Former President Joe Biden issued a sweeping 11th-hour pardon for former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) head Dr. Anthony Fauci before he left office Monday.
The pardon dates back to January 1, 2014, covering all of Fauci’s time as a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and his time as Chief Medical Advisor to President Biden. He didn’t become a household name until the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the world in early 2020, but Fauci’s work that some believe sparked the pandemic triggered a pardon that stretched back years earlier.
Notably, the Biden pardon of Anthony Fauci begins on “January 1, 2014.” pic.twitter.com/4pthsTONwH
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) January 20, 2025
Fauci’s pardon is backdated to cover the period in which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a May 2014 grant to EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak to study bat coronaviruses. In the time since, Fauci has been credibly accused of both lying to Congress and evading FOIA requests.
Daszak, the recently debarred president of EcoHealth, funneled that U.S. taxpayer money, alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), to fund gain-of-function research on coronaviruses prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in 2019, according to documents published by the House Oversight Committee.
Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance’s work on coronaviruses preceded the outbreak of COVID-19, an outbreak Fauci repeatedly claimed was most likely from natural sources.
The House Oversight Committee’s COVID Select Subcommittee, however, concluded that COVID-19 “most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
TOPSHOT – An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on April 17, 2020. The P4 epidemiological laboratory was built in cooperation with French bio-industrial firm Institut Merieux and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The facility is among a handful of labs around the world cleared to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) – dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission. HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images
Despite this, Fauci defiantly maintained that the virus was a “natural occurrence.”
Fauci also denied the possibility that the subawards his agency granted to the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have funded the origins of the virus.
“The viruses that were studied under the subawards to the Wuhan Institute … those viruses were phylogenetically so far removed from SARS-CoV-2 that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses to have evolved from SARS COV2,” he testified to Congress in June.
However, a number of experts suggested that Fauci perjured himself multiple times during his testimony, including his statement that it was impossible for the viruses he funded to have become COVID-19, necessitating a pardon from Biden.
Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci responds to accusations by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as he testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee about the origin of COVID-19, July 20, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Cases of COVID-19 have tripled over the past three weeks, and hospitalizations and deaths are rising among unvaccinated people. J. Scott Applewhite-Pool/Getty Images
Fauci also vehemently denied that his agency funded gain-of-function research. Numerous experts have claimed this is a lie, and that Fauci is obfuscating the definition of GoF.
GoF research is commonly understood to be research that alters a pathogen to make it more deadly, more contagious, or both.
NIAID previously had a similar definition of GoF before changing it to “altering an already pathogenic or pandemic capable virus; altering a virus to have a one log increase in growth; or altering a virus to have the same pathogenicity of SARS.”
Furthermore, FOIA requests showed that Fauci’s agency repeatedly referred to gain-of-function research in internal communications.
Four times Fauci perjured himself in a House hearing last year:
#1: “I’m saying no because I’ve said no multiple times.”
Fauci, his program officers and the virologists he funded have massaged the definition of gain-of-function research to mean: altering an already pathogenic… pic.twitter.com/fNBlZrNib3
— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 20, 2025
Another key moment where Fauci appeared to lie to lawmakers was his insistence that he did not intentionally downplay the likelihood of the lab leak theory. (RELATED: Former HHS Official Who Worked With Fauci To Downplay Lab Leak Reveals Theory On COVID Origins)
Fauci failed to disclose to lawmakers his integral role in commissioning a paper in the “Nature Medicine” journal titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
The now-infamous proximal origins paper concluded “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.”
Fauci referenced the article from the White House podium in April 2021.
After a reporter asked him about the possibility the virus was man-made, he replied “There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Fauci made no mention of the fact that the authors of the paper gave him an advanced draft and gave him multiple opportunities to edit the draft, according to the House Oversight Committee.
In fact, not only did Fauci get an advanced copy, but the committee concluded that he prompted the writing of it with the express goal to disprove the lab leak theory.
Fauci testified under oath to Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan that he kept an “open mind” on the possibilities of the virus’s origins.
#3: “I’ve kept an open mind throughout the entire process.”
Asked about the lab leak theory by reporters in the White House on April 17, 2020, Fauci endorsed a paper in Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
“There was a study recently that we can make… pic.twitter.com/Z1UrfKoRnV
— Emily Kopp (@emilyakopp) January 20, 2025
But one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Kristian Anderson, wrote to Fauci that “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” according to an email the House Oversight Committee obtained.
Dr. Kristian Andersen explains the motivation for preparing the Proximal Origin paper: “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory…”https://t.co/AsLZbq29XX pic.twitter.com/6Q9nwNWgo1
— Gary Ruskin (@garyruskin) March 5, 2023
Fauci’s top aide David Morens also appeared to attempt to circumvent FOIA requests by communicating with Peter Daszak through private emails.
“I can either send stuff to Tony [Fauci] on his private e-mail or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens emailed to Daszak in 2021, also mentioning connecting a reporter to Fauci through a “secret backchannel.”
Morens brushed the communications aside as a joke. (RELATED: New Private Emails Further Enforce Fauci Covid Conspiracy)
“There was no backchannel,” he testified. “The backchannel was, uh, the backchannel to Tony was the same one that applies to everybody.”
But further emails revealed he exerted effort to delete emails and solicited assistance from an NIH employee he referred to as the “FOIA lady” in an effort to scrub his communication record.
“Peter I just got news that a FOIA picked up an e-mail I sent you saying Tony commented that he was braindead. I deleted that e-mail, but I now learned that every e-mail I ever got since 1998 is captured and will be turned over whether or not instantly deleted,” Morens wrote.