Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci emailed about whether NIH funded Wuhan lab before secret call – U.S. Right to Know

In the earliest days of the pandemic, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins emailed about coronaviruses under study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and about whether they had steered money to the lab, an email obtained by U.S. Right to Know shows.

Collins, then leader of the National Institutes of Health, and Fauci, leader of its infectious diseases institute, exchanged emails on February 1, 2020, about a preprint authored by Zhengli Shi, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases. The preprint described bat coronaviruses under study at the lab, including a coronavirus 96 percent genetically similar to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. 

The emails show that Collins and Fauci were concerned about links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and NIH.

In case you haven t seen this preprint from one week ago, Collins said in a February 1, 2020, email to Fauci. No evidence this work was supported by NIH.  

I did see it, but did not check the similarities. Obviously we need more details, Fauci replied, a little before noon.

Some details of the short exchange are redacted. 

via usrtk.org

Responsible citizens (to use that antiquated concept) have to dig out and inform themselves on this, obviously one of the most important issues of our times. Why is this? Well, because whether you are a stone hearted socialist or a frenzied entrepreneurial capitalist, or it being the PRC, perhaps both, you have to care about whether the US and China have for whatever reason decided it’s a good idea to play about with the genetics of potentially civilization destroying viruses. Our hygienic and administrative skills are not presently good enough to assure the public that the functionally-gained bugs don’t escape the labs in which they have been created and cause a global pandemic. So I claim that we shouldn’t be doing it. It is like experimenting with nuclear fission without any clear idea of what to do in the event of criticality, and when that event had probably already happened once and killed millions of people. It’s baffling that one even has to say this, but I guess that’s how we roll these days. Strange times.