The fall of Fauci and the unraveling narrative about COVID-19’s origins is something of a slow-motion train wreck.

As recently as 2021, White House Chief Medical Advisor and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci was hailed as a national hero and an icon of science.

To be fair, Fauci did much of the hailing. “I represent science,” he infamously boasted on CBS’s Face the Nation. Just months earlier, he had assured MSNBC host Chuck Todd, “Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science.”

Now Fauci is the subject of an official Department of Justice criminal referral by Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky. Senator Paul has credibly accused Fauci of lying to Congress about his use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund risky gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As for COVID-19’s origins, until recently, every man and his dog was accused of spreading misinformation—and was silenced on social media—for suggesting the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

We now know from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence that “all agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.” The lab leak theory remains the FBI’s favored explanation for the origins of the pandemic and, after much kicking and screaming, one that many mainstream news outlets finally acknowledge as a possibility.

Most damning of all is the trove of emails and other memos sent between Fauci and his co-conspirators that have been forced out into the light of day thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests.

Perhaps the most influential peer-reviewed paper on COVID-19’s origins was “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020.

The paper argued COVID-19 “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” Its authors penned public emails and appeared in interviews denouncing the lab leak hypothesis as “crackpot” and “conspiracy theories.”

The only problem?

In private communications, every one of the paper’s five authors feared that SARS-CoV-2—the virus that brought the world to a standstill for two years—may in fact have leaked from the Wuhan lab.

These eminent scientists consciously misled the world, publishing dogged claims they secretly questioned.

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