In the summer of 2021, Beth Cameron, a biodefense expert on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, sprinted to review the classified intelligence on the origins of COVID-19 by a 90-day deadline.
The issue was sensitive: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab complex at the pandemic’s epicenter, had conducted research that engineered novel coronaviruses with support from the U.S. government, namely, Anthony Fauci’s longtime institute at the National Institutes of Health. But prominent virologists in Fauci’s orbit had persuaded the corporate press that any suggestion of a connection between the pandemic and the Wuhan lab amounted to a conspiracy theory.
Biden had ordered a 90-day review of the intelligence that spring after a conflicted World Health Organization report failed to turn up credible answers.
Cameron called Fauci into a secure room on the White House campus that June, but not for questioning, declassified documents show. Instead Cameron invited him to the White House for a classified briefing with Maher Bitar, the special assistant to the president for intelligence.
“I would like to invite you to sit with us directly,” she wrote to Fauci in a newly released June 21, 2021 email. “We and Maher stand ready to assist and appreciate greatly your time and leadership.”
New declassified documents released by Sen. Rand Paul on Thursday reveal in unprecedented detail Fauci’s influence over the U.S. intelligence community as the government’s top biodefense official, and how this influence distorted the public’s understanding of the most consequential pandemic in a century.
For nearly 20 years, Dr. Anthony Fauci was wired into America’s intelligence and defense apparatus.
Newly released documents from our investigation show how that access let him shape the COVID-19 origins debate — across science, the IC, and the public.
🧵 READ MORE:… pic.twitter.com/gCv1AQmnXx— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) June 11, 2026
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is working to declassify documents related to COVID’s origins before her tenure ends this month, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. A Senate letter on Monday revealed that Paul plans to conduct a transcribed interview with Fauci this month, though that letter has since been scrubbed from his committee’s website.
Fauci and Cameron did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Credit: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)
Top intelligence community (IC) officials in the Biden White House rolled out the red carpet for Fauci in 2021, the new documents show. During the three month push to assess the intelligence, Fauci repeatedly received classified briefings from some of Biden’s top intelligence officials. At the same time, a Pentagon official had uncovered alarming intelligence about virologists connected to Fauci, the new documents underscore.
The DEFUSE Proposal
In August 2021, amid a 90-day push by Biden to assess the intelligence about the origins of COVID, a new and startling clue emerged.
The COVID virus amounts to an “American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus,” Joseph Murphy, a Marine Corps officer working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wrote to his agency’s internal watchdog in a report dated Aug. 13, 2021 included in the declassified documents. “It was created by an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as suggested by the reporting surrounding the lab leak hypothesis. The details of this program have been concealed since the pandemic began.”
Murphy did not respond to a request for comment.
(Credit: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)
In a top secret grant proposal unearthed by Murphy, an American research group had proposed engineering novel coronaviruses with the same uniquely infectious features as COVID, the document show. The research group was EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit supported by Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed the group planned to surreptitiously export the experiments to Wuhan.
Peter Daszak, formerly the CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Murphy had seen intercepts from Wuhan naming some of the very WIV scientists listed in the proposal, he wrote. He said the proposal had been tucked into an unmarked folder on the DARPA server in July 2021.
Twelve days later, the NSC “warmly” invited Fauci to review a “very interesting report” at the White House.
(Credit: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)
‘Proximal Origin’
Amid the 90-day review in 2021, Fauci recommended that Cameron read an article titled “The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review,” by a team of 21 virologists.
“It summarizes what I said yesterday,” he said.
“We remain in awe of you and grateful for your work,” Cameron replied. “Thank you again for what you do and who you are.”
Fauci did not mention it, but he had secretly collaborated with some of the authors of that paper in February 2020.
As the pandemic first got underway, on January 31, 2020, Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen alerted Fauci to signs of engineering in the emerging virus’s genome.
On a private teleconference on February 1, 2020, Fauci and other men with massive influence in scientific research funding, including National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar discussed the matter with Andersen and other virologists.
Andersen and four colleagues immediately got to work on a paper that would dismiss the possibility of a lab leak, though their private chat messages betrayed that they still harbored serious concerns.
On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-COV-2,” concluding the COVID virus is “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The paper made global headlines and influenced the decision by Facebook to censor discussion of the lab leak theory until February 2021.
In one of emails newly unearthed by Paul, Collins wrote that he and Fauci helped with the paper “but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly.”
(Credit: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)
In sworn testimony before a congressional committee in 2024, Fauci denied having an influence on the “Proximal Origin” paper.
(Credit: House Select Subcommittee On The Coronavirus Pandemic)
‘The Darker Bioweapons Future’
One of the declassified documents, a CIA report dated November 2003, titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” may shed some light on why Fauci, the director of a civilian agency funding infectious diseases research, played such a large role in U.S. biodefense.
(Credit: Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee)A panel of life science experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences advised the CIA that, amid rapidly advancing biotechnology, “traditional intelligence means for monitoring WMD development could prove inadequate.”
One scientist recommended virologists act as a “living sensor web” to collect intelligence from foreign colleagues at conferences and university labs.
“Most panelists agreed that the US life sciences research community was more or less over its Vietnam-era distrust of the national security establishment and would be open to more collaboration,” the CIA report reads.
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