Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US’s chief medical adviser at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, has described a book by News Corp investigative journalist Sharri Markson that supports the lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins as "a bunch of nonsense" in his newly released diaries.

This week, Fauci, aged 85, was subpoenaed by Republican Senator Rand Paul to appear at a Senate hearing investigating Covid-19 and Fauci’s handling of the pandemic. Fauci, who retired in 2022 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, accused Paul of conducting an "unhinged" campaign lobbying for his imprisonment and refused to answer questions at the hearing.

The hearing continued Paul’s long-standing support for the lab leak theory, which posits that the Covid-19 pandemic began as a release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ahead of the hearing, Paul published 1,141 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era journal entries.

In these entries, Fauci criticized reporting in The Australian newspaper and Markson’s book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, which claimed that a Wuhan facility was "immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments." On 7 May 2021, Markson reported that Chinese military scientists had "discussed the weaponisation of Sars coronaviruses five years before the Covid-19 pandemic" and predicted a third world war fought with biological weapons. Guardian Australia later found that the document cited was based on a discredited 2015 book containing conspiracy theories about biological warfare.

Markson’s book argued there was "no scientific consensus that Covid-19 has a natural origin" and alleged a Chinese cover-up. Markson stated on Thursday, "I led the way internationally exposing the role of Anthony Fauci’s agency funding 65 projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funnelling the money through EcoHealth Alliance."

Sources