What most people did not know, though, was that for years, Fauci had been dogged by a very different sort of doctor — a researcher from Rutgers University who shunned the camera and preferred to keep his opinions in print. A man who made it clear with his appearance and his mannerisms that he never wanted to be an activist. A registered Democrat who supported Biden to the point of putting a Biden sign in his front yard, Ebright had always been convinced of one simple thing that he viewed to be above the petty fray of partisan politics: the government should not be spending our tax dollars to fund dangerous research on making viruses more deadly.
For years, Ebright and Fauci carried out a silent war, waged in print, visible mostly only to members of the small community of research scientists who conduct serious chemical and biological research. Over and over again the same refrain played out: Ebright warned the public that this research was making the public less safe, and Fauci insisted it was making the public more safe.
As we know now, Ebright was almost certainly right. However, it has taken four years — thanks to the concerted efforts of Fauci and his team — for the public to slowly come around to that realization.
But to understand where we are, it is first necessary to understand how we got here.
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Countless ink, both real and digital, has been spent examining Fauci’s every move taken since those fateful early days in 2020. Relatively little has been spent examining Fauci’s actions priorto 2020.
“[Dick Cheney] found one agency and one person willing to take that role… he found Anthony Fauci.”
Those actions, which are still largely shrouded in obscurity, may turn out to have been far more consequential than anything Fauci has done since he first appeared at the infamous press conference with former President Trump. You see, for the last two decades, Fauci has been by far the most important defender of what might be fairly called a bioweapons research program that the public now knows — albeit imperfectly — as “gain-of-function” research.
The U.S. government started the ball rolling on this dangerous research in the waning days of 2001. As you may recall, the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 were followed almost immediately by a series of high-profile anthrax attacks, in which prominent individuals in the U.S. were mailed envelopes with suspicious white powder that later tested positive for anthrax.