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Lawyers from the offices of Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana deposed Anthony Fauci as part of their lawsuit against the Biden administration. The suit, The State of Missouri et al. v Joe Biden et al., accuses high-ranking government officials of working with giant social media companies “under the guise of combating misinformation” to achieve greater censorship.

Fauci’s deposition was held on 23 November 2022.  As Schmitt explained in an interview with Fox News, during the seven-hour deposition some important information was extracted. One of the things that was revealed was that Fauci was very well aware that the lab-leak theory was credible.

Yesterday, a transcript of Fauci’s deposition was released.

Read the full transcript of Fauci’s deposition HERE.  A deposition is a witness’s out-of-court sworn testimony.  We haven’t read the entire 359-page transcript, but we waded through the first 163 pages of “I don’t recall” which was Fauci’s favoured response.  Fauci said “I don’t recall” 178 times, “I don’t specifically recall” 10 times and “I don’t know” 84 times.

The first 163 pages of the deposition covered communications and publications during the ten days from 31 January 2020 up to 9 February 2020 and attempted to establish Fauci’s relationship with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, Ralph Baric and the “bat woman” Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China.

When asked, Fauci denied knowing Baric or Zhengli except possibly in passing at one of the “meetings where there are thousands of scientists saying hi to each other,” as Fauci puts it.  He had heard of them rather than knew them personally.  He admitted that he had met Daszak once or twice although he didn’t recall meeting him:

“I don’t even remember meeting him [Daszak], but I do know that someone showed me a picture at a meeting where somebody said, here, take a picture with him. And so I clearly must have met him because there’s a photograph, I believe, of he and I.

“But that is not unusual, when you go to a scientific meeting, you run into hundreds of people.  And I believe that this Dr. Daszak is one of the people that I almost — well, I did run into him because I believe I’ve seen a photograph of he and I together at a meeting.”

Fauci said that although he is aware now, he was not aware in 2015 that EcoHealth had a sub-award from their original grant that went to Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In 2015 a paper was published titled ‘A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence’.  Shi Zhengli and Ralph Baric were two of the paper’s authors.  It noted that the research was funded by the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease (“NIAID”), the US National Institutes of Health (“NIH”), the National Natural Science Foundation of China and USAID-EPT-PREDICT funding from EcoHealth Alliance.

The paper to this day has a note at the top of it: “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing Covid-19 was engineered.”

Fauci was asked if he recalled concerns being raised at or near the beginning of the Covid outbreak that the virus might have been genetically engineered or originated in a laboratory.  He responded:

“There was a phone call in late January of 2020, I believe, from Jeremy Farrar. There was one other person on the phone. I believe it was Christian Anderson … saying that they looked at the virus and there was some concern about the molecular configuration or makeup of the virus that made them think there was a possibility that there could have been a manipulation of the virus.”

Jeremy Farrar is the Director of Wellcome Trust.  In the phone call Farrar, Anderson and Fauci agreed to get have a phone call with a larger group of scientists the next day, 1 February 2020, to discuss it further.  One of the scientists who was on the second call was Sir Patrick Vallance, UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Fauci said.  The second phone call concluded that more time was needed to properly investigate the origins of the virus.

After the phone call on 1 February, Farrar, Francis Collins and Fauci set about organising and compiling a list of names to be included in a working group at the World Health Organisation to investigate the origins of the virus.  Although Fauci said he had very little to do with it and it was Farrar who was the driving force and the liaison with WHO.

On 9 February 2020, Fauci and Daszak, who earlier in the deposition Fauci said he didn’t know, did a podcast together with Newt Gingrich.  However, Fauci said he didn’t recall doing the podcast.  Handing him an exhibit, the attorney asked “does this document jog your memory”?  Fauci responded:

“Well, there’s an advertisement that said that I’m Newt Gingrich’s guest. If you had not put this in front of me, I likely would not have remembered it. Like I said, I’ve done at least several hundred podcasts over the last couple of years … I don’t remember it specifically, but since the e-mail indicates that the podcast occurred, I don’t even say I vaguely remember that podcast. Like I said, I’ve done many podcasts.”

The attorney pointed this podcast out after Fauci had said in the deposition that he had always been open to the possibility that the virus originated from a laboratory. An extract from the podcast stated:

Gingrich: I don’t know if you had access to enough information from the Chinese, but as you know, there is sort of an urban legend that there is a biological warfare centre in Wuhan and that the coronavirus escaped from that. Do you have any sense where it probably came from?

Fauci: “Well, I think ultimately we know that these things come from an animal reservoir. I heard these conspiracy theories and like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they’re just conspiracy theories.

Fauci doesn’t recall making that comment to Gingrich.  Fauci also does not recall Daszak saying in the same podcast that “all the evidence say that is what happened.” “That” is the transmission of the virus from an animal to a human.

However, despite all of Fauci’s proclamations that he didn’t know Daszak, the attorney pointed out much later in the deposition, on page 204, that Fauci had exchanged emails in April 2020 with Daszak. Asking Fauci, again, if he knew Daszak, Fauci responded:

“Yeah. To the extent that I’ve answered that multiple times, I’m acquainted in the sense of I have seen him once or twice. I don’t have a friendship or a relationship, if you want to call it that, with him. I’m just aware of him, and I’ve seen him a couple of times. I think I did a podcast once where he was another member of the podcast group.”

Despite Fauci claiming that the conclusion of the phone call on 1 February was more time was needed to investigate the origin of SAR-CoV-2, working through Fauci’s emails that had been obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the attorney established that between the 4 and 7 February a draft paper explaining that the origin of the virus was from natural sources was being passed back and forth between Jeremy Farrar, Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes and Fauci.  The draft concluded: “Importantly, this analysis provides evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposely manipulated virus.” Unsurprisingly, the draft was authored by five people who were all on the phone call on 1 February. 

At the same time, unbeknown to Fauci, so he claims, Daszak was organising a statement to be published in the Lancet.  It’s not clear which statement is being referred to by the attorney but we found ‘Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting Covid-19’ published in the Lancet on 19 February 2020.

Although we didn’t make it through to the end, we encourage you to read at least some of the transcript. Fauci’s denials and ability to not answer questions is truly mind-boggling.