Perfectly-timed to coincide with Anthony Fauci’s closed-door testimony before the U.S. Congress, a recent bombshell report suggested, based on FOI emails, that Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology met with Fauci at his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), outside Washington, in June 2017. According to the most popular version of the ‘lab leak’ theory, it is, of course, Shi’s research on coronaviruses in bats which is supposed to have given rise to the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19.
In an even more sensational riff on the original report from the American non-profit U.S. Right to Know, a Daily Mail headline even proclaims that ‘U.S. scientists held secret talks with Covid ‘Batwoman’ amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly… just before pandemic’.
But there was nothing “secret” about the meeting. Supposing it in fact took place – which could at most be inferred from the cited e-mails – it was simply not publicised. At the time, pre-Covid, it would have been a matter of small public interest anyway.
Furthermore, although the U.S. Right to Know headline – ‘Scientists at the centre of the ‘lab leak’ controversy met with NIH, Fauci’ – implies that Fauci himself met with Shi, Fauci was not even a participant in the relevant e-mail string. The recipient of the supposedly incriminating e-mails from Peter Daszak of EcoHealth was Eric Stemmy of a NIAID subdivision. The current, updated version of the articleappears to concede that Fauci was not present at the meeting in question, although he did meet Daszak – without Shi – four months later.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Shi did in fact accompany Daszak to NIAID, as Daszak wanted; and let’s even say that Anthony Fauci attended the talk which Daszak was proposing to give there with Shi – as the headline still implies.
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