Dr. Anthony Fauci played a central role in a “massive cover-up” of COVID-19’s origins during his time as one of America’s top public health officials, according to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary. Makary made the allegation during an interview on the latest episode of Pod Force One with host Miranda Devine.
Makary — formerly a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine — argued that Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), actively worked to suppress the theory that COVID-19 may have leaked from a laboratory in China. He said this effort went largely unnoticed within the medical and scientific community.
“One thing that’s extremely obvious, but hardly recognized in the medical establishment, is that Fauci was involved in a massive cover-up of COVID’s origins,” Makary said. “Regardless of whether he participated in or funded the experiments that might have led to the outbreak, he was completely involved in the cover-up.”
Fauci, who later served as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, received a broad presidential pardon last December for any offenses dating back to January 1, 2014. Makary suggested the pardon may have been connected to Fauci’s alleged actions regarding the virus’s origins — an issue Makary viewed as even more serious than his disagreements with Fauci’s public guidance during the pandemic.
Makary accused Fauci of using science “as political propaganda,” claiming he helped commission scientific articles aimed at dismissing the lab-leak possibility. He pointed to a February 2020 paper, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, which the House Oversight Committee later said Fauci had both commissioned and approved. Just weeks after its publication, Fauci cited the paper at a White House briefing as evidence that a lab leak was unlikely.
According to Makary, the paper was written just days after Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins held a call with the authors to discuss early reports suggesting the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Makary said that in late January 2020 — as COVID-19 began drawing global attention — Fauci was “frantically” coordinating emails, calls, and meetings aimed at disputing the laboratory-origin theory. He claimed internal notes from these discussions showed that several virologists privately believed a lab leak was plausible, but publicly signed a letter soon afterward insisting the virus did not come from a lab. Some of those same scientists later received significant research funding from Fauci’s agency, Makary alleged.
Makary also argued that Fauci and Collins worked behind the scenes to soften federal restrictions on gain-of-function research, which involves altering viruses to study their potential behavior. He accused Fauci of “parsing words” and misleading Congress about such research.
Calling the alleged cover-up “an American tragedy,” Makary said he was stunned that many of his colleagues at Johns Hopkins were unaware of the claims and evidence he described. He attributed the medical community’s reluctance to scrutinize Fauci and Collins to longstanding institutional loyalty and the influence of federal research funding.
