Fauci’s Calendar: What Was He Doing in the Months Before the Pandemic?
After filing an expensive lawsuit, OpenTheBooks.com finally got the National Institutes of Health to release Dr. Anthony Fauci’s work calendar — here’s what it shows.
On Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020, at 9 a.m., Dr. Anthony Fauci joined staff at the National Security Council (NSC) — the President’s national security and foreign policy advisory shop — for a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about the novel coronavirus.
Fauci would continue to have meetings in classified settings throughout the month.
Fauci’s calendar entries included NSC meetings, White House Situation Room meetings and meetings in other classified settings, as COVID-19 was breaking in China. (To our knowledge, the existence of these meetings before Jan. 28, 2020, was not previously disclosed.)
On Friday, Jan. 24, four days after China admitted human-to-human transmission of the virus, Fauci started attending a small group COVID-19 discussion that first took place in “Anthony’s Office” in a building next to the White House. Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China.
Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — National Institutes of Health (NIH) dinner and workshops on Dec. 19 and 20 — the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.
On the morning of Dec. 19, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”
Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the NIH in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Fauci’s official calendar.
For a government bureaucrat, this sure was one tightly held calendar.
The refusal by NIH to follow open records law was a strategy to delay transparency: NIH forced us into expensive taxpayer-paid litigation to slow-walk 156 pages of semi-redacted calendar production.
Fauci’s calendar has 933 events during this five-month period — including 224 media interviews and 84 redacted events (only significant redactions that prevented analysis and understanding were counted, for example, phone number redactions were not included).
It’s a document that NIH and Fauci didn’t want you to see …
Why? What did Fauci know? And when did he know it?
Following Fauci’s timeline — highlights
Nov. 6, 2019: Fauci’s calendar lists “GPMB Discussion Note.” This likely deals with the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. Fauci is a past member of the GPMB board which was formed to “ensure[s] preparedness for global health crises.”
On Jan. 27, 2020, the GPMB convened regarding the COVID-19 outbreak and Fauci signed off on the group’s Jan. 30, 2020, statement commending the WHO and the “transparency of China.”
Judicial Watch’s FOIAs uncovered that this statement was organized and circulated by Wellcome Trust scientist and GPMB member Jeremy Farrar (who also organized a secret conference call with Fauci and others on Feb. 1, 2020).
Nov. 12, 2019: Fauci flies to the Netherlands. His multi-day itinerary is not listed. The Netherlands is home to the father of “gain-of-function,” high-risk researcher Dr. Ron Fouchier.
Fauci’s NIH institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), paused (2014) then restarted (Jan. 2019) funding to the controversial researcher who (using NIH funds) created an H5N1 bird flu in his lab with pandemic potential. He did so by passaging the virus through ferrets multiple times, until it gained a new function by going airborne and infecting a ferret in a different cage.
Nov. 25, 2019: Fauci joins Ambassador Deborah Birx, the Global AIDS Coordinator at a World AIDS Day evening event hosted by the Business Council for International Understanding. On Feb. 27, 2020, Birx is appointed to join Fauci on Trump’s COVID-19 Task Force.
Earlier that day, Fauci has a “Pre-Brief for US Japan Biodefense Meeting.” In 2004, as I previously reported at Forbes, Fauci received a permanent pay adjustment for his “biodefense” work. Fauci is the top-paid federal employee, specifically because he was paid to prevent the next pandemic.
Nov. 25, 2019: Fauci has a call with his future biographer, Janet Tobias, who later produces the “FAUCI” documentary.
Dec. 3, 2019: Fauci has a call with Victor Dzau, who is the president of the National Academy of Medicine, a Duke University professor and a man whose Chinese family fled to Hong Kong to escape China’s civil war.
Dec. 19, 2019: Fauci attends an “NIH Gates Fdn dinner” at “The Cloisters,” likely the one in Lutherville, Maryland, an hour from NIH.
Earlier that morning, Bill Gates tweeted out what has become a much-discussed prediction, “What’s next for our foundation? I’m particularly excited about what the next year could mean for one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”
Fauci and top officials, such as NIH director Francis Collins and Health and Human Services (HHS) assistant secretary for health Brett Giroir, joined Gates Foundation executives during the dinner and on panels the next day, according to a press report from the time.
Jan. 17, 2020: Fauci has a call to discuss “CDC Gao Writing Request.” This is presumably related to George Gao, Director-General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Jan. 23, 2020: Fauci had an 8 a.m., in-person meeting with Dr. James LeDuc. LeDuc ran one of the few BSL-4 (biosafety level-4) biocontainment labs in the country (think: moon-suit stuff), at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he has long-trained Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab in BSL-4 biosafety procedures.
Emails acquired by FOIA from the U.S. Right To Know (USRTK) organization revealed that LeDuc was sending backchannel emails with his Wuhan colleagues to get information on the novel coronavirus outbreak, and even soliciting edits and corrections from Wuhan’s so-called “bat lady” Shi Zhengli for his April 2020 Congressional testimony.
LeDuc’s emails show he was communicating with his virologist colleague Yuan Zhiming, who was in charge of the WIV BSL-4 lab. LeDuc wrote an op-ed published on January 24 about his U.S.-China working relationship.
It’s possible this drop-by visit by LeDuc was to let Fauci know what he was hearing from Wuhan, and perhaps, not put that news in email.
By 4:30 that afternoon, LeDuc and former Ft. Detrick BSL-4 biolab director Dave Franz joined HHS Robert Kadlec for a conference call, a call revealed in USRTK’s document production from the University of Texas (page 3,409).
Franz emailed a brief note that same day “to facilitate [the] call.” The email described his and LeDuc’s work since 2007 as establishing a relationship with Chinese scientists (pg 115).
In other words, LeDuc was in town to talk about China and the Wuhan lab with top HHS and former military biolab officials.
Thus, while the public discussion was and would remain that the virus had a natural origin, behind the scenes, people were being briefed on the U.S.-Chinese scientists’ interactions and the Wuhan lab itself.
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Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/anthony-fauci-calendar-before-pandemic/