Declassified COVID Documents Renew Scrutiny of Fauci, Wuhan Research, and Gain-of-Function Denials

by Emmitt Barry, Worthy News Washington D.C. Bureau Chief

(Worthy News) – Newly declassified COVID-19 documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have revived questions about U.S.-funded coronavirus research in China, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before Congress, and whether federal officials misled the American people about the origins of the pandemic.

The documents include an internal intelligence community email from 2021 in which a U.S. official flagged a video of Dr. Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth Alliance, speaking at a 2016 New York Academy of Medicine event. In the video, Daszak described how his “colleagues in China” had taken spike proteins from newly discovered bat coronaviruses and inserted them into pseudoparticles to test whether they could bind to human cells.

“We found other coronaviruses in bats … some of them looked very similar to SARS,” Daszak said in the video, according to the documents. “So, we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells, then we — well I didn’t do this work, my colleagues in China did the work — you create pseudoparticles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells.”

Daszak added that “each step of this” moved researchers “closer and closer” to determining whether such viruses “could really become pathogenic in people.”

The disclosure is significant because Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance have long been central figures in the debate over COVID-19’s origins. EcoHealth, a U.S.-funded nonprofit that worked with researchers in Wuhan, China, has faced intense scrutiny over grants connected to bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The renewed attention comes after years in which Fauci, then one of the nation’s most powerful public health officials, repeatedly denied that the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. In Senate testimony, Fauci told Sen. Rand Paul, “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Later, however, the National Institutes of Health acknowledged to Congress that U.S. funding had supported an experiment in Wuhan that altered a bat coronavirus in a way critics described as gain-of-function research.

The newly released documents also reference a whistleblower complaint submitted to the Intelligence Community Inspector General alleging that Fauci had provided false testimony to Congress about gain-of-function research at the NIH. Acting Intelligence Community Inspector General Tamara Johnson wrote in August 2021 that the complaint alleged Fauci had misled “the American people and Congressional oversight.”

Rather than referring the matter to the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general, the complaint was routed to then-HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Biden administration political appointee. Johnson wrote that her office determined there was “no merit” in referring the matter to the HHS inspector general because the public dispute over gain-of-function research was already widely known.

Gabbard, in releasing the documents during her final hours as DNI, accused federal officials of concealing critical information from the public and politicizing intelligence related to the pandemic’s origins.

“The tactics used to hide the truth are straight from the deep state playbook,” Gabbard said, accusing Fauci and others of covering up wrongdoing, manipulating intelligence, misleading Congress, and restricting President Donald Trump’s access to key information.

Fauci has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and has denied lying to Congress. He retired from government service before Trump returned to the White House and later accepted a pardon from President Joe Biden in late 2024.

The controversy surrounding COVID-19’s origin has grown steadily since the earliest days of the pandemic, when many public officials, media outlets, and scientific voices dismissed the lab-leak theory as fringe or conspiratorial. In the years since, however, the theory has gained broader consideration among lawmakers, intelligence officials, and scientists as more evidence has emerged about risky coronavirus research in Wuhan.

The latest documents do not settle the origins debate. But they add fresh weight to longstanding questions about transparency, taxpayer-funded research, congressional oversight, and the degree to which federal health officials allowed politics and institutional self-protection to shape the public narrative during one of the most consequential crises in modern history.

For many Americans, the matter now extends beyond science. It has become a test of public trust — whether government officials can be held accountable when their statements to Congress and the public conflict with later disclosures, and whether the full story of the pandemic’s beginning will finally be brought into the light.

The latest disclosures also echo reporting Worthy News published more than five years ago, when questions about a possible laboratory origin of COVID-19 were still widely dismissed by many public officials, major media outlets, and social media platforms.

On Jan. 7, 2021, Worthy News reported that retired Israeli Lt. Col. Dany Shoham, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Israel Defense Forces and Israel’s Defense Ministry, believed there was a strong possibility that the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

Shoham, a microbiologist and expert on chemical and biological warfare, was among the early voices to suggest that the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak could be linked to China’s biological research infrastructure. In an article published at the time, he argued that the initial assumption that COVID-19 had emerged naturally was coming under growing doubt from both scientists and intelligence analysts.

After publishing that report, Worthy News saw its coverage sharply suppressed across search engines and social media platforms. In the years that followed, and particularly after the release of the Twitter Files, broader concerns emerged over whether legitimate reporting and debate about COVID-19’s origins had been systematically censored or throttled.

For Worthy News, the issue is not merely retrospective. The consequences of that censorship continue to affect traffic and visibility to this day, underscoring a larger question at the heart of the COVID-19 origins debate: why were journalists, scientists, and analysts punished for asking questions that government officials are now being forced to revisit?

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