Trump Insider Says Fauci ‘Went Behind White House’s Back’ to Lift Ban on Risky Coronavirus Research

US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci has been reeling from public criticism amid revelations that he committed taxpayer money to experiments involving infecting beagle puppies with disease-causing parasites. Fauci is also under fire for allegedly lying to Congress about funding bat coronavirus research in China before the Covid pandemic.

Former Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro is releasing a book this week which promises to document Anthony Fauci’s prominent possible role in sparking the global coronavirus pandemic, and in suppressing cheap medications to help people fighting the virus.

In his book, “In Trump Time, a Journal of America’s Plague Year,” Navarro, who played an instrumental role in the Trump administration’s Covid response – including coordinating the government’s Defence Production Act to produce and procure medical supplies following the outbreak, accuses Fauci of doing more damage to the United States and the world than anyone other than the Chinese lead virologist at the Wuhan lab where the US alleges SARS-CoV-2 originated.

According to excerpts from the book seen by the New York Post, Navarro holds Fauci responsible for “everything from the Wuhan lab gain-of-function catastrophe and suppression of low-coast therapeutics such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to the political, partisan and deadly delay in delivering the Trump vaccines to the American people.”

Fauci, according to the former advisor, also failed to illuminate the president and White House coronavirus task force on the gain of function research funded by his National Institutes of Health (NIH) secretly taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to artificially engineer bat coronaviruses and make them more transmissible, ostensibly to make it possible to create vaccines to treat them.

Testifying before Congress this summer, Fauci vigorously denied allegations that this type of research was taking place. However, last month, the NIH admitted that a “limited experiment” had been carried out at Wuhan to see if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.” Those revelations led Senator Rand Paul, who previously grilled Fauci during his congressional testimony, to call for a criminal investigation against the medical administrator.

It was Fauci, according to Navarro’s account, who “went behind the back of the Trump White House in 2017 to lift the ban on dangerous gain of function experiments.”

It was also Fauci’s NIH that “helped fund and orchestrate such…experiments at a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic almost certainly originated,” the former Trump official claimed. “And it was Fauci who, as we now know from a trove of emails, was being told as early as January 31, 2020, that the virus was likely engineered,” Navarro added.

On 29 January, 2020, Navarro issued a memo which warned that the novel coronavirus which had been discovered in the city of Wuhan in December 2019 could “evolve into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” Days earlier, Fauci assured the public that the virus was “a very, very low risk.”

Navarro says Fauci continued to push the “low risk” opinion during meetings of the coronavirus task force, and opposed the China travel ban proposal pushed by Trump. “I’ve studied travel restrictions many, many times and [they] don’t work,” Fauci said, according to Navarro’s account.

Trump was relentlessly attacked by the media throughout the summer and fall of 2020 for taking Navarro’s advice and promoting low-cost, high availability drugs such as hydroxychloroquine to ease the virus’s severity, even as prominent scientists, including Ian Lipkin, the Columbia University epidemiologist and infectious diseases specialist who assisted the Chinese and US responses to the SARS outbreak, treated themselves with the medication in the pandemic’s early months.

Navarro and Fauci had a toxic relationship throughout the final year of the Trump presidency, with the economist publishing an editorial in the USA Today accusing the medical administrator of being “wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”

In March of 2021, after Fauci suggested that his decision to push for the creation of a vaccine for the coronavirus in January of 2020 was “the best decision that [he’d] ever made,” Navarro accused the medical administrator of being a “sociopath and a liar” who had “nothing to do with the vaccine.”

“The father of the vaccine is Donald J. Trump. What is Fauci the father of? Fauci is the father of the actual virus,” Navarro claimed.

Earlier this month, Navarro told a Seattle radio show that he got into a “screaming match” with Fauci within three minutes of first meeting him over the medical advisor’s initial refusal to support a travel ban. He also revealed advising Trump to fire Fauci twice, but said he did not fault the president for failing to do so.