Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, initially a media darling of the COVID-19 pandemic, might have been the orchestrator of a "massive cover-up," according to FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.
"One thing that's extremely obvious that very few people realize, and certainly hardly anyone in the medical establishment where I come from realized, is that [Fauci] was involved in a massive cover-up of the origins of COVID, a massive cover-up," Makary, a former Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor, told "Pod Force One."
"Whether or not he was involved in the experiments or funding the experiments that led to the origins of COVID, he was clearly 100% involved in the cover-up."
Makary said Fauci commissioned scientific articles dismissing the lab-leak theory and later cited them publicly.
After President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 – largely campaigning on the mishandling of COVID – he elevated Fauci to White House chief medical adviser.
Before leaving office in January 2025, Biden issued a slew of preemptive pardons to his operatives, including Fauci, albeit by autopen rather than by hand.
Makary linked Fauci's 2024 presidential pardon to the alleged suppression efforts, calling the episode "an American tragedy."
Fauci has long denied wrongdoing.
"Only recently did Anthony Fauci take it to the next level of using science as political propaganda," Makary told host Miranda Devine. "He commissioned the pieces that lied about the COVID origins.
"The author who submitted the article said this was commissioned by Dr. Fauci [and Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health] in that cover letter."
The House Oversight Committee released evidence in 2023 showing Fauci commissioned and gave final approval for "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," written in February 2020, to try to disprove the Wuhan, China, lab leak having spread the virus that killed more than 7 million worldwide.
Fauci then stood alongside President Donald Trump at a White House news conference eight weeks later, claiming the lab leak theory had been deemed implausible, citing the paper he had orchestrated as evidence.
"If you think back to the end of January, just before COVID became a thing in the news in the United States, January, February, what was Dr. Fauci doing? He was frantically engaging in a massive cover-up with 3 a.m. emails and phone calls," Makary said. "He was convening people.
"And the notes from those meetings reveal that all these virologists he convened had told him, 'We think it came from the Wuhan Lab,' and the output was days later, those same scientists wrote a letter in the medical journal saying it definitely did not come from the lab."
Fauci then went on to grant the authors "millions of dollars in funding from Fauci's agency," according to Makary.
"This is not rocket science. It's a no-brainer where it came from."
The campaign to cover for the origins on COVID and the potential U.S. complicity during Fauci's reign was ultimately shockingly effective in spinning doctors and scientists, Makary marveled.
"What I'm shocked by coming from the faculty at Johns Hopkins, is none of my colleagues knew any of this," he said.
"I could not believe that my colleagues had no idea of the origins and the facts surrounding the origins and the massive cover-up that Fauci and Collins led."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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