Emails Show How Fauci Conspired Against White House COVID Adviser

Newly released emails show that Dr. Anthony Fauci, while serving as a top member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, pressured Dr. Deborah Birx to back his play and conspired to get Dr. Scott Atlas ousted from the team.

In a series of emails shared by economic historian Phil Magness on Monday, Fauci spoke with other officials like Birx and then-NIH Director Francis Collins about how to get rid of Atlas and how they could best coordinate their efforts to discredit the “Great Barrington Declaration” — which made the case against broad lockdowns and advocated for achieving herd immunity by providing “focused protection” for vulnerable populations — and its authors.

The exchange began on October 11, 2020, when Fauci shared an article from the far-left publication “The Nation” with Collins. The article, written by epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves, framed the ideas of herd immunity and focused protection as “deadly delusions.” On October 14, Gonsalves responded to both Collins and Fauci in an email with a subject line that read, “Thank You For Your Frank Comments on Herd Immunity (Larry Kramer Would Be Proud).”

Further correspondence from that same day showed Fauci coordinating with Gonsalves, Birx complaining about Atlas, and Fauci bragging to Gonsalves about how he was working to undermine Atlas at the White House.

“I am trying to get this jerk shut down by working from within the White House,” Fauci said of Atlas. “They promise they will handle it and nothing happens. I will keep trying.”

“I’m just glad it’s in the open who has been undermining Tony and I at the White House and who was manipulating the data,” Birx replied. “We are pushing back very hard.”

In another October 14 email, Fauci compared proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) to “AIDS denialists” — a move that Magness found ironic since Fauci himself had spread false information about AIDS in the 1980s, saying that it could be transmitted through casual contact.

Gonsalves continued to complain about  GBD advocates in yet another email from October 14, saying, “Don’t even get me started. Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya (with who I am part of a grant, BTW), can suck it. I have never been so ashamed of my community of epidemiologists/decision-scientists.”

On October 15, Fauci emailed Birx directly to relay a conversation he’d had with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, saying that he’d been lobbying the White House adviser to help him get rid of Atlas.

“I really laid it on him but he still does not completely understand how dangerous this guy is. He is still in the realm of ‘differences of opinion,'” Fauci wrote, pressing Birx to follow up and drive the point home with Kushner. “You have got to speak with Jared and confirm what I said that this guy is killing people. I likened him to the AIDS denialists of the 1980s.”

The thread concludes with an email sent by Fauci to Birx on October 16, 2020, in which he tells her what to say since he will not be present at task force meetings that day.

“Over the past week I have come out very strongly publicly against the ‘Great Barrington Declaration.’ Scott Atlas may try to counter this. Please speak out for me,” Fauci directed, asserting that Atlas was also likely to deny the possibility that COVID-19 could cause residual effects. “This is all part of his theme that infections do not bother healthy people. Please speak out when he tries to play these things down.”

Fauci was supposed to testify on Capitol Hill last week, but spent the entirety of his time responding to questions — from queries about the origins of the pandemic to the color of his tie — by invoking his Fifth Amendment rights.