Ashley Rindsberg, from whose stories I have riffed on before, has a great piece in Spectator Magazine about the COVID cover-up that adds a new twist.
Anthony Fauci, through a Harvard University intermediary, helped funnel money from the Chinese property company Evergrande to Harvard in February 2020. And that contribution was, quite surprisingly, part of a backdoor effort on the part of the Chinese to communicate with and influence Fauci and America’s COVID response.
The only people buying this are those writing it. https://t.co/P6yiLtlOV4 pic.twitter.com/dZm6VR1ds3
— Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) April 25, 2025
On the morning of Sunday February 2, 2020, Anthony Fauci, then in the middle of putting together America’s pandemic response, received an unusual email with a highly unusual request. The email, revealed as part of a tranche of FOIA documents requested by the Intercept, was from George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School. “Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost, and I met yesterday with a team led by Jack Xia, the CEO of China’s Evergrande Company, and Dr. Jack Liu, Evergrande’s chief health officer,” Daley wrote. Addressing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases as “Tony,” he asked for “whatever information you are willing to share on your current efforts to coordinate a response.”
It was an odd question on its own: What business did Evergrande — then the most valuable real estate company on earth, but also widely known to be catastrophically indebted — have with the director of America’s pandemic response? But Daley’s next line was stranger still. “[Xia and Liu] stated thy [sic] were acting on behalf of Dr Zhong Nanshan, China’s key point person on the coronavirus outbreak (see below).” Below was an email from Evergrande’s Liu to Daley which, save for an opening line, is entirely redacted.
Normally, you would expect public health officials from different countries, faced with preventing or fighting a worldwide pandemic, would communicate directly with each other. They certainly wouldn’t use a property developer whose connection to public health is as clear as mud–the only connection is that Chinese Public Health officials and Evergrande are both subservient to the Chinese Communist Party–to sit down with Harvard administrators not involved in public health to communicate with Anthony Fauci.
It kinda stands out, doesn’t it? As does the fact that Evergrande committed huge sums of money to Harvard after that meeting.
Daley’s email could not have come at a more sensitive time. The day before, Saturday February 1, Fauci had taken part in a conference call now widely acknowledged as one of the most charged events in the search to uncover the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The preceding Friday, Fauci forwarded a Science article exploring theories about the possible origins of the virus to a disease genomics researcher at Scripps in California named Kristian Andersen. The article mentioned a 2015 study authored by University of North Carolina epidemiologist Ralph Baric and Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher Dr. Shi Zhengli — China’s infamous virus-hunting “bat woman” — which modified a bat-borne SARS-like virus to make it transmissible between humans. “If the SARS2 virus were to have been cooked up in Shi’s lab, then its direct prototype would have been the SHC014-CoV/SARS1 chimera [created by Baric and Shi], the potential danger of which concerned many observers and prompted intense discussion,” the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists later reported.
The discovery of this 2015 study appears to have been a giant red flag for Fauci, who was likely alarmed by the possibility that it might have been funded by the NIH (under which NIAID sits as one of twenty-seven constituent institutes) as it indeed was — despite the original publication failing to disclose this fact. Fauci forwarded the study to his deputy at NIAID, Hugh Auchincloss, with an ominous message: “Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM… Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you. You have tasks today that must be done.”
As we all know, what needed to be done is grasp control over the COVID narrative and shape it in such a way that Fauci and his minions were fully exonerated from the coming accusation that the NIAID, his agency, helped fund the creation of a virus that would soon kill tens of millions, upend the lives of billions, throw the world economy into a tailspin, and erode the civil rights of Americans.
Fauci became the mastermind of one of the greatest cover-ups in world history, and colluded with governments around the world to do so, including the Chinese Communist Party–his main co-conspirator.
Fauci flew into action, arranging the February 1 conference call which would eventually include NIH boss Francis Collins, Farrar and a handful of leading researchers, including Andersen and Holmes. None of the participants have divulged exactly what was said, and emails referring to its contents have been redacted in their entirety. But according to Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Judiciary Committee who viewed the original emails, many of the leading scientists on the call believed that a lab leak was at least as likely as the zoonotic spillover that had been widely suggested as the origin of the virus, if not more so.
Despite this, just three days after the conference call, a dramatic reversal took place regarding the scientists’ assessment of the possible origin of the virus. In a February 4 email that Andersen wrote to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and which was forwarded to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Andersen claimed the data “conclusively show” that the virus was not engineered and that speculation about a possible lab leak was nothing more than “conspiracy” and “fringe” theories spread by “crackpots.”
On the same day Andersen sent his White House-bound email referring to the “conspiracy,” “fringe,” “crackpot” theory that he himself had laid out seventy-two hours earlier, and just two days after Harvard Medical School’s dean contacted Fauci on behalf of Evergrande, another key development took place, this one (until now) almost entirely overlooked regarding the role it may have played in the effort to shape the narrative about the pandemic’s origin: the Chinese real estate firm on whose behalf George Daley had contacted Fauci pledged a $115 million donation to Harvard Medical School.
Is it any wonder that Martin Kulldorff of Harvard was slandered and eventually dismissed by Harvard Medical School? As an original signatory of The Great Barrington Declaration, he was smeared along with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford University, respectively. They were derided as “fringe epidemiologists” and paid enormous professional (and at times financial) prices for dissenting from the promoted narrative.
The donation, used to fund a Harvard-Evergrande-Guangzhou partnership to study Covid-19 that would come to be known as the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness (MassCPR), was publicly announced in a March 5 Boston Globe op-ed co-authored by Daley; Arlene Sharpe, co-director of Harvard’s Evergrande Center for Immunologic Diseases since 2013; Penny Heaton, then-CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute; Ronald Corley, director of Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories; and Bruce Walker, director of the Harvard-affiliated Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital. Science magazine published a feature story on Evergrande’s donation pledge, also on March 5, which quoted Jeremy Farrar, who had no official affiliation with Harvard, Evergrande, China, the city of Boston, or the US government. The article also included a bizarre quote from Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, who told Science that “coronavirus is not good for real estate.”
On the day Evergrande approved the donation (according to its 2020 annual report), another unusual but highly significant event occurred: Fauci took what, according to a Chinese foreign ministry official timeline of early pandemic events details, was his first call during the pandemic with the head of the Chinese CDC, George Gao, “to exchange information on the epidemic.” The same foreign ministry timeline also details that on the same day, February 4, Harvard and the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health had the first discussion on “scientific research cooperation” concerning the virus.
Money makes the world go around, they say, and money from China, with the blessing from the highest levels of the US public health establishment, bought the fealty of Harvard and other academic institutions. They happily participated in a massive cover-up and tried to destroy the careers of respected and unusually honest scientists.
This is what comes from an entrenched establishment. All establishments derive their power and prestige from the belief that they are committed and well placed to further the public good, and at best, they do. But when push comes to shove, entrenched establishments are in it only for themselves. That’s why academic scandals get swept under the rug, and outright lies will be promoted in the service of their power, prestige, privileges, and wealth.
Rindsberg is an excellent journalist, and there is much more to this story. You should read it all.
