The CIA blessed it.
That's the word in the newly surfaced documents connecting Anthony Fauci's NIAID directly to a CIA advisory panel and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Investigative reporter Emily Kopp put it plainly: "We can't say for sure, but the latest Fauci document dump includes evidence that Ralph Baric's coronavirus engineering research with the Wuhan lab was blessed by the CIA."
Blessed. As in: endorsed. Approved. Sanctioned by the same agency whose September 2015 internal commission studied how to engineer MERS into a pandemic-capable pathogen.
That same year — 2015 — Ralph Baric co-authored a study with Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist known as "Bat Lady," involving the insertion of spike proteins into SARS viruses. Baric isn't just any virologist. He's a member of the Biological Sciences Experts Group — the BSEG — which is a CIA advisory panel.
The CIA was modeling MERS pandemic scenarios on paper while one of its own science advisors was engineering spike proteins in the lab alongside the woman at the center of every serious lab-leak theory on earth.
Now documents confirm the agency knew.
The paper trail starts in 2002, when Vice President Cheney assigned Fauci to head U.S. biodefense research. Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright described what that assignment actually covered: "bioweapons-agents-development and bioweapons-agents-characterization research programs that approached, and arguably crossed, red lines set by the Biological Weapons Convention."
By 2014, Fauci's NIAID was funding EcoHealth Alliance — run by Peter Daszak — for a project titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." By 2018, the group submitted the DEFUSE proposal: a $14 million pitch to the Pentagon for SARS-like bat coronavirus experiments.
The Pentagon rejected it. The research was too dangerous.
The research continued anyway.
Ebright traced the institutional structure: "The documents show early steps in the process of transferring funding for, and direction of, CIA and DoD biodefense projects to Fauci's agency, NIAID."
Read that again. This is an inter-agency pipeline — CIA priorities. DoD money. NIAID execution. Wuhan labor.
Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, looked at the new documents and offered a two-word verdict: "Game over." He elaborated: "The latest revelations provide precise confirmation that all the many suspicious features of SARS-CoV-2 which imply it was man-made were set out in exhaustive detail in the DEFUSE proposal to which Wuhan Institute of Virology was a partner."
Game over.
Then there's the detail that didn't make it into the official reports. Kopp mentioned it on air: "I didn't include this in my report, but I heard one official burst into tears when presented with evidence for a lab leak."
A U.S. intelligence official. Crying. Because the evidence pointed exactly where they'd been told it couldn't.
This is the same Dr. Fauci who, in July 2021, recommended that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence consult specific virologists on the origins question — virologists whose independence from Fauci's own network was, to put it charitably, debatable. When Congress asked the ODNI which scientists were consulted, the answers raised more questions than they settled.
Rand Paul spent years pushing Fauci on gain-of-function research in Senate hearings. Tulsi Gabbard flagged the intelligence gaps. They were called conspiracy theorists.
The documents keep proving them right.
Seven million people died. Seven hundred and seventy million were sickened.
The man who told America to mask up, lock down, and trust the science was simultaneously running an agency that had been funneling coronavirus research through a Chinese virology lab — with CIA awareness — since at least 2015.
The Pentagon said the research was too dangerous to fund.
Fauci's network found a way to keep it going.
The CIA apparently knew.
And for four years, anyone who said so out loud got banned from social media.