People magazine, which named Dr. Anthony Fauci among its “2020 People of the Year,” is declining to comment on the recent bombshell report that found the U.S. government contributed funding to controversial gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Documents uncovered by The Intercept contradict Fauci’s sworn testimony claiming the National Institutes of Health didn’t fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
Breitbart News contacted People to ask if the celebrity magazine had any comment on The Intercept’s findings and if the magazine intends to follow up with Fauci about the veracity of his sworn Congressional testimony.
A spokeswoman for People hadn’t responded to Breitbart News as of Friday morning.
People named Fauci as one if its “2020 People of the Year,” making him one of several “People of the Year” who received their own cover spreads. Fauci was also nominated for People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive,” but lost to actor Michael B. Jordan.
In an accompanying interview with People, Fauci blamed political divisions for the pushback against his coronavirus recommendations, which included masks and forced lockdowns.
“I’ve never seen the extent of the divisiveness that leads to hostility against public health measures,” he said. “That is something that people are going to write books about — about how in fact the divisiveness was such that even someone who is trying to get people to implement public health measures that would be saving their lives is met with enough hostility to trigger threats of violence not just at me but against my family.”
Fauci didn’t address his own contradictory messaging about masks, nor did he talk about the ineffectiveness of forced shutdowns at controlling the spread of the virus.
The Intercept’s report is based on 900 pages of unreleased documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The progressive left outlet found the U.S. government provided the EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1 million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans.
Under oath, Fauci has repeatedly stated that the National Institutes of Health’s funding of the Wuhan lab didn’t include gain-of-function research.
As Breitbart News noted, The Intercept’s report quotes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, who said that the viruses the Wuhan lab constructed “were tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human type receptors on their cell.” These viruses included both SARS-related and MERS-related coronaviruses.
Ebright later posted an eight-part thread on Twitter explaining in greater detail the document’s revelations concerning the “enhanced pathogenicity” of one of the “novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses” created by the Wuhan lab.
He noted that this particular Wuhan lab-generated SARS-related coronavirus had not been “previously disclosed publicly” and that it was found to be “more pathogenic” to humans than “the starting virus from which it was constructed.”
Time magazine, which named him to its “most influential people of 2020” and Instyle, which put Dr. Fauci on its cover under the caption “The Good Doctor.”
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg. Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
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