Photo: Screenshot from C-SPAN video of Dr. Anthony Fauci giving U.S. Senate testimony in January 2021, juxtaposed with official Fauci calendars from November 2019.
By Adam Andrzejewski
On Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 9am, Dr. Anthony Fauci joined staff at the National Security Council (NSC) — the President’s national security and foreign policy advisory shop — for a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about the novel coronavirus. Fauci would continue to have meetings in classified settings throughout the month.
Fauci’s calendar entries included NSC meetings, White House Situation Room meetings, and meetings in other classified settings, as Covid-19 was breaking in China. (To our knowledge, the existence of these meetings before January 28, 2020 were not previously disclosed.)
On Friday, January 24th, four days after China admitted human-to-human transmission of the virus, Fauci started attending a small group Covid discussion that first took place in “Anthony’s Office” in a building next to the White House. Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China.
Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.
On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”
Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.
So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:
DOWNLOAD DR. FAUCI’S OFFICIAL CALENDAR HERE
For a government bureaucrat, this sure was one tightly held calendar.
The refusal by NIH to follow open records law was a strategy to delay transparency: NIH forced us into expensive taxpayer-paid litigation to slow-walk 156 pages of semi-redacted calendar production.
Fauci’s calendar has 933 events during this five-month period – including 224 media interviews and 84 redacted events (only significant redactions that prevented analysis and understanding were counted, for example, phone number redactions were not included).
It’s a document that NIH and Dr. Fauci didn’t want you to see…
Why? What did Dr. Fauci know? And when did he know it?
Following Fauci’s Timeline — Highlights
November 6, 2019: Fauci’s calendar lists “GPMB Discussion Note.” This likely deals with the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank’s Global Preparedness Monitoring Board. Fauci is a past member of the GPMB board which was formed to “ensure[s] preparedness for global health crises.”
On January 27, 2020, the GPMB convened regarding the Covid-19 outbreak and Fauci signed off on the group’s January 30, 2020 statement commending the WHO and the “transparency of China[…]”. Judicial Watch’s FOIAs uncovered that this statement was organized and circulated by Wellcome Trust scientist and GPMB member Jeremy Farrar (who also organized a secret conference call with Fauci and others on February 1, 2020).
November 12, 2019: Fauci flies to the Netherlands. His multi-day itinerary is not listed. The Netherlands is home to the father of “gain-of-function,” high-risk researcher Dr. Ron Fouchier. Fauci’s NIH Institute, NIAID, paused (2014) then restarted (Jan. 2019) funding to the controversial researcher who (using NIH funds) created an H5N1 bird flu in his lab with pandemic potential. He did so by passaging the virus through ferrets multiple times, until it gained a new function by going airborne and infecting a ferret in a different cage.
November 25, 2019: Fauci joins Ambassador Deborah Birx, the Global AIDS Coordinator at a World AIDS Day (WAD) evening event hosted by the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU). On February 27, 2020, Dr. Birx is appointed to join Fauci on Trump’s Covid-19 Task Force.
Earlier that day, Fauci has a “Pre-Brief for US Japan Biodefense Meeting.” In 2004, as I previously reported at Forbes, Fauci received a permanent pay adjustment for his “biodefense” work. Fauci is the top-paid federal employee, specifically because he was paid to prevent the next pandemic.
November 25, 2019: Fauci has a call with his future biographer, Janet Tobias, who later produces the ‘FAUCI’ documentary.
December 3, 2019: Fauci has a call with Victor Dzau, who is the president of the National Academy of Medicine, a Duke University professor, and a man whose Chinese family fled to Hong Kong to escape China’s civil war.
December 19, 2019: Fauci attends an “NIH Gates Fdn dinner” at “The Cloisters,” likely the one in Lutherville, MD, an hour from NIH.
Earlier that morning, Bill Gates tweeted out what has become a much-discussed prediction, “What’s next for our foundation? I’m particularly excited about what the next year could mean for one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”
Fauci and top officials, such as NIH director Francis Collins and HHS assistant secretary for health Brett Giroir, joined Bill and Melinda Gates executives during the dinner and on panels the next day, according to a press report from the time.
January 17, 2020: Fauci has a call to discuss “CDC Gao Writing Request.” This is presumably related to George Gao, Director-General of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
January 23, 2020: Fauci had an 8am, in-person meeting with Dr. James LeDuc. LeDuc ran one of the few BSL-4 biocontainment labs in the country (think: moon-suit stuff), at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he has long-trained Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) lab in BSL-4 biosafety procedures.
Emails acquired by FOIA from the U.S. Right To Know (USRTK) organization revealed that LeDuc was sending backchannel emails with his Wuhan colleagues to get information on the novel coronavirus outbreak, and even soliciting edits and corrections from Wuhan’s so-called “bat lady” Shi Zhengli for his April 2020 Congressional testimony.
LeDuc’s emails show he was communicating with his virologist colleague Yuan Zhiming, who was in charge of the WIV BSL-4 lab. LeDuc wrote an op-ed published on January 24 about his U.S.-China working relationship.
It’s possible this drop-by visit by LeDuc was to let Fauci know what he was hearingfrom Wuhan, and perhaps, not put that news in email.
By 4:30 that afternoon, LeDuc and former Ft. Detrick BSL-4 biolab director Dave Franz joined Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert Kadlec for a conference call, a call revealed in USRTK’s document production from the University of Texas (pg 3409).
Franz emailed a brief note that same day “to facilitate [the] call.” The email described his and LeDuc’s work since 2007 as establishing a relationship with Chinese scientists (pg 115).
In other words, LeDuc was in town to talk about China and the Wuhan lab with top-HHS and former military biolab officials.
Thus, while the public discussion was and would remain that the virus had a natural origin, behind the scenes, people were being briefed on the U.S.-Chinese scientists’ interactions and the Wuhan lab itself.
Top-Secret Meetings
Unreported until now, throughout late January and February 2020, Fauci was in meetings with the National Security Council (NSC) and in top-secret settings – including in the White House Situation Room. Fauci was also in small, “restricted” meetings with the NSC.
Were all these top-secret meetings known to the President, and do they give the impression people-in-the-know thought the virus had a natural origin?
January 14 and 16, 2020: Fauci has a 9am “Novel Corona Virus PCC/Synch Meeting” with Phil Ferro, NSC and Executive Office of the President, on the 14th and a “Novel Corona Virus Touch Base” with Ferro on the 16th.
January 20: China announced to the world that the virus has human-to-human transmission, an admission that they had a possible pandemic virus on their hands.
January 21: Fauci’s NSC meeting gets a new name (“nCoV-PCC”) and the meeting now includes secure video teleconference (SVTC).
January 21: Fauci is interviewed by The Wall Street Journal reporter Betsy McKay on the listed topic “Coronavirus & HIV Papers.” Is she asking Fauci about an upcoming scientific paper (published January 31st by Indian scientists, but quickly withdrawn by the authors, amid intense criticism) that noted an “uncanny similarity” between the HIV virus and the spike protein in the Covid-19 virus?
Because bats don’t contract HIV, such a similarity would point to a lab creation for the novel virus.
An hour earlier, Fauci had a call with Peter Hotez about an “Anti-SARS vaccine candidate.” Hotez is an NIH-funded, Texas-based scientist and vaccine researcher, who had a $6 million NIH grant since 2012 studying a “SARS vaccine for biodefense.” Hotez developed a non-mRNA vaccine model, that won recent approval for distribution in some foreign countries, such as India.
January 22: The COVID-19 meetings with Fauci rise to a new level as Fauci’s calendar shows him in the White House Situation Room (“WHSR”), from ~1:30-3 this day for “nCoV PCC”
January 24: From ~1:30-2:30 Fauci has a “nCoV Small Group Discussion” at the EEOB, next to the White House, in “Anthony’s Office” Room 381. (nCoV stands for novel coronavirus and was the reference given to Covid-19, before it was officially named SARS-CoV-2.) This is one of the few times no last name is listed on Fauci’s calendar. The meeting entry in our FOIA production is cut off but includes “***Please ”, the entry also includes an attachment, which NIH currently has not released to OpenTheBooks.com.
“Anthony’s Office” Clue from February 5: From 2:30-3:30pm on Feb. 5, Fauci’s calendar shows an EEOB “Restricted Small Group” meeting with Anthony Ruggierro, who is listed as with the Executive Office of the President/NSC. Anthony Ruggierro, according to his public LinkedIn page, was NSC “Special Assistant to the President, Senior Director for Counterproliferation and Biodefense” at the time of the meeting. Thus, it’s likely the January 24th EEOB meeting in “Anthony’s Office” was with the same man as the Feb. 5th meeting: Anthony Ruggierro.
January 27, 2020: From 2:30-3:30pm, Fauci has an “NSC Deputy Call” in the NIH SCIF. (SCIF stands for “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” and is usually a room reserved for sensitive or classified briefings.) Trump’s National Security Council Deputy at the time was Matthew Pottinger. The subject of the call is not noted on the calendar.
(Also on January 27th, Fauci met with the CEO of Moderna, Stephane Bancel.)
January 28, 2020: A Fauci/NSC Covid-19 meeting was previously disclosed by Sharri Markson, who reported in her book What Really Happened in Wuhan that Pottinger called the January 28 meeting with Fauci, HHS Secretary Azar, and CDC Director Redfield just after Pottinger heard from Chinese dissident and human rights activist Wei Jingsheng about the virus breaking in China.
From January 16 through January 29, with few exceptions, Fauci’s weekday calendar shows a Covid meeting, either in person or by phone via secure video teleconference (SVTC) with Phil Farro, who is with the Office of the President and the NSC.
January 22: Fauci has an hour and half blocked off for the Covid meeting in the White House Situation Room.
January 27: If he didn’t know before, emails released to the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee reveal that on this date, Fauci got definitive word from his staff that NIAID, his institute, funded a bat coronavirus grant to EcoHealth Alliance who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr. Ralph Baric. If the virus was from the WIV, Fauci now knew he had funded the Chinese lab.
January 31: Fauci is in the Oval Office, meeting, presumably, with the President.
February 4: By this date, according to released emails, Fauci and the federally funded scientists he consults with, have decided that Covid-19 came from nature via a bat, through some intermediate species. Behind the scenes, they are drafting papers arguing that any position besides a natural origin is a conspiracy theory.
Yet, Fauci keeps meeting with Anthony Ruggiero, NSC’s biodefense and China expert (1/25 and 2/5). Are they thinking Covid may have come from a lab leak?
February 11: Fauci has a meeting with Dr. Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina coronavirus scientist, arguably the nation’s foremost expert on bat coronaviruses. The meeting includes Emily Erbelding, the Director of the NIAID Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases.
Baric had a long-working relationship with the Wuhan lab, and, it would later be revealed, applied (unsuccessfully) for a $14 million DARPA grant with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance to insert a furin cleavage site into a chimeric bat virus and passage it through “humanized” mice to see if it had pandemic potential. Some virologists have called that leaked document a recipe for the Covid-19 virus.
The Fauci/Baric meeting backs up against the NSC meeting with Phil Ferro. It’s not clear where Baric is during the meeting, if in-person or by phone. Was Baric on the NSC call or listening in?
(Previously at Forbes, I wrote about how Fauci continued to fund scientists like Baric and Fouchier by giving exemptions and narrowly defining scrutinized research – circumventing funding bans by Presidents Obama and Trump.)
February 17: “Proximal Origins,” a paper that Fauci apparently helped edit and was organized by NIH-funded Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, stated that the Covid-19 virus was from nature and called any suggestion otherwise a conspiracy. Largely based on this paper, scientific discussion and social media posts suggesting a lab leak were censored as misinformation.
Other Items of Interest
Between 25 November 2019 and 26 February 2020, Fauci does three events with the American Society of Microbiology (ASM): a “Biothreats” discussion (11/25/2019); the ASM biothreats conference (1/29/2020); and meets with the ASM board (2/26/2020).
January 7 and 9, 2020: Fauci did his first interviews on corona: 1. With CTV (Canadian TV) on the “pneumonia outbreak in China”; and 2. With Voice of America (VOA) on the “Wuhan pneumonia.” We couldn’t find the interviews published anywhere on the internet.
While the NIH keeps a public record of interviews Fauci conducted since January 27, 2020, we identified 34 other interviews with him discussing the conronavirus from January 7 to January 26.
Between January 27 and February 24, Fauci meets or has calls with Stephane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna (1/27); Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust (British health non-profit focused on vaccines) (2/1); Biotech executive and former NIH staffer Gary Nabel (2/6); and Johnson & Johnson Chief Scientist Paul Stoffels (2/24).
February 7: Fauci receives training on personal protective equipment (PPE). Given his varying recommendations on PPE early in the pandemic, it would be interesting to know what training he received.
March 18: Fauci logged a meeting entitled “code red” with a follow up meeting on March 20th. No further details were listed.
March 26: Fauci did four YouTube hits of 15 minutes each. Fauci’s calendar titled these events: “FDA Califf Request”—likely referencing Robert Califf. At the time, Califf was leading healthcare strategy at Alphabet (Google and YouTube parent company). Robert Califf is the current U.S. Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the former commissioner under Obama.
Summary
The official work calendar is an historic hour-by-hour documentation of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the months leading up to and during the publicly announced Covid-pandemic.
Even with this topline calendar transparency, NIH admits to holding an additional 60,000 pages of backup documentation. The federal court is allowing us to ask for specific items.
Therefore, if there is a specific document of oversight interest, please send our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com a message via the ‘contact us’ portion of our website.
The historic release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s work calendar leaves all of us with more questions than answers.
It’s incumbent upon Congress to exert its right to oversight.
Note: We reached out for comment to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other top scientists mentioned on Fauci’s calendar. None gave us comment by our deadline.