Newly obtained documents reportedly show that Dr. Anthony Fauci instructed an aide to permanently delete an email concerning controversial gain-of-function research years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The emails, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, date back to 2012, when Fauci was defending experiments that made a highly dangerous strain of bird flu transmissible through the air.
Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier conducted the experiments with funding from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Fouchier described the resulting virus as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”
The experiments triggered debate over whether the potential benefits of gain-of-function research justified the potentially catastrophic consequences of an accidental laboratory escape.
New York Times science writer Phil Boffey was among those sounding the alarm, warning of an “engineered doomsday” capable of killing “hundreds of millions of people.”