Fauci's Paper Trail: How the Lab Leak Was Buried

↓ Jump to the video and timestamps

I've been covering this story for five years. I'm not coming at it fresh, and I'm not pretending to be neutral. I believe SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab using US taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research, that the Proximal Origin paper was a deliberate narrative weapon built in backroom meetings to protect the vaccine pipeline, and that the presidential pardon shielding Anthony Fauci is a social fiction that cannot and should not stand against what was done to the world.

Jessica Rose has been doing some of the most meticulous documentary work on this story, combing through the 1,300-page Fauci email releases, the Slack messages from the Proximal Origin authors, the CBP intercept documents from the Rand Paul releases, and the VAERS data that most researchers won't touch. She came back on the show this week and we went through all of it: the February 1st phone call, the furin cleavage site, Fauci's personal journal, biologicals being trafficked across US borders with federal protection, DNA in vaccine vials, and the mRNA flu vaccine that just got approved without a saline placebo group. The evidence is not circumstantial anymore. The question now is whether anyone has the spine to act on it.

My son was born in February 2020. He had a speech delay because everybody was wearing masks and he couldn't see mouths move. Behind the scenes, Fauci was privately admitting the masks weren't doing anything, and I'm coming at this story from that place.

Key takeaways

• The Proximal Origin paper was a 45-day narrative engineering job, not peer-reviewed science. The scientists who wrote it were privately alarmed by the furin cleavage site while publicly negating any possibility of engineering. Christian Andersen's own Slack messages show he didn't think the paper was ready when it went out.
• The paper's purpose was to justify the vaccines. If the public had known the spike protein coding material came from a lab-engineered chimeric virus, as Jessica Rose put it, no one would have gone near it with a 10-foot pole. That's why the narrative had to be locked down fast.
• Fauci's personal journal documents a sociopath, not a misguided bureaucrat. He was reveling in magazine covers and public attention while privately telling CNN reporters that natural immunity was best, hydroxychloroquine worked, and the 6-foot rule was invented out of thin air. The same media that spent a decade calling Trump a sociopath is now defending this man.
• A presidential pardon is a piece of paper, not moral exoneration. It is a social agreement between the government and the governed. It cannot and should not protect someone from accountability for shutting down the global economy, destroying millions of small businesses, and ruining the lives of children.
• The cover-up is still active. The mRNA flu vaccine was approved without a saline placebo group. Biologicals were trafficked into the US from China with federal interference in customs inspections. The same people are still pushing gene-therapy products into younger and younger age groups.
• Persistence is the only path. The hearings, the email releases, the CBP documents are real progress. But only if people keep the drum beating and anyone still inside the apparatus finds the courage to come forward.

The February 1st Phone Call and the Paper That Followed

The Proximal Origin paper was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. The peer review timeline, from submission to acceptance, was approximately 45 days. That is anomalous by any historical standard for a peer-reviewed scientific publication, and it becomes a lot more interesting when you read what the authors were saying to each other in private during those same weeks.

The February 1st, 2020 phone call brought together Fauci, Francis Collins, Ralph Baric, and others with significant money and influence behind the pandemic response. Jessica has been through the email releases and the Slack message threads, and what she found is that the people who wrote the paper were genuinely worried about what they were looking at. Christian Andersen's Slack messages show he was concerned the furin cleavage site was a definitive sign the virus might have been engineered. He also said the paper wasn't ready when it went out. They published it anyway.

Then there's the Gates memo. According to the email releases, on April 22nd, 2020, Bill Gates sent a multi-page memo to Fauci outlining what he believed should be done in terms of pandemic response. In that memo, per the releases, his stated goal was to vaccinate the entire world. Every person, regardless of age, health status, or geography.

That memo matters in context. By April 22nd, 2020, the Proximal Origin paper had already been published. The narrative that the virus came from nature, not a lab, was already locked in. And here was Gates, six weeks later, laying out a global vaccination architecture.

I've been saying for years that the importance of pushing the Proximal Origin paper on the public was to justify the vaccines. If people had known the spike protein was the coding material from a lab-engineered chimeric virus, they wouldn't have gone near it. The paper gave the vaccines the cover they needed.

The Furin Cleavage Site and What the Scientists Said in Private

The furin cleavage site is the piece of the puzzle that the authors of the Proximal Origin paper couldn't explain away, which is why their private communications look so different from their public conclusions.

In the Slack messages released as part of the Senate hearing materials, Andersen's alarm about the furin cleavage site is clear. In Jessica's read of those messages, it was described as a possible definitive sign of engineering. Andersen asked Eddie Holmes, in colorful terms, who had invited Ian Lipkin onto the paper. Holmes's response, as Jessica reads it: Lipkin invited himself, but I didn't object.

The four main authors had a private Slack channel that Lipkin wasn't part of. They didn't want him there. He ended up on the paper anyway, going against the group's conclusions publicly in the months that followed, which sent the other four into a spiral about what he was doing.

Jessica speculates, and she's explicit that it's speculation, that Lipkin may have had some kind of intelligence-adjacent role on the paper. She says she can only guess at what that might have been. What isn't speculative is that his presence on the paper was contested from the start and that he later publicly undercut its conclusions.

Ralph Baric's protectiveness around the furin cleavage site research comes up in the February 3rd meeting documented in these records. When Andersen wanted to examine it, Baric pushed back hard. Jessica's read on why: Baric has the knowledge and the expertise to build a chimeric virus with exactly these characteristics. His defensiveness about who gets to look at this research isn't hard to explain if you follow that thread.

Li-Meng Yan published three reports on COVID origins that challenged the wet market narrative. According to Jessica's review of the email materials, the Proximal Origin circle was actively threatened by her work and was working to discredit anyone asking these questions.

The Pradhan paper, a preprint that went up on a server in early 2020 showing four short sequences in the spike protein with significant identity to HIV sequences, was pulled from the server within days of posting. Jessica remembers reading it and crying. She looked at her partner and said: they made it. The paper's removal from the preprint server is, in her view, itself a data point.

"My Foot Is on Your Neck", Fauci's Emails and the Vaccine Pipeline

One of the things Jessica has surfaced from the email releases is a quote attributed to Fauci in the context of the Moderna clinical trials. As she reads the email, someone relays that Fauci told them: "I hope you feel like my foot is on your neck right now to get this done." She says she made this go viral when she first found it. It's a long way from a public-health official earnestly worried about a dangerous pathogen.

The Drew Weissman email is arguably the most damning single document in the entire release. On February 8th, 2021, Weissman, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2023 alongside Katalin Karikó for the mRNA technology underlying the COVID vaccines, wrote to Fauci that mRNA-LNPs go to the placenta and fetus, and that the uterus and ovaries take up the mRNA-LNPs and translate the mRNA. Fauci received that email.

The vaccine rollout continued into younger and younger age groups after that date. Jessica's view: the plan was always to get this onto the childhood vaccine schedule, because that's where liability protection lives under existing law. Safety data was not going to stop that plan.

Then there's remdesivir. In Jessica's review of the email releases, Fauci was privately receiving communications from doctors and researchers warning him that remdesivir was dangerous and that hydroxychloroquine was showing better outcomes. He was writing back in ways that reflected he knew this.

About ten days later, he was publicly touting remdesivir as the course of action for COVID treatment, and there he was in the White House briefing room backing it up. The gap between what he wrote privately and what he said publicly on this question is about as clean an example of deliberate deception as you're going to find in these documents.

On the mRNA flu vaccine: Jessica reviewed the safety data in the FDA approval document and found that more people died in the mRNA product group than in the comparator group. The comparator was not a saline placebo. It was another flu vaccine. There was no saline control.

She built a chart showing that if you hypothesize a saline placebo group with zero severe adverse events and zero deaths, both flu products show roughly a 30-times higher chance of dying compared to that baseline. The FDA approved it anyway. It's now being recommended.

I've been a CrowdHealth member for five years, and situations like this are exactly why. My family of five pays around $700 a month. We've had two kids born on it, multiple health events, and I'm not going back to health insurance.

The whole conversation we had with Jessica is a case study in why opting out of the captured system matters. If you want to do the same, go to joincrowdhealth.com, use code TFTC, and you'll get $99 a month for the first three months.

Trafficking Biological Materials, The CBP Intercept Documents

This is the part of the story that gets the least attention and deserves the most.

The documents Jessica is working from are the CBP release package from the Rand Paul releases. The executive summary she read on tape covers an incident as early as 2018: vials containing suspected coronavirus were intercepted at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. The vials were being carried by a third-party individual from a researcher in China and were intended for a recipient named Fang Li, described as a professor and virology researcher at the University of Minnesota, associated with NIH grants.

That's the 2018 incident. There are more.

The second document Jessica read from covers a separate individual. Per the document, this person failed to declare and misrepresented biologicals in their possession twice, concealed their ties to an institution (the name is redacted), and misrepresented their status. They were also found to have used another person's login credentials on devices in their possession.

A box of vials was detained. The rest of that paragraph is redacted. The person boarded their flight at the conclusion of the inspection.

Then there's the Peter Daszak email. Dated January 11th, 2021, from the Fauci email releases: an agriculture specialist in the Office of Field Operations for US Customs and Border Protection drafted a list of recommended questions for an inbound inspection in the event that Daszak was hand-carrying biological samples. Those sensible questions, per Jessica's reading of the document, were overridden.

Her impression is that Daszak was not inspected when he came in, traveling through JFK, she believes via Doha, though she flags that routing as uncertain. Someone at a level above the customs specialist ensured the inspection did not take place.

These are not isolated incidents, per the documents. Biological materials of undeclared or misrepresented designation were being moved into the United States from China, and people with federal authority were actively intervening to prevent inspections from taking place.

Fauci's Diary and the Sociopath in the Mirror

I want to stay on this point because I think people are underselling it.

For the better part of a decade, the mainstream media told us that Donald Trump was a sociopath who cared only about his self-image and public perception. I've conceded that Trump has megalomaniacal tendencies. Fine. But we now have Anthony Fauci's personal journal from the COVID period, released through the Senate hearing process, and what it shows is a man who, while the world was shutting down and people were dying, was focused on how many magazine covers he was on, who was praising him, who was attacking him, and how it all reflected on his legacy. He was getting glee from the attention.

In that same journal, he was privately deriding a CIA officer who came to brief him on the lab-leak hypothesis, even while his own private communications showed he considered a lab origin at least plausible in the earliest days of the outbreak. He was constructing a narrative in his public posture, and then reinforcing that narrative in his private writing, even when it contradicted what he actually believed.

By Jessica's count, he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during the Senate hearings. He has since been found in contempt of Congress. A man who called himself the science refused to answer basic questions about the carpet color while sitting in front of the United States Senate.

If the media standard is that we cannot tolerate sociopaths in positions of power, then this man's diary alone meets the test they set. The fact that the same outlets defending him spent years making the opposite argument about Trump is a tell.

The Presidential Pardon Problem, and Why Persistence Is the Only Answer

A presidential pardon is a social agreement between the government and the governed. It's a signature on a piece of paper. And I'm going to be direct: I don't believe a piece of paper should protect Anthony Fauci from accountability for what happened.

He shut down the global economy. He helped engineer the destruction of millions of small and medium businesses. He presided over a policy regime that mandated masks he privately admitted were useless, enforced a 6-foot rule he knew was made up, suppressed treatment options he privately acknowledged showed promise, and pushed vaccines containing a spike protein from what the evidence increasingly suggests was a lab-engineered chimeric virus into the arms of billions of people under conditions that can only be described as coercion.

My son was born in February 2020. He had a speech delay because he couldn't see people's mouths move through masks. Fauci knew the masks weren't doing anything, and millions of other families paid a far greater cost.

The Biden pardon covers a defined period of Fauci's conduct. What it cannot do is change what happened. It cannot return the businesses that closed, the children whose development was stunted, the people who died on remdesivir while hydroxychloroquine sat on a shelf.

A contempt finding is a start. It's not enough.

Jessica raised Kevin McKernan's work on DNA contamination in the vaccine vials. Every lab that has tested those vials, using different methodologies, qPCR, fluorometry, sequencing, has found DNA that shouldn't be there. One of the components found is an SV40 enhancer-promoter.

For context: SV40 was found as a contaminant in early poliovirus vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s, and it's associated with oncogenesis in humans. The presence of an SV40 enhancer-promoter sequence in the COVID vaccine vials is not a small claim. A forthcoming paper in OncoTarget, currently past the proofs stage as of our conversation, will systematically counter the main published response to McKernan's original findings.

There was also a Japanese preprint, since pulled from the server, describing a shift in cancer-type distribution post-2021. The distribution moved toward cancers in the anatomical areas where the spike protein from the COVID vaccines was known to concentrate in the body.

Jessica and I both noted: these are the things they're afraid of people finding out. When you map the liability exposure from DNA contamination evidence onto companies with multi-hundred-billion-dollar market caps, you understand why this story hasn't broken through the mainstream. The financial and legal consequences would be staggering.

That financial and legal exposure is a reason to be more precise and more persistent, not a reason to stop.

The childhood vaccine schedule started expanding in earnest in the 1990s. Vaccine manufacturers have operated under a liability shield since the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. One product on the schedule generates roughly a billion dollars a year in revenue, liability-free. The incentive structure is not complicated.

If you're inside this apparatus and you're listening: roll. Come forward. You will not be shamed by the people who have been fighting this story for years. You'll be welcomed.

Your soul is worth more than whatever they have on you. As I said on tape: save your soul.

Nobody who got vaccinated was stupid. They were subjected to the largest psychological operation in human history from every direction at once. Every mainstream information source was saying the same thing, putting up the same death charts, inciting the same fear.

People acted out of genuine concern for themselves and the people they love. The people who ran that operation were the problem, not the people who fell for it.

Persistence is the only difference between success and failure on this. The hearings are real. The email releases are real. The CBP documents are real.

The contempt finding is real. None of it means anything if we let the drum stop beating. We won't.

About Jessica Rose

Jessica Rose is an independent researcher and writer with a background in computational biology, molecular biology, and immunology. She holds a BSc in Applied Mathematics, an MSc in Immunology, and a PhD in Computational Biology.

She has spent the past several years analyzing VAERS data, vaccine trial design, and the scientific and documentary record surrounding COVID-19 origins and the mRNA vaccine rollout. Her work is published on Substack, where she has written extensively on adverse event signals, the furin cleavage site, DNA contamination in vaccine vials, and the Proximal Origin paper.

She has also contributed to peer-reviewed research on vaccine safety signals that has been entered into the Congressional Record by Senator Ron Johnson.

Sources mentioned

• Proximal Origin paper (Nature Medicine, March 2020): the published study concluding SARS-CoV-2 had natural origins, now contested by the private Slack communications of its own authors
• Senate hearing materials, Johnson/Paul releases: the 1,300-page and 3,200-page Fauci email releases, the Slack message disclosures, and the CBP document package reviewed throughout this conversation
• "2026-07 final CBP release package" per Jessica Rose's reference to the Rand Paul document releases: covers the Detroit Metropolitan Airport 2018 interception and the Daszak January 2021 inspection email
• Drew Weissman / Karikó Nobel Prize (2023): confirmed Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for mRNA modification work underlying the COVID vaccines
• Kevin McKernan's DNA-in-vials research: independent laboratory findings of DNA contamination including SV40 enhancer-promoter sequences in COVID vaccine vials, replicated across multiple labs using different methodologies
• National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (1986): the federal law establishing the liability shield for childhood vaccine manufacturers
• Pradhan et al. preprint (bioRxiv, uploaded January 31, 2020, withdrawn February 2, 2020): the preprint hypothesizing HIV-like insert sequences in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, removed from the server within days of posting
• Li-Meng Yan reports: three preprint reports authored by Li-Meng Yan challenging the natural-origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2
• OncoTarget paper (forthcoming): Jessica Rose's forthcoming paper systematically rebutting the Ox et al. counter-study on DNA contamination findings; past the proofs stage as of this recording

Watch the conversation

Timestamps

• 0:00 - Intro
• 0:42 - Why the Proximal Origin Paper Mattered
• 7:13 - The February 1st Phone Call and the Gates Memo
• 17:06 - The mRNA Flu Vaccine and No Placebo
• 19:35 - Ian Lipkin and the PO Boys
• 31:55 - Lab Origin and the Spike Protein as a Compounding Catastrophe
• 48:29 - CBP Intercepts and Biological Materials
• 54:59 - Reading the CBP Documents Live
• 59:29 - The Presidential Pardon Problem
• 1:08:21 - The Pradhan Paper and HIV Inserts
• 1:19:17 - DNA in Vials and the OncoTarget Paper
• 1:29:15 - Accountability, the Pardon, and Why Persistence Wins
• 1:35:14 - The Childhood Vaccine Schedule and Liability Shield

Sponsors

• Cash App: For a limited time, new customers can get $21 added to their balance. Just use code TFTC10 when you sign up, and send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. cash.app/app/TFTC
• Square: For up to $200 off eligible Square hardware. square.com/go/tftc
• Bitkey: Use code TFTC10 for 10% off the new Bitkey. bitkey.world
• Aven: aven.com/bitcoin
• CrowdHealth: joincrowdhealth.com/tftc
• Unchained: unchained.com/tftc
• Salt of the Earth: drinksote.com/tftc