Dr. Fauci sharpened his elbows and began maneuvering for a leading role for NIAID in milking the BARDA/Homeland Security’s cash cows. NIAID’s biosecurity budget went from zero dollars in 2000 to $1.7 billion after the 2001 anthrax letters, much of that for bioweapons vaccines.71
Within five months following the anthrax postal incidents, Dr. Fauci had created two new sub-agencies to capture his share of the cheese: the NIAID Strategic Plan for Biodefense Research and the NIAID Biodefense Research Agenda for CDC Category A agents, which were those microorganisms designated by CDC to be potential pandemic pathogens. To populate the sub-agencies, he assembled a cadre of his loyal deputies and infectious disease principal investigators from the HIV bonanza. Their mission was to brand contagions as pressing terror threats, drum up pandemic panic, and lobby for government support for NIAID’s new battery of biodefense vaccinations.
Dr. Fauci and the El-Hibris found common cause. Dr. Fauci could run interference for the El-Hibris at FDA, overriding regulatory anxieties about BioPort’s laboratory and product safety. The El-Hibris, in turn, provided Dr. Fauci with a ready-made biodefense vaccine and a beachhead into the arcane maze of military contracting. Taking to the airwaves, Dr. Fauci made himself the face of biodefense. In a style now familiar to Americans, Fauci warned the public that postal workers who had handled the letters containing anthrax spores “might still be harboring these in their lungs even after taking two months of antibiotics,” spreading plague with the morning mail. Taking the El-Hibris’ vaccine prophylactically, Dr. Fauci advised, might help.72, 73 Dr. Fauci’s signature fearmongering was, of course, his trademark science-free speculation.
Nestling the El-Hibris under his protective wing, Dr. Fauci swept aside FDA’s safety concerns and publicly praised BioPort’s experimental anthrax vaccine, BioThrax. He brushed aside the reservations of critics that the El-Hibris never established BioThrax’s safety with some of his prototypical dissembling. Dr. Fauci said, “The vaccine is designed to get the immune system to recognize the proteins—and therefore the bacteria—and destroy both.”74
In a December 2001 PBS interview, Fauci promised to deliver BioThrax—which had failed to pass a single FDA audit during the prior four years—at record pace. Fauci explained, “In usual times, that is a process that takes years and years,” but he committed that his project for delivering BioThrax “is going to be markedly truncated because of the urgency of the situation.”75
PBS observed that because of BioPort’s production problems, the Pentagon had dramatically scaled back its plan to vaccinate US forces, and there were insufficient anthrax vaccines in the Pentagon’s stockpile to conduct the mass civilian inoculation program that had been Dr. Fauci’s ultimate aim.76 But BioPort still possessed the only military contract, and Fuad El-Hibri announced that he was primed to ramp up production.
Practically every veteran federal bureaucrat was jockeying to ride the War on Terror into the high stakes winner’s circle. The military’s medical corps, maneuvering for its share of the overflowing stream of bioterrorism funding, had proposed that each American soldier should receive seventy-five new vaccines upon enlistment, to cover every potential bioweapon. The brass asked President Bush to finance the development of this inoculation fusillade. Not to be outgunned by the military doctors, Dr. Fauci announced in an October 2002 speech that within ten years, “his institute would produce a vaccine, a therapeutic drug and an adjuvant drug for each of some two dozen bioweapons diseases, such as plague and hemorrhagic fever.” According to an article in Scientific American, “one scientist who requested anonymity said that Dr. Fauci told him that the Bush administration had demanded this goal and that he accepted it to prevent the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security from getting the job.” Dr. Fauci was openly competing with the military in an escalating campaign to soak the taxpayers using the risk posed by anthrax as a pretext. NIAID’s biodefense budget alone increased sixfold between 2002 and 2003—from $270 million to $1.75 billion.77
When no further bioterror attacks occurred over the next ten years, Dr. Fauci skillfully maintained his annual $1.7 billion biosecurity funding by deftly recalibrating his rhetoric away from bioterrorism hype. Instead, he invoked the new panic of natural but emerging infectious diseases. Dr. Fauci’s pivot to conflate infectious disease with terrorism proved a milestone inflection point in the militarization of pandemic response and in overcoming the traditional revulsion among Western democracies—codified in the Nuremberg Charter—against coercive medical interventions.
Despite the fact that they collectively killed only 800 people globally,78 the SARS coronavirus outbreaks between 2002 and 2004 were therefore a godsend to Dr. Fauci. The NIAID Director ignored the most compelling caveat from those incidents: the fact that coronavirus lab escapes in China, Taiwan, and Singapore had precipitated several of the outbreaks.79 Fauci boasted in 2011, “Through the anthrax response, we built both a physical and an intellectual infrastructure that can be used to respond to a broad range of emerging health threats.”80 By that time, the escalating intramural arms race to capture Pentagon, CIA, BARDA, DARPA, and HHS biosecurity funding was pulling the military, CIA, and NIAID deeper and deeper into the dicey alchemy of “gain-of-function research” that would ultimately culminate inside the BSL-4 Pandora’s box in Wuhan.81
The CIA Dips In Its Toe
The CIA had a long, sordid history of secretly promoting the US bioweapons program. One of the agency’s first projects was establishing a network of so-called “ratlines” that Army intelligence officers used to smuggle some 1,600 chemicals and bioweapons and WMD experts—many of them Nazi Party kingpins and notorious war criminals—out of the reach of the Allies’ Nuremberg prosecutors following World War II. The directors of a notorious operation, code-named Paperclip, provided these researchers with new identities and put them to work developing US germ warfare capacity at Ft. Detrick and elsewhere even after 1972. As late as 1997, the CIA defied the Bioweapons Treaty to launch a top-secret—and highly illegal—effort to create a doomsday “bacteria bomblet.”82