Timeline of Fauci’s involvement in the origin of COVID-19 debate

Newly revealed documents show that Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was intimately involved in the shaping of the federal government’s intelligence information at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Declassified documents released in recent weeks by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard indicate that the intelligence community, consisting of 18 agencies, heavily relied upon Fauci’s expertise when making pronouncements regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Both Gabbard and Paul allege that Fauci, along with National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and NIH-funded researchers, covered up the connections between funding from federal agencies and research conducted in China that may have triggered the pandemic.

The Washington Examiner conducted an analysis of the nearly 500 pages of documents released by Paul and Gabbard to develop a detailed timeline of Fauci’s involvement with the intelligence agencies’ assessment of the origin of the virus in the two years of the pandemic.

On her last day, @DNIGabbard drops a bombshell with even more evidence of Fauci’s collusion with a politicized intelligence community.

This release includes additional documents revealing the truth about the lab-leak origins and Fauci’s lies to Congress under oath.

I’ve… https://t.co/DuoECGfP0Q

, Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) June 19, 2026

Here is the timeline from both sets of documents, beginning in the early 2000s and ending in the summer of 2021.

Pre-pandemic: 2003 to 2019

August 2003: Fauci is included as a formal reviewer on the National Intelligence Council’s report on SARS.

June 1, 2014: The research firm EcoHealth Alliance receives five years of funding from NIAID to conduct bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The project involves collecting various bat coronaviruses to store at the lab.

October 2014: President Barack Obama places a moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern for viruses with pandemic potential, including influenza, SARS, and MERS. Gain-of-function research refers to genetic manipulation of pathogens to make them either more infectious or more dangerous to humans.

January 2018: The NIH lifts the moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern.

January 2018: EcoHealth Alliance proposes a research project, known as the DEFUSE proposal, to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for more research at the WIV and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The project would have been overseen by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth and Ralph Baric of UNC. The research would have involved the manipulation of spike proteins on various coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund the project because it was considered too dangerous.

May 31, 2019: EcoHealth Alliance’s NIAID grant for research at the WIV ends.

Early days: Spring 2020

Jan. 31, 2020: Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen contacts Fauci with concerns that SARS-CoV-2 could have been a genetically engineered virus. Fauci instructs Andersen to contact the FBI if he believes it could be a bioweapon.

Feb. 1, 2020: Fauci, NIH Director Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar of the British Wellcome Trust engage in a Zoom call with Andersen and colleagues. After the call, Andersen and his colleagues go on to write the paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which promotes the animal origin hypothesis and downplays concerns of it being a lab-generated virus.

February 2020: Heavily redacted emails from Gabbard’s files indicate intelligence community officials ruled out the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being a bioweapon early into the process. There are large sections of redacted text on whom to consider subject matter experts on the virus.

March 6, 2020: Andersen contacts Fauci and Collins thanking them for their “advice and leadership” on the “Proximal Origin” paper, saying it was accepted by the journal Nature Medicine. Collins instructs Fauci to ensure the two NIH officials “are appropriately not mentioned explicitly” in the credits for the paper.

March 17, 2020: “Proximal Origin” is published and quickly becomes one of the most read and most cited scientific papers of all time.

March 20, 2020: Collins publishes an NIH director’s memo on the agency’s website outlining a zoonotic, or animal-based, origin of the virus.

March 20-25, 2020: A former Department of Energy employee working for the nonprofit research corporation MITRE contacts intelligence community officials with concern about potential genetic engineering of the virus. Internal emails between intelligence community personnel cite the “Proximal Origin” paper and Collins’s memo as evidence not to further investigate the claims of the MITRE employee.

April 17, 2020: Fauci cites the “Proximal Origin” paper from the White House Coronavirus Task Force podium in response to questions from reporters about the lab leak hypothesis. In a private Slack channel, Andersen tells his colleagues he is still worried that “we also can’t fully rule out engineering” of the virus, despite the publication of “Proximal Origin.”

Intelligence community on origins: September 2020 to July 2021

Sept. 16, 2020: Intelligence community officials express concerns about being viewed by the public as the “final arbiter of technical analysis on the SARS-CoV-2 genome,” instead wishing to defer to subject matter experts from biomedical agencies. The official, whose name and agency are redacted, said in an email chain, “I do not think the IC brings any unique expertise to bear on analyzing the disease itself at this point, and we should be deferring purely technical questions on unclassified scientific research to others.”

May 11, 2021: Fauci tells Paul during testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee: “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

May 26, 2021: President Joe Biden orders the intelligence community to publish a report within 90 days on the origins of the pandemic.

June 4, 2021: Fauci briefs the National Security Council on the origins of the virus and puts together a list of subject matter experts for the intelligence community to consult. Included on that list are Baric, Daszak, Andersen, and the other authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper.

June 28, 2021: The intelligence community formally requests information on the virus for its report from the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services.

July 13-14, 2021: Intelligence community personnel via email discuss the degree to which they are relying on Fauci’s recommendations. An intelligence official, whose name and office have been redacted, expressed that Fauci was not to be considered a policymaker, but rather a subject matter expert “with a wealth of knowledge about current and historical research who probably knows better than most who the real Coronavirus experts are.”

July 20, 2021: Fauci and Paul yell at one another during another Senate hearing. Fauci says, “I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed.”

Aug. 27, 2021: The director of national intelligence publishes a 1 1/2-page report indicating the intelligence community believes the virus was not developed as a bioweapon and that most agencies “assess with low confidence” that the virus was not genetically engineered. “Variations in analytic views largely stem from differences in how agencies weigh intelligence reporting and scientific publications, and intelligence and scientific gaps,” the report says.

Whistleblowers come forward: August 2021

Aug. 13, 2021: A Marine Corps fellow with DARPA files a whistleblower complaint with the agency’s inspector general regarding the DEFUSE proposal. “SARS-CoV-2 is an American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus,” the whistleblower report says. Twelve days later, Fauci is contacted by the National Security Council to review the whistleblower complaint.

Aug. 16, 2021: A separate whistleblower within the intelligence community files a complaint against Fauci for perjury following his testimony before the Senate HELP Committee that there was no gain-of-function research funded by the NIH being conducted at the WIV. The intelligence community inspector general informed Congress, but sent the complaint to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.