By Zachary Stieber
A newly disclosed file from Twitter indicates Dr. Anthony Fauci lied under oath when he said he didn’t use social media.
The newly released internal Twitter report said Fauci, the then-head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “did an account takeover” in February 2021 for the White House COVID-19 response team’s account. Journalist Paul Thacker obtained the file.
Fauci said while being deposed in late 2022 that “I don’t do social media.”
“I’m so dissociated from social media. I don’t have a Twitter account. I don’t do Facebook. I don’t do any of that, so I’m not familiar with that. I’ve never gotten involved in any of that,” Fauci said.
“I don’t even know how to access a tweet,” he added later. “I wouldn’t know how to access a tweet if you paid me.”
An account takeover is when a person is allowed to assume control of an account for a period of time, posting content on a social media platform.
The White House said on social media in February 2021 that Fauci “is taking over this account” to answer questions from the public. In April 2021, it said that Fauci “will take over this account” to answer questions.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases did not respond to a request for comment. Fauci could not be reached.
Martin Kulldorf, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard University, said that the newly disclosed file appears to show Fauci lied.
“He’s involved even if he doesn’t write the tweets,” Kulldorff, a regular Twitter user who is part of the lawsuit against the federal government over its pressure on Big Tech to censor users, told Thacker. “To me that’s explosive, and it seems he lied under oath.”
‘Inconsistent’
Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser from 2021 to 2022, has come under fire before for questionable and false statements, including his claim that the U.S. government did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
NIAID funds were funneled by a nonprofit to the institute for experiments that included increasing the transmissibility of a bat coronavirus, records show. Experts say those experiments fit the definition of gain-of-function.
“Some of Dr. Fauci’s testimony is inconsistent with some of the intelligence that we have that remains classified as well as inconsistent with some information that is publicly available,” John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, told Congress this week.
Fauci was also involved in a paper that claimed the theory that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute was disproven. Fauci cited the paper from the White House podium as showing COVID-19 had a natural origin without revealing his involvement. COVID-19 is believed to originate with bats but no intermediary animals have been identified, undercutting natural origin proponents like Fauci.
There’s a growing belief that COVID-19 came from the Wuhan laboratories, including a new Senate report that concluded it was likely SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was accidentally released amid vaccine development.
“The preponderance of information supports the plausibility of an unintentional research-related incident that likely resulted from failures of biosafety containment during SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-related research,” the report says.
Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the acting director of the National Institutes of Health, which includes the agency Fauci headed, told members of Congress this week he had “no idea” if the virus came from the labs.
“There are two prevalent theories—a lab accident, or as you say a lab leak, versus a zoonotic transfer from animals to humans,” Tabak said. “In my mind, the available evidence favors the latter, but of course our minds are open to the former possibility.”
