In the summer of 2021, Beth Cameron, a biodefense expert on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, was racing against a 90-day deadline to review classified intelligence on the origins of COVID-19.
The question was politically explosive and scientifically complicated. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the pandemic began, had conducted research involving engineered novel coronaviruses. Some of that work had been supported by U.S. government funding, including through Anthony Fauci’s longtime institute at the National Institutes of Health.
At the same time, several prominent virologists connected to Fauci had helped convince much of the corporate press that any suggestion of a possible link between the pandemic and the Wuhan lab was a conspiracy theory.
Biden ordered the intelligence review in the spring of 2021 after a World Health Organization report failed to provide convincing answers about how the pandemic started.
That June, Cameron called Fauci into a secure room on the White House campus. But newly declassified documents show the meeting was not arranged as a tough questioning session. Instead, Cameron invited Fauci to attend a classified briefing with Maher Bitar, then special assistant to the president for intelligence.
“I would like to invite you to sit with us directly,” Cameron wrote in a newly released June 21, 2021 email to Fauci. “We and Maher stand ready to assist and appreciate greatly your time and leadership.”
The documents, released Thursday by Sen. Rand Paul, offer a detailed look at Fauci’s role inside the U.S. government’s COVID origins review. They also raise new questions about how much influence Fauci had over the intelligence community’s understanding of the pandemic’s origins, and how that influence may have shaped what the public was told.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is working to declassify documents related to COVID’s origins before her tenure ends in June, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. A Senate letter on Monday also indicated that Paul plans to conduct a transcribed interview with Fauci this month, though the letter was later removed from his committee’s website.
Fauci and Cameron did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The newly released documents show that senior intelligence officials in the Biden White House welcomed Fauci into the review process in 2021. During the 90-day effort to assess the intelligence, Fauci received multiple classified briefings from top Biden intelligence officials.
For nearly 20 years, Dr. Anthony Fauci was wired into America’s intelligence and defense apparatus.
Newly released documents from our investigation show how that access let him shape the COVID-19 origins debate — across science, the IC, and the public.
🧵 READ MORE:… pic.twitter.com/gCv1AQmnXx— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) June 11, 2026
At the same time, a Pentagon official had uncovered troubling information involving virologists connected to Fauci.
One major development came in August 2021, during Biden’s review, when a new clue surfaced involving a research proposal known as DEFUSE.
In an Aug. 13, 2021, report to his agency’s internal watchdog, Joseph Murphy, a Marine Corps officer working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, wrote that the COVID virus appeared to be an “American-created recombinant bat vaccine, or its precursor virus.”
Murphy wrote that the virus was created through an EcoHealth Alliance program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and said details about the program had been hidden since the start of the pandemic.
Murphy did not respond to a request for comment.
According to the documents, Murphy had discovered a grant proposal in which an American research group proposed engineering novel coronaviruses with features similar to those found in the COVID virus. The group was EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that had received support from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act later showed that EcoHealth planned to carry out some of the proposed work in Wuhan.
Peter Daszak, the former CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Murphy wrote that he had seen intercepts from Wuhan involving some of the same Wuhan Institute scientists named in the proposal. He also said the proposal had been placed in an unmarked folder on a DARPA server in July 2021.
Less than two weeks later, the National Security Council invited Fauci to review what it described as a “very interesting report” at the White House.
During the same 90-day review, Fauci recommended that Cameron read a paper titled “The Origins of SARS-CoV-2: A Critical Review,” written by a team of 21 virologists.
“It summarizes what I said yesterday,” Fauci wrote.
Cameron replied warmly.
“We remain in awe of you and grateful for your work,” she wrote. “Thank you again for what you do and who you are.”
What Fauci did not mention was that he had quietly worked with some of the paper’s authors in the early days of the pandemic.
On Jan. 31, 2020, Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen alerted Fauci to signs of possible engineering in the virus’s genome. The next day, Fauci joined a private teleconference with other major figures in scientific research funding, including NIH Director Francis Collins and Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar.
Andersen and several other virologists soon began drafting a paper that would argue against the lab leak theory, even though their private messages showed they still had concerns.
That paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was published by Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. It concluded that the virus was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The paper received major media attention and helped shape public discussion of the pandemic’s origins. It also influenced Facebook’s decision to censor discussion of the lab leak theory until February 2021.
One newly released email from Collins said that he and Fauci helped with the paper, though they were “appropriately not mentioned explicitly.”
Fauci later denied under sworn testimony in 2024 that he influenced the “Proximal Origin” paper.
Another declassified document, a November 2003 CIA report titled “The Darker Bioweapons Future,” may help explain why Fauci, despite leading a civilian infectious disease agency, played such a central role in U.S. biodefense.
The report said a panel of life science experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences warned the CIA that rapid advances in biotechnology could make traditional intelligence methods inadequate for tracking weapons of mass destruction.
One scientist suggested that virologists could act as a “living sensor web,” gathering information from foreign colleagues at conferences, universities, and labs.
The report also noted that many scientists had moved past the Vietnam-era distrust of the national security establishment and would likely be open to greater cooperation.
That context matters now because the newly released documents suggest Fauci was not merely a public health adviser during the COVID origins debate. He was treated as a trusted figure inside the intelligence process, even as questions swirled around U.S.-funded research, the Wuhan lab, and the scientists who shaped the early public narrative.
The central issue remains the same: whether the government’s search for the truth about COVID’s origins was driven by evidence, institutional loyalty, or a desire to protect powerful figures from scrutiny.
