In a recent town hall discussion at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia with CNN’s Jim Acosta, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci declared that another pandemic is inevitable.
Dr. Fauci stated on Monday that there “will absolutely be an outbreak of another pandemic” and even suggested that it could occur as early as next year.
“It may be next year or it may be in your grandparent—your grandchildren and your great grandchildren’s lifetime,” he added. “We don’t know.”
A large audience consisting of students, faculty, and community members filled JMU’s Wilson Hall to listen to Fauci discuss his career in public health, according to local reports.
The former NIAID director was interviewed by Acosta, who is CNN’s chief White House correspondent, and a student in the College of Health and Behavioral Studies.
Fauci has admitted to collaborating with scientists in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus pandemic is thought to have emerged from.
He even defended a $600,000 grant from NIAID that went to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which then paid the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans, Fox News reported in May 2021.
“You don’t want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species,” Fauci said. “So we had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus, and we did that through a sub-grant from a larger grant to EcoHealth.”
“The larger grant was about $600,000 over a period of five years,” he continued. “So it was a modest amount. The purpose of it was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of” infecting humans.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R), a medical doctor, has accused Dr. Fauci of directly funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed by some to have led to the emergence of COVID-19.
“What we are arguing is that the techniques that the NIH funded in Wuhan to create enhanced pathogens may also have been used to create COVID-19,” Sen. Paul wrote in a Nov 2021 op-ed. “[U]ltimately, we’re talking about culpability here. NIH, under Dr. Fauci’s tutelage, funded research in Wuhan that used recombinant genetics to merge unknown bat coronaviruses with a known pandemic pathogen, the SARS virus.”
“The American people deserve to know how this pandemic started, to know if the NIH funded research that may have caused this pandemic, and to remove from office anyone, such as Dr. Fauci, who let this happen,” Paul concluded.
In Jan 2017, Fauci accurately predicted a “surprise outbreak” of a new disease, which turned out to be COVID-19.
“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases,” Fauci said speaking of the Trump administration during a speech at Georgetown University. “The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years.”
Other U.S. government health leaders have been warning about future outbreaks.
A recently resurfaced interview shows former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr. Robert Redfield discussing gain-of-function research on bird flu viruses.
Redfield expressed concerns about the funding of such research on a global scale, including in the United States, and argues that society needs to debate safety and responsibility implications.
He also corroborates Sen. Paul’s stance that Fauci had indeed allowed gain-of-function research to be performed on bird flu viruses.
Redfield even disagreed with publishing the amino sequence changes required to make bird flu a pathogen for humans.
“This is a major disagreement I’ve had with my colleague Dr. Fauci—when they decided to publish the amino sequence changes that were required to make bird flu a pathogen for humans,” he said. “I felt we shouldn’t publish that. We shouldn’t be doing this research. It’s potentially too dangerous [and] could cause a pandemic.”
In the interview, the former CDC director predicted that a coming bird flu pandemic will be much worse than COVID and explained that he expects the bird flu virus will “have significant mortality, in the ten to fifteen percent range.”
“I don’t believe [COVID] is the ‘great pandemic,’” he went on to say. “I believe the great pandemic is still in the future. And that’s going to be a bird flu pandemic from man. It’s going to have significant mortality, in the ten to fifteen percent range. It’s going to be trouble. And we should get prepared for it.”
Redfield emphasized the danger of this expected imminent bird flu pandemic.
“I do believe that the pandemic risk is of greater risk to the national security of the United States than Korea, China, Russia, [and] Iran. And we ought to start investing proportional to that national security risk so we’re prepared. Unfortunately, we’re not more prepared today than we were when the [COVID] pandemic hit when I was CDC director. And we need to make that proportional investment so that we are prepared.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. has resumed the construction of biological laboratories in Ukraine, expanding the structure to train Ukrainian biologists, the head of the radiation, chemical, and biological defense troops of the Russian Armed Forces said on Friday.
