New documents released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reveal that Dr. Anthony Fauci was concerned about an experiment involving the Ebola virus.
In the 2016 diary entry, Fauci detailed a trial involving the U.S. military that involved vaccinating primates with a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) vaccine. The primates were exposed to an aerosolized Ebola virus. Sixteen of the 20 non-human primates died, Fauci said, including the two control animals. He wrote that there was “more inflammation in the lungs of the vaccinated animals – implying that vaccination is bad.”
“The US Embassy and the Liberian and Guinea and Sierra Leone officials are going [expletive] because we are planning to do vaccine studies there and use the VSV as [a] ring vaccine if other outbreaks occur,” Fauci wrote. “What idiots those guys at USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] are. This should have been a classified experiment that never should have been done in the first place.”
“During the course of those experiments, the DOD [Department of Defense] noticed that the animals that were vaccinated had more inflammation in the long [sic] then [sic] those who were unvaccinated even though almost all the aerosol-challenged [sic] animals died,” Fauci wrote a later entry. “The current experiments were done to find out if this was a real phenomenon and if it was relevant. Again, I believe all of this is important for bio-defense, but has little to do with naturally emerging Ebola outbreaks. Nonetheless, the idea that the vaccine can do harm is now causing people a great deal of concern.”
Discussing the study, Fauci wrote to NIAID Dr. Michael Kurilla, who served as the Associate Director for Biodefense Product Development and the Director of the Office of Biodefense Research Activities, “I have to meet with the NSC [National Security Council] people later this AM. And so, please, please make sure that you or the people from whom you get this information tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Do not tell me what you think I want to hear or hold back what you think will upset me. No one will get hurt if they made a mistake, but then they told me the truth.”
“If someone does not tell me the truth and I find out they did not, then they are gone,” he warned.
Paul commented on the new information in a social media statement, saying that NIAID “paid for risky Ebola experiments run at an Army lab. The study was conducted at the Army’s infectious disease institute at Fort Detrick under a NIAID task order, an engineered exposure that drove the virus deep into the lung in a way natural infection would not.”
