On Monday, two Republican senators dug up 11 text messages from Fouchi’s phone.
The sending time of this batch of text messages was January 25 and 26, 2021, when the vaccine had only been on the market for just over a month.
The three people in the chat were Fouchi, dubbed the “U.S. Zhongnan Mountain”; Valensky, then director of the CDC; and Mourtie, who later became the director of the health bureau. The topic was whether pregnant women should get vaccinated.
Fouchi said that many people develop fever after the second dose, have a cytokine storm, and theoretically this may be related to early miscarriage in pregnancy—so take care.
“Well said,” Valensky said. Mourtie said it was very useful.
On the surface, these chat logs seem to have no issues. But just a few days later, on February 3, Fauci publicly said that the FDA had found no "red flag" warnings.
By August 30, the public statements had become extremely confident: the CDC tracked tens of thousands of pregnant women and found no abnormalities at all—"clearly it should be administered."
Privately he said, "theoretically it could result in miscarriage," but publicly he said, "it should clearly be administered." Fauci clearly is a "front-facing one thing and back-facing another" kind of person.
Why would Fauci be so supportive of the COVID-19 vaccine? It likely has to do with the massive interests behind the scenes.
Moderna—the company that developed vaccines for the U.S.—had basically not made any money before 2020. It had no officially上市 (approved and publicly launched) drugs; it was a pure burn-cash clinical-stage biotech company.
Thanks to the COVID-19 vaccine, in those years of the pandemic, the total revenue reached as much as $50 billion!
Moderna went from an obscure biotech firm to an industry giant overnight.
Moreover, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine was jointly developed with a vaccine research center under the NIAID led by Fauci. Moderna will pay NIAID a royalty of "a low single-digit percentage" based on sales.
That is to say, there really is a tangible chain of interests between this institution run by Fauci and the commercial success of this vaccine.
With the midterm elections in mid-November still three months away, Polymarket shows the probability that the Democrats will win the House is as high as 87%!
The "Clarity Act" for cryptocurrencies that Trump has strongly promoted: the House passed it last year, and the Senate Banking Committee approved it in May as well. As a result, it’s been dragging on ever since and still hasn’t been scheduled for a full Senate vote. On August 8, it only barely got the ball rolling on a procedural adjournment motion; the formal vote is still nowhere to be seen. At the earliest, it could restart only after the September congressional recess ends.
After the midterm elections, if the Democrats control the House, then trying to push it through would be extremely unlikely.
To reverse the unfavorable situation for Republicans in the midterms, the line involving Fauci and the COVID-19 vaccine is exactly one of the issues Republicans have invested the deepest in over the past few years and have the strongest grassroots support for.
The 11 text messages that have been dug up so far are just the first wave—there are another 522 voice messages and more than 34,000 text messages afterward.
In July, Republican Senator Paul first released Fauci’s 1,000-plus pages of private diary. Immediately afterward, he issued subpoenas to drag him to testify before the Senate. At the hearing, Fauci was asked more than 100 times—each time he shut it down by invoking the Fifth Amendment (the right to remain silent).
On August 6, the committee voted to find that Fauci had contempt of Congress. Paul then directly bypassed a full Senate vote and sent the documents to the Department of Justice. This move itself broke congressional precedent.
So it all comes down to whether the "clear bill" that everyone in the crypto industry is eagerly waiting for can pass this year—how many chips the Republicans can pry loose from Fauci as a breakthrough ~