Emails obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) indicate that in March 2012, Anthony Fauci told a subordinate, “Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” after criticizing New York Times science writer Phil Boffey over his warnings about gain-of-function research. DCNF reports that deleting government records violates federal law. Fauci did not respond to DCNF’s request for comment.
The 2011–2012 H5N1 fight
DCNF situates the email in a broader dispute over lab-altered influenza. In 2011, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, whose work was funded by Fauci’s institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), created an airborne strain of bird flu with an estimated 50% fatality rate, which he described as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make,” according to the report.
Fauci, along with NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Vaccine Research Center’s Gary Nabel, argued in a December 2011 Washington Post op-ed that such manmade pandemic viruses were a “risk worth taking” because they could help public health and drugmakers prepare if similar viruses emerged in nature, DCNF notes.
DCNF says the New York Times published an un-bylined January 2012 op-ed apparently written by Boffey that warned NIH had created an “engineered doomsday” that could kill “hundreds of millions of people,” adding, “The consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk.” Boffey followed with March 2012 commentary titled “The Truth About the Doomsday Virus?” expressing skepticism about assurances that the airborne strain’s lethality was overstated, per DCNF.
What the emails show, per DCNF
On March 4, 2012, Fauci emailed Francis Collins regarding Boffey, writing, “Phil Boffey is really off base here. He is acting like a mischievous guy,” according to DCNF. The next morning, Fauci wrote more bluntly to a subordinate, “Clearly, people are getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it,” the outlet reports.
DCNF says Fauci opposed a recommendation from NIH’s biosecurity advisors to withhold sensitive details of Fouchier’s experiment, warning that if the advisors did not change course, “the field of research on influenza … has a serious problem.” In that same period, he allegedly instructed, “Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” on his NIH account, per the documents cited by DCNF.
DCNF adds that Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul later highlighted two other instances from 2020 in which Fauci apparently sought deletion of public records, despite Fauci’s sworn 2024 testimony before another committee that he never did. DCNF also reports that NIH’s biosecurity advisors ultimately allowed full publication of Fouchier’s work. Boffey and Fouchier did not respond to DCNF’s requests for comment.
COVID-era spillover, according to DCNF
When COVID-19 emerged, DCNF reports that Fouchier worked with Fauci and other virologists to downplay a possible lab origin. The outlet says Fouchier ghostwrote a key argument in “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper that dismissed a lab origin, and that Fauci frequently cited the paper without revealing behind-the-scenes collaboration. DCNF further quotes private characterizations of Fouchier as “unbelievably conflicted” and one author’s remark that “Ron … is not going to want it to be a GOF [gain-of-function] escape.”
According to DCNF, Fouchier argued against publicly addressing a lab-leak scenario in the paper: “This manuscript would be much stronger if it focused on the likelihood of the first two scenarios as compared to intentional or accidental release … [That] would also limit the chance of new biosafety discussions that would unnecessarily obstruct future attempts of virus culturing.”
