The Anti-Faucist: Reported NIAID nominee pioneered COVID lab-leak theory before it was cool

Nominees who threaten medical establishment narratives and profits have a mixed track record staying in the Trump administration, if they make it through the gauntlet at all.

A month after vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. squeaked through confirmation as Health and Human Services secretary, Senate Republicans preemptively tanked former GOP congressman Dave Weldon's nomination to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for insufficient obeisance to vaccine dogma.

Despite saying COVID-19 vaccines had killed identifiable children and subjecting drug applications to higher scrutiny than did his predecessors, Vinay Prasad lasted nine months longer as the Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine regulator than did establishment favorite Susan Monarez, who quickly lost Kennedy's trust as CDC director.

With the alleged "queen of mandating vaccines" Erica Schwartz confirmed Wednesday as CDC director, the agency run by Dr. Anthony Fauci for 38 years is reportedly set to be helmed by his mirror image – a scientist who made his reputation during the pandemic arguing SARS-CoV-2 must have escaped from a lab.

Atossa Therapeutics founder Steven Quay is "undergoing final vetting" to become National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, according to Politico, crediting a "senior HHS official" and a source outside government. 

Kennedy picked Quay, who had applied for the job but didn't make it to the interview stage, over the finalists chosen and interviewed by National Institutes of Health staff, "one of the people familiar with the process" told Politico.

Acting NIAID Director John Powers took over in June for Jeffery Taubenberger, who was appointed in an acting capacity in April 2025 despite having worked with Fauci on policy for gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more dangerous to prepare for future pandemics but may have caused the COVID pandemic.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told a Senate hearing in May that Taubenberger agreed to the move as part of NIAID's shift away from biodefense to "conditions that people actually have," as Bhattacharya, Taubenberger and Powers wrote in Nature Medicine. "A knowledgeable source" told Science that Taubenberger had interviewed for the full NIAID director job.

Quay didn't answer a query to his personal website on whether he's been tapped to helm NIAID and how he got the job, assuming Senate confirmation. Neither did HHS.

A senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Quay's new book The Code as Witness argues that "genetic evidence" and the "features of the virus are most consistent with human engineering" and that policymakers should "rein in" the gain-of-function research that Fauci championed and funded. Kansas GOP Sen. Roger Marshall, a physician, opened his book launch event last month.

Quay also testified in detail about the evidence for lab-leak before the Senate Homeland Security Committee two years ago, emphasizing his conclusions aren't tainted because he doesn't receive NIH or NIAID funding, unlike the "Proximal Origin" authors who publicly ruled out lab-leak yet privately doubted their own confidence.

Quay is "an excellent choice," lab-leak proponent Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and founder of APY Therapeutics, wrote on X. He would be "the first NIAID Director in more than four decades who was not a misfeasant and malfeasant sociopath (Fauci) or a DEI hire and Fauci sock puppet," Ebright said, referring to his successor Jeanne Marrazzo.

"The dumbing down of America's scientific infrastructure continues," Peter Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance passed through Fauci's NIAID funding to the lab-leak-suspect Wuhan Institute of Virology and was debarred on the eve of President Trump's inauguration, wrote on X. Quay is a "conspiracist w/ zero training in infectious disease."

Former Senate pharmaceutical corruption investigator Paul Thacker interviewed Quay in June about his new book and the need for "real reforms" in virology, whose professionals and "their Big Pharma allies in the media are trying to scare you about pandemics when infectious disease is not even a top 10 killer of Americans."

Fauci was 'wrong to argue so forcefully' for natural origin

Quay's ascension to the agency that received $6.6 billion in fiscal 2026, but would get $1.8 billion less under the White House request for FY 2027, would mark a stunning rebuke of Fauci, the subject of a Thursday contempt vote in the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Fauci received an unprecedented, preemptive pardon from President Biden for unspecified crimes he might have committed dating to 2014, when Fauci kept funding alleged gain-of-function research despite an Obama administration "pause" on the methods. 

The Biden administration buried a whistleblower complaint, exposed in June by departing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, that alleged Fauci lied to Congress "related to the conduct of gain of function research at the National Institutes of Health" and could be prosecuted for such.

Yet Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times at last week's Senate hearing – chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to grill Fauci on his pandemic-era notes from a government computer, turned over by Kennedy.

They repeatedly show Fauci's private thoughts contradicting his public statements, including his dismissal of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the "source" of COVID's first human infections. He also acknowledged that the vast majority of scientists he consulted thought it "possible" that the highly infectious furin cleavage site in the virus was the product of "deliberate insertion," not nature.

Fauci helped cement the natural-origin theory, which relied on the very "wet market" he privately ruled out, as the only scientifically and socially acceptable explanation for COVID through his secret shaping of the "Proximal Origin" paper, for which its authors thanked Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins. One received a $9 million NIAID grant shortly thereafter.

Now back in academia, Prasad emphasized in a video Tuesday on Fauci's hearing that social media platforms censored posts that gave credence to the lab-leak theory for more than a year. One of Facebook's designated fact-checkers even cited a funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a prime leak suspect, to dismiss the lab-leak theory.

The censorship only stopped when President Biden commissioned an intelligence review of the theories, revealing that the FBI, CIA and Department of Energy believe lab-leak is more likely.

Among the latecomers to a lab-related explanation for COVID is Biden White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha, who told CNN Sunday that a lab leak was "more likely." 

Days earlier, Jha said on X he "pretty much agree[s] with everything" in a post by former Clinton administration official and World Health Organization adviser Jamie Metzl, who said "the available evidence overwhelmingly" points to a lab incident, the U.S. should not have funded the Wuhan lab, and Fauci was "wrong to argue so forcefully" for natural origin.

Jha later tried to reframe the CNN interview as expressing his view on COVID origins "since my time at the White House," and cautioning that while he believes a leak is "much more likely," he thinks it was "accidental" and not "engineered" or "deliberate."