This week, Republican senator Rand Paul subpoenaed Dr Anthony Fauci – the Covid pandemic’s rockstar medic (and long-serving bureaucrat). He was to appear before Paul’s Senate hearing for a showdown about the origin of the Covid pandemic. In the run-up to the hearing, Paul released more than 1,000 pages of emails and Slack messages sent by Fauci and his associates before and during the pandemic, including an astonishing diary that Fauci had kept during the critical years of 2019 to 2022.

But at the hearing, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination despite having been pardoned by then US president Joe Biden. So we learned nothing new from the Senate hearing. Nevertheless, the document dump has deepened the evidence of rank duplicity by Fauci and his associates. The people who spent most of 2020-2022 insisting a lab leak could not possibly have happened thought, in private, that it possibly had.

They lied to us. There is now little doubt that, like Chernobyl, Bhopal and 9/11, the pandemic was manmade. And it killed 100 times as many people as those three disasters put together. Yet a bunch of people with power and influence did their utmost to bury the truth about the cause.

For a long time, I disagreed with the focus on Fauci. It took the spotlight off the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese researchers working there – in Wuhan, the very city where Covid first emerged. They were engaged in ‘gain of function’ research, editing the genomic sequence of virus samples so as to make them much more infectious. These idiotic experiments almost certainly caused the outbreak and those carrying them out refused to share information about them. But I have to admit that the latest facts about Fauci are shocking.

Like Hoover, power and status went to Fauci’s head. At the height of the pandemic his diary shows him obsessed with his own celebrity. Here’s what he wrote on 21 May 2020: ‘Deaths 9,800… It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked-about person in the country and one of the most recognisable people in the world.’ On another occasion he writes, ‘press still hot and heavy about me’. After meeting a celebrity he boasts that ‘one person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more sexy than she was’.

Worse, at a time of great emergency, Fauci used federal colleagues to solicit scientists – funded by his agency – to nominate him for eight large cash awards, totalling over $1million. I paraphrase, but this example is real: Dear Barton Haynes, Here’s $282million for your research. Now, would you like to nominate me for a $900,000 award? My assistant will write the necessary prose for you. Yours, Tony. Haynes did as he was told. ‘You bet’, he wrote.

That is the public-sector version of insider trading.

But nauseating narcissism and gobsmacking greed (and using private email addresses for government business) do not in themselves cause or cover up pandemics. The far greater sin was deliberately misleading the world about the origin of Covid-19. And there in black and white on 26 January 2020 in his diary is Fauci’s line about the Wuhan seafood market, which many claimed was the origin of Covid: ‘Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.’

Yet, a week later, he convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so, and spoke about it from the podium of the White House as if he had nothing to do with it.

Before and after they wrote the paper its authors all thought a lab leak was possible, perhaps even likely, as their private messages have repeatedly confirmed. Here’s what the lead author, Kristian Andersen, said the day after the meeting:

‘The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely – it’s not some fringe theory. I absolutely agree that we can’t prove one way or the other, but we never will be able to – however, that doesn’t mean that by default the data [are] currently much more suggestive of a natural origin as opposed to [for example] passage. It is not – the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain.’

(Andersen’s concern about the furin cleavage site is important to note. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are known to have planned to insert a furin cleavage site into the spike gene of a SARS-related virus, in order to increase infectivity in human beings but not bats. All you really need to know about furin cleavage sites is that Covid is the first and only SARS-related virus, out of many hundreds that have been described, ever to show up with a furin cleavage site in its spike gene.)

And here’s what Andrew Rambaut, of Edinburgh University, said about Covid’s origins: ‘I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.’

Yet both Andersen and Rambaut put their names to a paper that categorically ruled out a laboratory origin. When ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2′ shot up the scientific-impact charts, Rambaut crowed: ‘Top! Fuck me.’ And Andersen replied: ‘We RUUUUUUULE. That’s tenure secured, right there.’ Fauci’s agency finalised a $8.9million grant to Andersen’s lab, and co-author Bob Garry’s lab, shortly after.

Thereafter Fauci vilified anybody who even raised the possibility of a lab leak. It worked. Look at the way the media fell into line following that paper’s publication: ‘Scientists debunk lab-accident theory of pandemic emergence’, said National Public Radio. ‘Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes Covid-19 “is not a laboratory construct”’, said ABC News. ‘Fact check: Did the coronavirus originate in a Chinese laboratory?… We rate this claim FALSE’, claimed USA Today. ‘Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus’, said CNN.

Over here, Ian Birrell at the Daily Mail and Sarah Knapton at the Telegraph were honourable exceptions to this lemming rush. The rest of the media was supine. Today, the evidence for a natural source of the virus is zero. Researchers have found not a single infected animal in any market, nor any person who caught Covid from an animal. The evidence for the lab is overwhelming: we know they were doing precisely the right kind of experiment on precisely the right strain of virus at precisely the right time in precisely the right city and in precisely the wrong biosafety conditions.

What was Fauci’s motive for misleading the world? That is clear as a bell: he had spent decades championing the idea that gain-of-function research on risky viruses was a good idea, even as others expressed serious doubts. Here is what his nemesis, Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, had to say about his agenda in 2005: ‘A majority of the nation’s top microbiologists – the very group that the Bush administration is counting on to carry out its biodefence-research agenda – dispute the premises and implementation of the biodefence spending.’ In Fauci’s diary he calls Ebright ‘preposterous’ and a ‘villain’.

Specifically, Fauci’s NIAID funded the work on coronaviruses, first at the University of North Carolina, and then in Wuhan. Fauci himself knew this by 23 January 2020, when an email was sent with the following subject: ‘Urgent for Dr Fauci: China’s lab for studying SARS and Ebola is in Wuhan, the outbreak’s centre’, which discussed the grant NIAID had given the intermediary body, EcoHealth Alliance, to fund the work in Wuhan.

So Fauci knew from then onwards that if a lab leak looked plausible, his own role in godfathering the research would come out. He had to keep a lid on it for a few weeks until the outbreak petered out. Only it did not peter out. It turned into a three-year ordeal that killed 20million people and turned the world economy upside down. Naturally, people were keen to investigate how this happened.

To give one detailed example of the way we were all misled over a global disaster, consider the case of Ralph Baric – a scientist funded by Fauci, but who Fauci claimed he hardly knew. In the new dump of documents, there are key revelations about the role of this University of North Carolina scientist who developed fiendishly clever techniques for swapping genes between coronaviruses and taught the Chinese scientists how to do it.

One of the handful of feeble arguments against a lab-leak origin of Covid was that the virus that causes it was not a perfect fit for human receptors: if they were designing it to infect human cells then they would have done it better. It is not much of an argument but the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper placed a lot of weight on it. However, Baric knew by 2019 that making an imperfect match was actually the smart thing to do. If the fit is too good, the virus gets stuck and is less infectious. But he insisted to congressional investigators he never told his Chinese colleagues that.

Yet what does the independent sleuth Gilles Demaneuf find in Baric’s own notes for a talk he gave at a conference in Harbin in China in January 2019? ‘Creating a virus that is super-adapted to a particular host can actually result in an attenuation of virulence, if the virus interacts overly strongly with a cellular receptor.’ Whoops – it looks like he did coach the Chinese researchers on this step after all.

It is a weird experience reading the messages these scientists exchanged during the pandemic. They sent up to 50 messages a day to each other during busy periods – did they have time to do, er, science? They use the f-word repeatedly – I am no prude but who needs to do that in exchanges with colleagues? And they are obsessed with ‘discrediting’ (rather than rebutting) anybody who even toyed with a theory they themselves thought ‘friggin likely’. They call me a ‘complete idiot’ and say of my brilliant young co-author, Alina Chan: ‘We need to push hard to discredit people like Alina as conspiracy theorists.’

Far more serious, however, is the way they try to prevent information coming out. British scientist Peter Daszak was the intermediary whose EcoHealth Alliance shovelled American taxpayer funds to the Chinese laboratory that did the dangerous experiments. Here he is coaching his Chinese colleagues on how to be non-transparent, warning Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology not to respond to very polite and reasonable requests from a very distinguished American scientist, Jesse Bloom, for detailed information about certain experiments:

‘Dear Zhengli,

I strongly recommend you don’t answer more questions from Jesse Bloom. The questions may seem harmless, like he is trying to find out more about basic information, but his goals are to continue attacking you, the WIV, and our collaboration. He has already asked me about the RaTG13 information separately, and I responded with a single sentence to tell him the sequence is incomplete at the end of the genome. In other words he already knew the answer but wrote to you separately anyway, I believe he is trying to see if one of us says a different response so he can accuse us of lying.

With someone like this, if you give home [sic] more than a short response, he will use the information against you. He has done this with us in the past by making public statements about things we’ve said in emails to him and criticising us.’

Think about this for a second. Millions of people are dying; finding out why should be a priority. But a British ‘grantrepreneur’ who has done very nicely out of supporting very risky and foolish experiments wants a citizen of a communist country not to help a scientist find out more.

The likes of Daszak and especially Anthony Fauci still have serious questions to answer.

Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan.