In a report from The Intercept on Sunday, it was revealed that of the documents requested by the media organization regarding the origins of COVID-19, nearly 300 of those pages were redacted in their entirety.  While I have not personally been in contact with the journalists at The Intercept, I have been following their quest to obtain the information that has been to date withheld, in the hope that a report on that information may help to fill in holes or may confirm reporting already made here at RedState.

From The Intercept:

“With the global death toll from Covid-19 approaching 6 million, the need to understand the origins of the pandemic is both pressing and grave. But the National Institutes of Health continues to withhold critical documents that could shed light on this question. This week, in response to ongoing litigation over public records related to coronavirus research funded by the federal agency, the NIH sent The Intercept 292 fully redacted pages rather than substantive material that could help us understand how the virus first came to infect humans.”

Truly, one could never expect the NIH, the NIAID, or any other government organization to understand the origins of COVID-19 without a full and complete investigation into the type of research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  Despite previous claims by Dr. Anthony Fauci, claims that later turned on to be unabashed lies, the NIH had indeed funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology through a non-profit intermediary, EcoHealth Alliance.  In an October 2021 letter, the NIH admitted that testimony given by Fauci did not match the record on hand, referencing a report sent to the agency by EcoHealth Alliance which indicated the research conducted had created a new and more virulent virus than either of the viral lineages of the chimeric (or genetic hybrid) viruses.

Yet, despite this information showing that Fauci has intentionally lied to Congress, a crime which has earned other former Trump officials arrest warrants, Fauci, the NIH, and the NIAID continue to stonewall journalists’ efforts to secure information confirming that the NIH was indeed funding banned research at the Wuhan lab.  To further complicate the issue, Chinese officials have outright banned, under the threat of nuclear military action, any effort to investigate the Wuhan lab as a part of a COVID origins investigation.

When we consider that our government is limited in what they can and cannot redact in the release of government information, the question then should become: What requires 292 pages of redaction?  Are the 292 pages of fully redacted documents containing personal information, trade secrets, informant names, or sensitive security information? Likely not, in fact, short of those reasons, as determined by US courts, the government cannot redact the information, even when it may be less-than-complimentary of their dealings.  Since June 3rd, 2021, RedState has made at least two FOIA requests from the NIH, both of which have yet to be processed and returned.  This, of course, was after the unilateral determination made by the NIH which stated that I was not a journalist and that the reporting done at RedState doesn’t amount to real journalism.

The entire purpose of the Freedom of Information Act is so the government cannot have secrets from the people. For the NIH to claim the privilege of redaction, they would have to prove that the release of that information would expose one of the four court-accepted excuses and therefore would grant them access to redaction.  While I could understand that the NIH would have some information that would require redaction, including the personal telephone numbers and email addresses of people involved in the research, the fact that the NIH fully redacted 292 of the 314 pages released, shows a flat-out intent for a cover-up.

What is clear is that the NIH is not interested in determining the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 outbreak, any more than they are interested in telling the truth about the risks associated with conducting gain-of-function research at a Chinese Military Lab.  They are flat-out engaged in a cover-up.  The very goal of the research they were conducting, that is, the identifying of pandemic causing SARS Bat Coronaviruses is lost when they are completely uninterested in determining the origin of a virus that meets that very definition.  Compounded with Fauci’s lies, is there another plausible explanation other than a cover-up?  Why lie, why redact, why stonewall, if the goal was not covering up the NIH’s role in the funding of the research that created the SARS-CoV-2 virus?  Do we need to ignore the motivation for lying and covering it up?  Would our government being complicit in the deaths of six million people and the information that proves it not be something to which the world should have full access?

Unfortunately, absent aggressive legal action, we can only expect that the government will be successful in covering it up.