Elon Musk said Twitter employees had an internal group on Slack that was a fan club for White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, with Musk hinting that this shows Twitter staff’s political leanings under prior management.

Musk, who was strongly opposed to COVID-19 lockdowns that Fauci had backed, made the remark in a thread on Twitter on Dec. 28.

Twitter “had an internal Slack channel unironically called ‘Fauci Fan Club,’” Musk said in a post on Twitter.

Musk’s post noted that the Fauci Fan Club was set up despite outstanding “glaring issues” regarding Fauci, including the question of whether the White House adviser was untruthful when he denied that U.S. federal money was used to fund risky “gain-of-function” research at a Chinese lab at the center of speculation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The comment made by Musk was sparked by a meme posted by tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, which included a screengrab of a response by the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot that was responding to a question whether Fauci “ever lied.”

“It is not accurate to say that Anthony Fauci has lied,” the chatbot said, per the screengrab. “Dr. Fauci is a highly respected physician and scientist who has spent his career working to improve public health and address infectious diseases.”

Musk reacted to Andreessen’s post by sharing a Newsweek article from Sept. 2021 that carried the headline: “Fauci Was ‘Untruthful’ to Congress About Wuhan Lab Research, New Documents Appear to Show.”

The documents the article refers to were obtained and released by The Intercept following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the publication against the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

‘Gain-of-Function’

The documents obtained by The Intercept detail the work of the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based health organization that used federal money to fund research into bat coronaviruses at the Chinese lab in Wuhan.

Some have argued that the documents show that research funded by EcoHealth in China amounted to “gain-of-function.” This type of research involves altering the properties of a pathogen, such as its virulence, in order to study its potential impact on human health. Gain-of-function research is controversial because of the potential risks it poses.

Seven out of 11 scientists who are virologists or work in related fields were asked by The Intercept about the documents, and they said that the work appears to meet the NIH criteria for gain-of-function research.

EcoHealth, NIH, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that Fauci heads have denied that the funding amounted to gain-of-function research, while Fauci himself has repeatedly insisted that it did not.

“The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Fauci said at a Senate hearing on May 11, 2021.

NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins said in a statement on May 19 that “neither NIH nor NIAID have ever approved any grant that would have supported ‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”

But the question of whether the research amounted to gain-of-unction appears to be to some extent subjective.

“No one knows exactly what counts as gain-of-function, so we disagree as to what needs oversight, much less what that oversight should be,” said Nicholas Evans, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who specializes in biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, in remarks to ASBMB Today.

But Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, has insisted the research amounted to gain-of-function and that Fauci and others lied when insisting it was not.

“The materials confirm the grants supported the construction—in Wuhan—of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells,” Ebright wrote on Twitter.

“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] are untruthful,” he added, referring to the FOIA documents obtained by The Intercept.

Separately, Ebright told The Washington Post that the EcoHealth funded research at the Wuhan lab “was—unequivocally—gain-of-function research,” adding that it met the definition for such type of research under a U.S. government pause of funding for such research in 2014.

2014 Pause on Gain-of-Function Research Lifted

In 2014, the Obama administration imposed a funding pause on gain-of-function experiments in 22 fields, including ones involving influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.

But in 2017, the NIH lifted the ban on gain-of-function research, saying it’s an important tool to help scientists “identify, understand, and develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.”

At the same time, the NIH said that related grant applications would undergo greater scrutiny than in the past under a new framework (pdf) that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would use to assess proposals for research that would create pathogens with pandemic potential.

The HHS review of gain-of-function research proposals would include a risk-benefit assessment and a determination whether the work can be conducted safely, and only allow it to proceed if there is no safer alternative.

In his thread on the Fauci Fan Club, Musk took issue with the resumption of gain-of-function funding by the NIH, pointing to a report on a paper Fauci authored in 2012 that argued that the benefits of such research outweighed its risks.

It wasn’t clear what was discussed in Twitter’s Fauci Fan Club channel that Musk was talking about or how many members were part of it.

Fauci didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Musk wrote in a follow-up tweet that he invited Community Notes, Twitter’s tool that lets users add context notes to potentially misleading posts, to “correct or amend” his thread.

This isn’t the first time Musk has targeted Fauci on Twitter. In a recent pair of viral tweets, Musk appeared to call for legal action against Fauci, who’s been a lightning rod of criticism over COVID-19 lockdowns.

‘Just One More Lockdown, My King …’

In one tweet that at the time of reporting had more than 1 million “likes,” Musk said: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” suggesting action in courts involving Fauci, who’s set to leave his role as White House adviser and as NIAID director on Dec. 31.

In another tweet, Musk shared a meme comparing Fauci to Wormtongue, a “Lord of the Rings” villain who whispered into the ear of another character, King Théoden, and kept him under a wicked spell.

The meme Musk posted features Fauci’s face edited onto Wormtongue’s and President Joe Biden’s face in place of the king’s.

“Just one more lockdown, my king …” the meme reads.

At the height of the outbreak, Fauci repeatedly backed harsh measures that were believed to help contain COVID-19, including lockdowns.

Since then, research (pdf) has suggested lockdowns had a minimal impact on virus-spread and COVID-19 mortality, while having a “devastating” impact on the economy and society.

Fauci recently brushed off criticism from Musk, describing the Twitter CEO’s barbs as a mere “distraction.”

“I don’t respond to him,” Fauci told CNN’s David Axelrod. “I don’t pay any attention to him because that’s merely a distraction.”

“And if you get drawn into that—and I have to be honest—that cesspool of interaction, it’s … There’s no value added to that, David. It doesn’t help anything.”

‘Lockdowns May Claim 20 Times More Life Years Than They Save’

Some studies have identified lockdowns as contributing to jumps in suicides, mental health crises, learning loss, and delayed health treatments.

Other studies have indicated lockdowns worked to stem the spread of the virus.

“Our results show that major non-pharmaceutical interventions—and lockdowns in particular—have had a large effect on reducing transmission,” wrote the authors of the study backing restrictive measures, though the research did not evaluate any unintended impacts of the measures.

But a recent study that looked at a wide array of research into lockdowns concluded that such measures can be an effective tool in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, but only if “long-term collateral damage is neglected.”

“The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save,” the study’s authors wrote.

That study’s authors also said that what deserves a “special and urgent analysis” is the question of “to what extent, why, and how the dissenting (disapproved by healthcare officials) scientific opinions were suppressed during COVID-19.”

“Suppression of ‘misleading’ opinions causes not only grave consequences for scientists’ moral compass; it prevents the scientific community from correcting mistakes and jeopardizes (with a good reason) public trust in science,” they wrote.

Fauci Vows to Cooperate With Probe

Fauci, who became the face of the U.S. pandemic response under both the Trump and Biden administrations, has faced criticism over backing harsh COVID-19 restrictions.

For instance, in October 2020, Fauci publicly recommended that then President Donald Trump “shut the whole country down,” although it’s not clear what he meant, as presidents don’t have the authority to impose sweeping lockdowns.

“When it became clear that we had community spread in the country … I recommended to the president that we shut the country down,” he said in an event with students at the College of the Holy Cross in October 2020.

If the United States didn’t “shut down completely the way China did,” then the spread of COVID-19 wouldn’t be stopped, Fauci also said at the time.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since early 2020 has pursued a zero-COVID strategy that some analysts say is tantamount to economic suicide, although that policy is being lifted.

Republicans said in August that if they retake the House in the midterm election (which they have now done), they will pursue a COVID-19-related investigation, at which Fauci indicated he’d be willing to testify.

“If there are oversight hearings, I absolutely will cooperate fully and testify before the Congress,” Fauci told reporters on Nov. 22.

“I have no trouble testifying—we can defend and explain everything that we’ve said,” he added.

Jack Phillips and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.