BY ZACH HEILMAN
While most Americans, if not all, know who Dr. Anthony Fauci is thanks to his constant input on the COVID-19 pandemic, apparently, numerous countries have their own version of the famed doctor. Just change the name and face, but the narrative behind COVID-19 and the constant back and forth on fighting the virus seem the same. In the United Kingdom, that person is Jeremy Farrar, who is the head of the Wellcome Trust and was once a professor at Oxford University. What is so inserting about Farrar is the fact that this big investor in vaccine companies released a book in July of 2021 detailing how he, Dr. Fauci, and Francis Collins used burner phones while speaking about the COVID-19 pandemic and its origins.
In Farrer’s book, he wrote:
By the second week of January, I was beginning to realize the scale of what was happening. I was also getting the uncomfortable feeling that some of the information needed by scientists all around the world to detect and fight this new disease was not being disclosed as fast as it could be. I did not know it then, but a fraught few weeks lay ahead.
In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism.
‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’
In the very next chapter, Farrer added, “In the last week of January 2020, I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, the possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release….”