Kristian Andersen – an Anthony Fauci confidant who has received research grants worth millions from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director – reportedly offered to secretly delete a research paper exposing the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s erasure of a database containing information relevant to the origins of COVID-19.

Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, made the suggestion during a Zoom call with Fauci himself, alongside former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, and the paper’s author Jesse D. Bloom.

Bloom, an evolutionary biologist, had recovered a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences, which were erased by the NIH at the request of Chinese Communist Party researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Zoom call – the details of which were revealed by Vanity Fair – was arranged two days after Bloom had sent a preprint of the report to Fauci and Collins.