During a recent episode of “Pod Force One,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of orchestrating a significant cover-up concerning the origins of COVID-19. At the time, Fauci was a key public health figure throughout the pandemic.

Makary, who previously taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, shared his insights with host Miranda Devine. He claimed that as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci made considerable efforts to downplay the notion that COVID-19 may have originated from a research laboratory in China—a possibility that largely went unnoticed by the wider medical community.

Makary emphasized, “It’s painfully clear, though rarely acknowledged, especially within the medical circles I hail from, that Fauci was deeply involved in concealing the true origins of COVID-19.”

He continued, “Regardless of his direct involvement in the experiments or their funding, Fauci was undoubtedly integral to the cover-up efforts.”

Fauci, who also served as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, was granted a comprehensive pardon by the former president last December. The pardon covered any potential transgressions from January 1, 2014, until the pardon was officially issued.

Makary suggested the pardon was related to Fauci’s alleged role in the COVID cover-up, which he argued supersedes any of the “massive disagreements” he has with the way he advised the public and government leaders during the pandemic. 

“[O]nly recently did Anthony Fauci take it to the next level of using science as political propaganda,” Makary told Devine. “He commissioned the pieces that lied about the COVID origins. The author who submitted the article said this was commissioned by Dr. Fauci and [Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health] in that cover letter.” 

In 2023, The House Oversight Committee released evidence showing Fauci commissioned and gave final approval for a scientific paper – “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” – written in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. 

Follow The Post’s live coverage of President Trump and national politics for the latest news and analysis

Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible. 

The paper was written four days after Fauci, and his old boss Collins, held a call with the four authors to discuss reports that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan lab. 

“If you think back to the end of January, just before COVID became a thing in the news in the United States, January, February, what was Dr. Fauci doing? He was frantically engaging in a massive cover-up with 3am emails and phone calls,” Makary said.

“He was convening people. And the notes from those meetings reveal that all these virologists he convened had told him, ‘We think it came from the Wuhan Lab,’ and the output was days later, those same scientists wrote a letter in the medical journal saying it definitely did not come from the lab,” he continued, claiming that some of the authors went on to receive “millions of dollars in funding from Fauci’s agency.”

“This is not rocket science. It’s a no-brainer where it came from,” Makary fumed. 

The FDA commissioner charged that Fauci and Collins “meticulously worked in their bureaucratic ways to water down” Obama-era rules against gain of function research and approve federal grants for the controversial practice of genetically altering viruses. 

“They did everything you could do bureaucratically,” Makary said, adding that Fauci then “parsed his words to basically lie to Congress” about gain of function research.   

Makary described the alleged COVID origins cover-up as “an American tragedy.”

“What I’m shocked by coming from the faculty at Johns Hopkins, is none of my colleagues knew any of this,” he said, adding, “I could not believe that my colleagues had no idea of the origins and the facts surrounding the origins and the massive cover up that Fauci and Collins led.” 

Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington on ‘Pod Force One.’ Subscribe here!

Makary argued that Fauci and Collins were successful in downplaying the COVID’s links to the Wuhan lab  – which he said had the “safety standards of a poorly managed dental office” – because “there’s an allegiance to them” in the medical establishment, tied to funding for research. 

“They have achieved sainthood, and they have tremendous power.”

Fauci did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.