A peer-reviewed paper did not find that 'Fauci created COVID-19.' That’s Pants on Fire!

More than two years since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and claimed the lives of more than a million Americans, an Instagram video claims new research shows the entire thing was created by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert.

"Fauci created COVID," reads the chyron in a video clip that appeared in a Oct. 24 Instagram post. The video shows far-right talk show host Stew Peters. The post’s text caption says, "Peer-reviewed paper has vindicated what we have been saying. It was a man-made Bioweapon, NOT a ‘respiratory virus.’"

The post was flagged by Meta as part of the platform’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The video clip comes from the Oct. 24 episode of Peters’ show, which was shared on the show’s Instagram page. Peters has a track record of perpetuating COVID-19 conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine rhetoric.

In the original video, Peters pointed to a recently published preprint of an academic study as his source. Though Peters repeated the claim that it has been "peer-reviewed," preprint means it has not undergone peer-review. At the top of the website, where the paper was posted Oct. 20, a note reads, "bioRxiv posts many COVID19-related papers. A reminder: they have not been formally peer-reviewed and should not guide health-related behavior or be reported in the press as conclusive."

The paper, titled "Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2" was authored by Alex Washburne, who founded Selva, which he describes on his LinkedIn page as a microbiome science innovation startup in New York City; Antonius VanDongen, a Duke University associate professor in pharmacology; and German scientist Valentin Bruttel, who specializes in molecular immunology at the University of Würzburg. 

The researchers wrote that they used a method called in-vitro genome assembly and noticed a pattern that they believe indicated "a fingerprint that is typical for synthetic viruses." 

"Both the restriction site fingerprint and the pattern of mutations generating them are extremely unlikely in wild coronaviruses and nearly universal in synthetic viruses," the paper said. "Our findings strongly suggest a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV2."

The preprint does not mention Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.

Featured Fact-check

Facebook posts

stated on April 9, 2024 in a Facebook post

Notice from a New Jersey doctor’s office proves that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous for athletes.

The paper has been subject to criticism from many in the scientific community. 

"There are many kinds of 'wrong' in science, but this preprint is False," wrote Alex Crits-Christoph, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, at the top of a Twitter thread that laid out what he viewed as the study’s flawed analysis. The research laid out in the paper did not back its conclusion, Crits-Christoph said. 

Hassan Vally, an associate professor in epidemiology at Deakin University, told Newsweek the paper was not logically sound. 

"There seems to be flaws in the logic of this paper in terms of why one would stitch a whole genome together piece by piece to manufacture a virus," Vally said. "This to me makes no sense. If you were doing what the authors are purporting happened, you would insert small amounts of manufactured genetic material into a largely intact virus genome and there would be no need to piece together a genome in small segments. This doesn't make sense and points to a fundamental flaw in this paper and the logic behind the interpretation."

Two of the preprint’s authors, Washburne and VanDongen, have pushed the theory that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, The Economist reported.

Scientists for more than two years have been debating and researching SARS-CoV-2’s origin. Two extensive studies released in February presented detailed evidence suggesting the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans did not originate in a lab but at a seafood market in Wuhan, China in late 2019. An interim report released Oct. 27 by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Minority oversight staff, concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was "more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident."

An Instagram post and video claimed that a "peer-reviewed" study found that Fauci created COVID-19.

The paper cited as evidence is a non-peer-reviewed paper that suggests the virus could have been synthetic in its origin. It does not mention Fauci and has been criticized as employing flawed logic and analysis.

We rate this claim Pants on Fire!

Update, Oct 29, 2022: This fact-check has been updated to include mention of an interim report into SARS-CoV-2 origins that was released by a U.S. Senate committee as this fact-check was published.