Seventy minutes into a compilation released as proof, the case comes apart inside the compilation. At 36:41 one of Megyn Kelly's own guests says the funding connection is "almost certainly not true," and, after a dollar figure the captions garble, adds: "It's very unlikely that that is what caused the pandemic" [1]. Nobody on the tape pushes back on him. The line stays in the file that went out on August 1 as vindication.

The same guest explains, twenty seconds later, why the charge worked anyway. The gain of function question was "too Byzantine and complicated for people to really get upset at him for," he says, and "Rand Paul just looks like he's bullying Mr. Science" [1]. That is a description of a political failure. The tape is being circulated as a scientific one.

None of which makes the compilation empty, and the strongest version of it deserves to be stated in full sentences. Kelly is holding a real document, and she reads it correctly. The February 2020 email is genuine, and Fauci's own words are read into the record at 7:08: "The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus... I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you're going to a low-risk location" [1]. His answer under deposition, "I vaguely recall talking to her about certain safety issues regarding masks," is evasive by any ordinary standard of what a person remembers about advice they gave in writing [1].

Kelly also catches a real overstatement, and the catch holds. In the footage she plays, Fauci says that all of the intelligence groups agree the virus was not engineered. Her response at 23:07 is: "it is not true that all of the intelligence groups agree" [1]. She is correct. The declassified record shows that almost all of the agencies studying the question assessed the virus was not genetically engineered, with two saying there was not sufficient evidence to determine it either way [3][4]. Almost all is not all, and the gap between those two phrases is the whole of her point.

Her cost accounting at 15:42 is not rhetoric either: "children who are behind in school... children whose social development has been stunted, business owners who lost their life's work during the lockdowns... increased suicide rates, drug addiction rates, alcohol addiction rates" [1]. Those costs landed, they landed unevenly, and a great many outlets spent 2021 declining to count them.

What the tape never puts on screen is the grant. NIH's public database returns it in one query. Project R01AI110964, "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence," principal investigator Peter Daszak, organization EcoHealth Alliance, administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is the institute Fauci ran, project start date June 1, 2014 [2]. Seven fiscal years come back: $666,442 in 2014, $630,445 in 2015, $611,090 in 2016, $597,112 in 2017, $581,646 in 2018, $661,980 in 2019, and $576,290 in 2023. The seven sum to $4,325,005. Fiscal 2020 through 2022 do not appear in the return.

That number cuts in both directions, and both directions belong in the same paragraph. It defeats any claim that Fauci's institute never funded bat coronavirus work through the Wuhan Institute's collaborator, because the award is public, the institute is named on it, and the principal investigator is named on it. It also means the figure the guest reaches for at 36:41, a couple hundred thousand dollars, is not the size of the grant. The reverse error is available too, and it is the more tempting one: $4,325,005 is the prime award to EcoHealth Alliance, not the sub-award that traveled onward to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That sub-award is a fraction of the total, and the fraction is not in this return. Presenting the prime figure as the Wuhan money would be the mirror image of understating it.

The intelligence record is divided and has stayed divided. In the 2021 declassified assessment, four intelligence elements and the National Intelligence Council favored natural exposure at low confidence, one element favored a laboratory-associated incident at moderate confidence, three did not choose, and the assessment stated the virus was not developed as a biological weapon [3]. By the later update, the FBI and the Department of Energy favored a lab origin for different reasons, five entities favored natural origin, and the CIA and one other agency could not determine one without more information [4]. Fauci overstated in one direction with the word all. Kelly overstates in the other at 23:22, describing the intelligence as "growing more and more confident that it did develop as a result of a lab intentionality to create gain of function" [1], which is not what a record split five to two with two abstaining will support. Two overstatements, one exchange, and no verdict from us on either. The origin is unresolved, and the agencies are the ones saying so.

The name that goes missing across seventy minutes surfaces once, in passing, at 25:57. Peter Daszak is the principal investigator on R01AI110964. He wrote the proposals, he ran the project, and his organization received $4,325,005 in the fiscal years NIH returns [2]. Anyone who wants to know who was funded and for how much can have it from a public interface in about ten seconds. What the audience gets instead is seventy minutes on one retired official, a title promising the exposure of a fraud, and, at 36:41, a guest of the house saying the money did not cause the pandemic.