The Atossa Therapeutics founder, now reportedly undergoing final vetting to lead NIAID, has spent years arguing that genetic evidence points to a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2 and calling for tighter controls on gain-of-function research.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Steven Quay, a physician, biotechnology executive and longtime advocate of the COVID-19 laboratory-origin theory, is reportedly nearing selection to lead the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, potentially placing one of Anthony Fauci’s most prominent scientific critics at the head of the agency Fauci directed for 38 years.
Quay, founder of Atossa Therapeutics and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is “undergoing final vetting” for the NIAID directorship, Politico reported, citing a senior Department of Health and Human Services official and another person outside the government.
According to one person familiar with the selection process, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. chose Quay even though he had applied for the position but was not among the finalists selected and interviewed by National Institutes of Health staff.
Neither Quay nor HHS responded to inquiries about whether he had formally been selected or how he emerged as the reported choice, assuming the position requires Senate confirmation.
His possible appointment would continue a period of rapid change across federal health agencies, where nominees and officials who challenge established vaccine and pandemic policies have experienced mixed political fortunes, according to a Just the News report.
Kennedy narrowly won confirmation as HHS secretary one month before Senate Republicans effectively ended former Republican Rep. Dave Weldon’s CDC nomination. Weldon had faced opposition over what critics characterized as insufficient adherence to prevailing vaccine positions.
Vinay Prasad, meanwhile, remained the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator for nine months longer than Susan Monarez served as CDC director. Prasad had said identifiable children died after receiving COVID-19 vaccines and imposed greater scrutiny on drug applications and annual booster approvals than his predecessors.
Monarez, by contrast, was regarded as an establishment favorite but lost Kennedy’s confidence shortly after taking office.
The Senate confirmed Erica Schwartz as CDC director Wednesday after vaccine skeptics had labeled her the “queen of mandating vaccines”. Her confirmation came as the administration reportedly moved toward installing Quay at NIAID.
Acting NIAID Director John Powers assumed leadership in June after Jeffery Taubenberger, who had served in an acting capacity since April 2025, left the position. Taubenberger had previously worked with Fauci on gain-of-function research policy, a field that modifies viruses to study potential future threats but has also been examined as a possible contributor to the pandemic.
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told senators in May that Taubenberger agreed to leave as NIAID shifted attention away from biodefense and toward “conditions that people actually have,” an approach Bhattacharya, Taubenberger and Powers later described in Nature Medicine.
A source familiar with the process told Science that Taubenberger had interviewed for the permanent NIAID directorship.
Quay’s scientific and public profile rose during the pandemic as he repeatedly argued that the genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 was more consistent with laboratory manipulation than natural evolution.
His new book, The Code as Witness, maintains that “genetic evidence” and the virus’s features are most consistent with human engineering. It also calls on policymakers to “rein in” gain-of-function research promoted and funded during Fauci’s tenure.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., a physician, opened Quay’s book-launch event last month.
Quay also testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee two years ago about evidence he believes supports a laboratory accident.
During that testimony, he emphasized that he does not receive NIH or NIAID funding and argued that this distinguishes him from the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper, who publicly dismissed a laboratory origin even though private messages showed some initially doubted that conclusion.
Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright, another laboratory-origin proponent and founder of APY Therapeutics, called Quay “an excellent choice” in a post on X.
He said Quay would become “the first NIAID Director in more than four decades who was not a misfeasant and malfeasant sociopath (Fauci) or a DEI hire and Fauci sock puppet,” referring in the latter instance to Fauci’s successor, Jeanne Marrazzo.
Peter Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance directed NIAID-supported funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, sharply criticized the reported choice.
“The dumbing down of America’s scientific infrastructure continues,” Daszak wrote on X, calling Quay a “conspiracist w/ zero training in infectious disease.”
EcoHealth Alliance was debarred from federal funding shortly before Trump’s inauguration.
Former Senate pharmaceutical-corruption investigator Paul Thacker interviewed Quay in June about the book and what they described as the need for “real reforms” in virology.
The discussion included the claim that virologists and “their Big Pharma allies in the media are trying to scare you about pandemics when infectious disease is not even a top 10 killer of Americans.”
Quay’s potential appointment would represent a major reversal in the direction of an agency that received $6.6 billion in fiscal 2026. Under the White House’s fiscal 2027 request, NIAID would receive $1.8 billion less.
It would also come as Fauci faces renewed scrutiny in Congress. The Senate Homeland Security Committee was scheduled to hold a contempt vote Thursday.
Before leaving office, President Joe Biden issued Fauci an unprecedented preemptive pardon covering unspecified federal offenses dating to 2014, when Fauci continued funding research alleged to qualify as gain-of-function work despite an Obama administration pause on such methods.
A whistleblower complaint later released by departing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard alleged Fauci misled Congress about gain-of-function research at NIH. The complaint was not acted upon by the Biden administration, according to the report, and claimed Fauci could face prosecution.
At a Senate hearing last week, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned him about pandemic-era notes saved on a government computer and later turned over by Kennedy.
Those notes showed Fauci privately discounting the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the source of the first human infections.
They also recorded his acknowledgment that most scientists he consulted considered it “possible” that the virus’s highly infectious furin cleavage site resulted from “deliberate insertion” rather than natural development.
Fauci later helped shape the public scientific discussion around natural origin through his behind-the-scenes involvement with the “Proximal Origin” paper, whose authors thanked him and then-NIH Director Francis Collins.
One of the paper’s authors received a $9 million NIAID grant soon afterward.
Prasad, who has since returned to academia, said in a video Tuesday that social media companies suppressed posts supporting the laboratory-origin theory for more than a year.
One of Facebook’s approved fact-checkers cited a Wuhan Institute of Virology funder while dismissing the theory.
That censorship ended only after Biden ordered an intelligence review, which revealed that the FBI, CIA and Department of Energy considered a laboratory leak more likely than a natural spillover.
Former Biden White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha has since moved toward that position, telling CNN Sunday that a laboratory leak was “more likely.”
Several days earlier, Jha said he “pretty much agree[s] with everything” in a post by former Clinton administration official and World Health Organization adviser Jamie Metzl.
Metzl wrote that “the available evidence overwhelmingly” supports a laboratory incident, that the United States should not have funded the Wuhan laboratory and that Fauci was “wrong to argue so forcefully” for a natural origin.
Jha later clarified his remarks, saying his view that a leak was “much more likely” dated to his period in the White House but that he believed the incident was “accidental,” not “engineered” or “deliberate.”
Should Quay ultimately receive the NIAID appointment, his elevation would place a prominent critic of the pandemic’s dominant origin narrative in charge of the federal institute most closely associated with Fauci, gain-of-function policy and the scientific debate over how COVID-19 began.
Original article
Comments