In September 2026, federal agents and prosecutors were seeking phone records, grant files and grand-jury testimony from at least eight scientists. One of them was Anthony Fauci. Another was a Nobel laureate whose only visible link to the case was a letter he had organized six years earlier.

Zahir Hasan takes both halves of the story seriously. A senior NIH official really did plead guilty to concealing federal records. Oversight of the Wuhan research funding really did fail. The origin of SARS-CoV-2 really is unresolved, and a laboratory incident cannot be ruled out. None of that, he argues, establishes the political story that has been built on top of it.

The New American Witch Hunt is an account of how legitimate accountability turns into something else — when officials announce the verdict before the evidence, when association replaces individual conduct, and when the process itself becomes the punishment. Working from court filings, audits, declassified intelligence, the Senate hearing transcript and the peer-reviewed literature, it separates four questions that public argument keeps collapsing into one: where the virus came from, whether American institutions supervised risky research properly, whether anyone committed a crime, and whether the government is now investigating people for what they said rather than what they did.

It is not a defense of anyone. A full chapter is given to the official who pleaded guilty, and a full appendix to the strongest case against the book's own thesis. What it refuses to do is let one man's admitted misconduct lower the standard of proof for everyone standing near him.

Includes a full chronology from grant to grand jury, a reader's guide to weighing the evidence, a claim-by-claim assessment of the origins debate, a ten-point institutional reform agenda, and four documentary case files.