On Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020, at 9 a.m., Dr. Anthony Fauci joined staff at the National Security Council (NSC) — the President's national security and foreign policy advisory shop — for a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about the novel coronavirus.

Fauci would continue to have meetings in classified settings throughout the month.

Fauci's calendar entries included NSC meetings, White House Situation Room meetings and meetings in other classified settings, as COVID-19 was breaking in China. (To our knowledge, the existence of these meetings before Jan. 28, 2020, was not previously disclosed.)

On Friday, Jan. 24, four days after China admitted human-to-human transmission of the virus, Fauci started attending a small group COVID-19 discussion that first took place in "Anthony's Office" in a building next to the White House. Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China.

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — National Institutes of Health (NIH) dinner and workshops on Dec. 19 and 20 — the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of Dec. 19, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: "one of the best buys in global health: vaccines."

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the NIH in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.