A Bad Week at Congress for Dr. Fauci
This week congressional subcommittee witnesses ripped former White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for pushing the narrative that the COVID-19 virus originated naturally in a wet market in Wuhan, China.
Former science editor at The New York Times Nicholas Wade testified Wednesday morning before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that the evidence is now strong the virus that causes the COVID-19 infection escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Nevertheless, powerful U.S. science officials, such as Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, were able to make sure virus researchers continued to promote their natural origins narrative because of the scientists’ reliance on government grants to continue their research.
Wade explained in his testimony how Fauci, Collins, and their allies in the media were able to suppress the lab leak theory while they promoted the notion the COVID virus originated naturally:
[I]f the evidence for the lab leak is so strong, why do so many people still believe the virus came from nature? The reason is that the natural origin camp got its story out first – always a big help. It very successfully painted the lab leak as a conspiracy theory before anyone had publicly opposed it. The national media swallowed the national origin story unskeptically and, once committed to it, failed to report important contrary evidence … Science journalists, in particular, it seems to me, fell down on the job by failing to check out the virologists’ self-serving claims.
“The natural origin theory did not prevail by accident,” Wade continued. “It was promoted by science administrators in the United States and England, including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health [NIH]. The NIH is a national treasure, and Collins and Fauci, its most prominent leaders of the time, are well known to the public and on Capitol Hill. It's hard to believe that in the twilight of their long careers, they would seriously mishandle an issue as important as the origin of the COVID virus.”
Wade then explained the sequence of events in Fauci’s campaign to “discredit the lab leak,” beginning with January 31, 2020, when Fauci received an email from virologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and three other virus scientists.
He noted that all four researchers were of the opinion the COVID virus escaped from a lab:
They had all concluded that SARS2 … could not have been made in nature. Fauci was probably not too pleased to hear that the virus might have escaped from research that his agency has funded. A strange thing happened to the virologists’ conclusion within four days. Andersen, in an email on February 4 repudiated, deriding the leak as a crackpot theory. What made him change his mind? No new scientific evidence about the virus came to light between January 31 and February 4, but from that 180 degree reversal, a whole campaign was able to be developed including highly influential articles placed in Nature Medicine and the Lancet.
Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), also told the Select Subcommittee he had “no doubt” NIH and Fauci funded the gain-of-function research that likely ended up creating the coronavirus causing COVID-19 and its leak from the Wuhan lab.
“There’s no doubt that NIH funded gain-of-function research,” Redfield testified, adding that American tax dollars did fund the research that created the COVID-19 virus.
“I think it did — not only from NIH but from the State Department, USAID, and from DOD," he elaborated.
Emails recently unearthed by House Republicans showed Fauci “prompted” – and approved – a scientific paper called “Proximal Origins,” published in February 2020 with the purpose of smearing the lab leak theory.
Redfield also testified he was “excluded from those conversations” regarding the origins of the virus,” a situation which he found “retroactively very disappointing, since I was obviously a virologist, and very engaged,” and had requested conversations about the origins of the virus.
“I found it unusual, I do think it illustrates one point that’s worth really focusing on,” Redfield said. “When you have a group of people that decides there could only be one point of view, that's problematic. And I'll keep saying it's antithetical to science. And unfortunately, that's what they did.”
Meanwhile, on Saturday, while Fauci told CNN he always has had an “open mind” about the origins of the COVID virus, he described those who criticize him for his handling of the pandemic as “off the deep end.”
“All of the intelligence agencies agree unanimously that this was not engineered,” the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who retired in December, said. “Namely, they didn’t deliberately do this to make a bioweapon. Everybody agrees with that, no matter what your prior thoughts were, everybody agrees with that.”
“A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild, maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab and was being studied in the lab and then came out of the lab,” he hypothesized. “But if that’s the definition of a lab leak, Jim, then that still is a natural occurrence.”
“There are no lab leaks that have led to pandemics,” Fauci asserted.
Both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Energy have confirmed within recent weeks the origin of the virus likely occurred in the Wuhan lab.
Fauci also continues to deny NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, and shot back at critics who are calling for him to be prosecuted.
I mean, prosecute me for what? What are, what are they talking about?” he asked on CNN. “I mean I wish I could figure out what the heck they were talking about. I think they’re just going off the deep end.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to say something like that and it actually is irresponsible,” he said.