Former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, delivered an opening statement before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic where he denied, denied, denied, taking any course of action to “suppress” the theory that the origins of COVID were due to a lab leak in Wuhan, China. There’s so much evidence to the contrary at this point, why in the world is Fauci — or as I like to call him, “Dr. Doom” — even attempting to deny the truth?
Fauci went on to provide an outline for the committee concerning how he, back on Jan. 1, 2020, was “informed through phone calls with Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK, and then with Kristian Anderson, a highly regarded scientist at Scripps Research Institute, that they and Eddie Holmes, a world-class evolutionary biologist from Australia, were concerned that the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus could have been manipulated in a lab.” The next day, Fauci said, he participated in a conference call “with about a dozen international virologists to discuss this possibility versus a spillover from an animal reservoir.”
According to Fox News:
Fauci described the conference call discussion as “lively with arguments for both possibilities” and said two participants have testified before the House subcommittee on the coronavirus that he “did not try to steer the discussion in any direction.”
“It was decided that several participants would more carefully examine the genomic sequence after this further examination. Several who at first were concerned about lab manipulation became convinced that the virus was not deliberately manipulated. They concluded that the most likely scenario was the spillover from an animal reservoir, although they still kept an open mind,” Fauci stated before the committee. “They appropriately published their opinion in the peer reviewed literature.”
“The accusation being circulated that I influenced these scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false and simply preposterous. I had no input into the content of the published paper,” he went on to say in his opening statement. “The second issue is a false accusation that I tried to cover up the possibility that the virus originated from a lab. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite.”
The Republican-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started. Democrats opened the hearing saying the investigation so far has found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong while missing an important opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.
Fauci spent a whopping 14 hours across two days back in January getting toasted on both sides by the House panel in a closed-door meeting. Now, on Monday, the questioning has started up again, this time in public, with cameras trained on him for the first time since he decided to retire from nearly 50 years in public service.
And let me tell you, his retirement itself is a great public service.
This time around, he’ll face a new set of questions about the credibility of his former agency, the National Institutes of Health. Last month, the House panel revealed emails from an NIH colleague about ways to evade public records laws, including by not discussing controversial issues on government email.
As it stands right now, there are two major theories for explaining the origins of the coronavirus that swept across the globe four years ago. The first one that was passed around was that the virus emerged in nature and simply made the leap from animals to people, likely in a wildlife market located in the city of Wuhan where the outbreak started. The second theory is that the virus was engineered in a lab and got leaked into the general market.
“I have repeatedly stated that I have a completely open mind to either possibility and that if definitive evidence becomes available to validate or refute either theory, I will ready accept it,” Fauci commented during his opening statement for the latest hearing.