Fauci's COVID Origin Controversy

One million Americans died from COVID-19.

Some estimate as many as 15 million people died worldwide from COVID-19.

Publicly, Anthony Fauci promoted the theory that the virus arose naturally,

while privately he was well aware of a mountain of evidence

suggesting the virus originated in the lab.

The American people deserve answers.

The American people deserve to know why dangerous research was funded

by NIAID in a totalitarian country, in a lab that lacked acceptable safety standards.

The decision to fund dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China,

will likely go down in history as perhaps one of the worst public health decisions.

Frankly, the American people deserve an apology.

I hope today Dr. Fauci will come clean,

admit it was a mistake to fund dangerous research in China,

admit that the risk of this dangerous research exceeded any possible benefits,

ask forgiveness,

and pledge to help our government devise safeguards so a man-made epidemic never happens again.

Instead of an apology,

you have for years avoided responsibility.

Regarding the lockdowns, you argue that you did not personally issue every lockdown order,

close every school, or impose every mandate.

But officials across the country invoked your authority to justify these decisions.

And you presented your recommendations not as judgments open to debate.

but as dictates of science itself.

Your own words demonstrate that you understood the influence you exercised.

On March 14th, 2020, you wrote that the task force recommendations were driven by me,

yourself, Deb, and CDC.

The next day you wrote that you had convinced Mayor Bill de Blasio

to close the New York City schools, so you were involved.

That same night, Governor Gavin Newsom's chief of staff told

you that the governor had decided to close California schools, bars, and restaurants after watching you on television.

Presidents, governors, mayors, school boards, corporations, and Congress all bear responsibility for the decisions they

made. The COVID lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime.

Children lost years of education.

Small businesses built over a lifetime disappeared.

Patients delayed cancer screenings and other medical care.

Families were separated from dying relatives.

Workers were ordered to accept a medical procedure or lose their jobs.

Worship assembly, employment, education, and travel were restricted in the name of science.

While you did not impose every restriction, you used your public authority to justify them.

While you concluded publicly that COVID occurred naturally,

your private record tells a different story.

In early 2020, your handpicked virologist warned that the virus appeared to have been manipulated in the lab.

In a conference call concerning the origin of the virus, all but two of the participants believed deliberate insertion was possible.

Your concern was not merely theoretical.

That same week you led an urgent effort to determine whether your own agency

had funded the research related to these experiments that were now under suspicion.

Hours later your assistant reported that the Wuhan experiments had indeed been reviewed and approved by the NIH.

Those were not the actions of officials who believe that a research related origin was an absurd conspiracy theory.

They were the actions of officials urgently trying to determine whether their agency funding was connected to the research under discussion,

connected to the pandemic.

You could not hide that your agency had funded the Wuhan research or

your long history of defending gain-of-function research.

The only alternative left was to argue that COVID-19 did not originate in the Wuhan lab.

You were not a detached observer.

You had an institutional interest in the public believing that federally funded research had nothing to do with the pandemic.

It was a conflict of interest from the very beginning.

The authors of the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 privately had serious doubts about a natural origin.

Within days though, they flipped and they all wrote in proximal origin

that the virus was almost certainly not a laboratory construct.

That paper was then used by the government and the media and you to discredit

Americans who were asking the same questions that you and the authors were asking yourselves privately.

You even cited proximal origin from the White House podium.

You held it out as evidence that the virus could not have been engineered,

but you didn't disclose your role and the discussions that preceded the writing of the paper.

You did not disclose the author's original concerns.

You did not reveal that you had been part of the paper, that you had read and offered editorial comments on the paper before it was published,

before you began using it as evidence that it couldn't have originated in the lab.

You did not disclose that you had immediately investigated yourself whether NIAID funding might be connected to the research.

You did not tell the American people the full story.

Duly released private messages indicate that the doubts with the authors and others didn't disappear after the publication.

So while this was being waived at the White House to show that it couldn't come from the lab,

the authors were still privately continuing to assign a meaningful probability to a laboratory origin,

one thing in public and another in private.