Dr Anthony Fauci admitted that the lab leak Covid origin theory was credible as he shed more light on the chaotic decision-making process behind the scenes of America’s pandemic response.
During his second day of marathon grilling by Congress, the former White House advisor confessed that the lab leak – the idea Covid was engineered and accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan – was ‘not a conspiracy theory’.
The U-turn is significant because he was the chief architect of a 2020 paper that discounted the theory. Fauci’s friends and former colleagues also spearheaded a paper in the Lancet that called believers conspiracy theorists and racists.
Fauci, 83, sat before the House coronavirus subcommittee for a second seven-hour stretch of questioning on Tuesday about the pandemic response that he oversaw and its myriad flaws.
The infectious disease expert said that data did not support recommendations to keep six feet of distance from another person and that vaccine mandates he personally advised likely increased vaccine hesitancy.
Dr Fauci arrived at the Capitol on Tuesday for his second seven-hour stretch of grilling by a House subcommittee over the government’s pandemic response and Fauci’s outsized role in it
Dr Fauci has been accused on squashing dissenting opinions that argued against blanket Covid lockdowns. Correspondences between him and former NIH health Dr Francis Collins showed they wanted to undermine what they called ‘fringe’ opinions
Fauci also U-turned on his views of President Donald Trump’s 2020 orders to restrict incoming travelers from China.
He told Congress yesterday that he supported the ban – despite publicly criticizing the move in 2020.
The former President moved to restrict travel from China in January 2020 soon after Chinese officials identified around 10,000 cases of the novel virus.
Leading political figures on the left including President Joe Biden calling the then-President’s travel restrictions ‘hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.’
Dr Fauci, once seen as an ‘adult in the room’ amid a chaotic and confusing government response to the initial 2020 outbreak, has seen his sparkling public image take a hit in recent years.
He flip-flopped on crucial Covid safety information including masks and worked to silence scientists with views that differed from the mainstream.
The full extent of Dr Fauci’s testimony over the two days will be released after lawyers review their content to make sure no restricted information will be made public, though it’s not clear when that will be.
Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup, who heads up the subcommittee for the pandemic response, said Tuesday: ‘Dr Fauci’s transcribed interview revealed systemic failures in our public health system and shed light on serious procedural concerns with our public health authority.
‘While we remain frustrated with Dr Fauci’s inability to recollect Covid-19 information that is important for our investigation, others we have spoken to do recall the facts.’
Newly released highlights from the second day’s hearing revealed that the committee honed in on the issues of social distancing, mandatory vaccinations, early travel bans, and the now-infamous paper that called the lab leak a conspiracy.
Dr Fauci told the committee that scientific data was not a driver of the blanket six-feet-distance recommendation to reduce the spread of the virus, saying that the rule ‘just sort of appeared.’
He also said that vaccine mandates, which split the nation in 2021, likely reinforced a general sense of distrust in the government with more and more people questioning its motives.
Republicans on the House committee said that Dr Fauci ‘advised American universities to impose vaccine mandates on their students.’
While it is not clear exactly how Dr Fauci engaged with university leaders to install vaccine requirements, it is well known that he supported such mandates on university campuses as well as primary and high schools.
Mandates also sparked outrage about what millions of Americans perceived as government infringement on their personal freedoms.
Many chose to eschew the vaccines to, in their view, preserve their own autonomy despite mandates for attending university, going work, or taking public transit.
Rep Wenstrup told the Washington Examiner: ‘I can’t get into his mind, but I think he felt it was the right thing to do because he thought it would save lives… but he basically was saying the lesson learned [was it] didn’t get into the psyche of America.’
Dr Fauci was also said to have ‘played semantics’ with the definition of the lab leak theory, which maintains that the coronavirus that started sweeping the globe in early 2020 emerged from a Chinese lab where researchers tinker with viruses to make them more transmissible and/or virulent.
He was specifically speaking about the now-infamous Proximal Origins paper published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020. The paper argued that Covid had most likely evolved naturally after spilling over from animal reservoirs, rather than being engineered by scientists.
Dr Fauci was not an author of the paper, but he has come under fire for his role in commissioning it.
A House investigation later reported that Dr Fauci, along with former National Institutes of Health head Dr Francis Collins, orchestrated a conference call before the paper would be published, during which time they allegedly strong-armed scientists into publishing the natural origin theory.
But Dr Krisian Andersen, a co-author of the Proximal Origins paper who initially believed the virus showed signs of being genetically manipulated in a lab, told Congress last year, ‘there was no ‘prompting’ to disprove, or dismiss, a potential ‘lab leak.’
‘Although Drs. Fauci and Collins were on emails containing documents that would eventually help form the basis of the Proximal Origin paper, they were not sent drafts or final versions of the paper for ‘editing and approval’, nor did they, or any other NIH official, provide any edits or suggestions on the paper.’
Still, emails from Dr Andersen included language that Fauci ‘prompted’ him to write the paper with the goal of ‘disproving’ the lab leak theory, Dr Andersen told Congress that the statements they highlighted ‘are false and based on selective quote-mining of private emails, misrepresenting what was said.’
New emails dated February 1, 2020 show Fauci acknowledged that ‘scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan’
Recently-published internal communications among the scientists painted a picture of internal efforts to quash dissenting voices on more than just the issue of covid origins.
A petition written by who Dr Collins called ‘fringe epidemiologists’ Martin Kulldorff at Harvardi University, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya railed against blanket pandemic lockdowns, arguing for focusing instead on isolating people most susceptible to severe illness.
Dr Collins told Fauci: ‘There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.’
Dr Fauci assured him that a take down was in fact, underway.
Rep Wenstrup said on Tuesday: ‘He testified that the lab leak hypothesis — which was often suppressed — was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory.’
The Republican added that Dr Fauci, during his testimony, was not as staunchly against Trump Administration-era travel bans on arrivals from China, a policy that was painted as xenophobic at the time.
During Monday’s hearing, Dr Fauci had backtracked on his earlier claims that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases never allocated government money to gain of function research.
He had insisted to Senators last summer that his former department ‘has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
Yet, recently publicized emails dated February 1, 2020 showed Fauci acknowledged that ‘scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.’
While video recordings and text have not been made publicly available, Rep Wenstrup told reporters after Monday’s first stretch of testimony that it was ‘pretty congenial’ but added there are ‘a lot of things that we’re learning’ about how Dr Fauci’s definition of risky ‘gain of function’ experiments on viruses and his role in dispersing grant money to fund such research.
