WASHINGTON — According to an email thread newly leaked by House Republicans on Tuesday, Dr. fauci dismissed the theory that COVID-19 may have emerged from a Chinese lab shortly after the onset of the pandemic in the US, calling it a “shiny object that will go away.”
A letter was sent by Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, in which they demanded that Fauci be made available to sit for testimony.
In the leaked email from April 16, 2020, Anthony Fauci was sent a link to a report from Fox News that “multiple sources” who had been briefed on the origins of COVID-19 believed it emerged from the Wuhan lab. The link was sent to him by then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, who wanted to know if there was “anything NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum.”
“I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this,” wrote Collins. “But probably didn’t get much visibility. Anything more we can do? Ask the National Academy [of Sciences] to weigh in?
“I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in times [sic],” wrote Fauci in response early the next morning.
According to Reps Comer and Jordan, Fauci and Collins both participated in a conference call with at least 11 other scientists, who warned them of the real possibility that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, the letter states, “it is unclear if either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever passed these warnings along to other government officials or if they simply ignored them.”
So real was the possibility of the lab leak theory, that Tulane University virologist Robert F. Garry, who participated in the conference call, later wrote in an email that “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario” for the emergence of the virus.
However, Garry later signed his name to a paper called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which stated: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
This was the very paper that Collins alluded to in his April 16 email to Fauci, and interestingly enough, Collins and Fauci both received a draft of it before it was made public, raising questions if Fauci and/or Collins were involved with the paper taking that position.
“After speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak. It is also unclear if Drs. Fauci or Collins edited the paper prior to publication,” says the letter from Reps Comer and Jordan.
At a Tuesday hearing, Fauci was visibly triggered when confronted by Sen. Rand Paul with this suggestion.
“Did you communicate with the five scientists who wrote the opinion piece in Nature, where they were describing, ‘Oh, there’s no way this could have come from a lab?’” Paul asked.
“That was not me,” responded a visibly upset Fauci. “You keep distorting the truth. It is stunning how you do that.”
“Were most of the scientists that came to you privately, did they come to you privately and say, ‘No way this came from a lab,’?” Paul later pressed. “Or … was their initial impression actually that it looked very suspicious for a virus that came from a lab?”
“Senator, we are here at a committee to look at a virus now that has killed almost 900,000 people,” Fauci deflected. “And the purpose of the committee was to try and get things out how we can help to get the American public. And you keep coming back to personal attacks on me that have absolutely no relevance to reality.”
The Republicans’ letter also suggested that contrary to Fauci’s persistent denials, he knew in January 2020 that NIAID worked with the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance to create a policy that would slip by a gain-of-function moratorium, allowing it to conduct dangerous experiments on novel bat coronaviruses.
The letter further accuses Fauci of being aware in January 2020 that EcoHealth was not in compliance with the terms of its grant that funded the Chinese lab, evident by the fact that EcoHealth failed to submit a report to NIAID by Sept. 30, 2019.
To read the entire letter and read the leaked email thread, CLICK HERE.
As reported by Vos Iz Neias