Looks Like Trump Was Right About Fauci After All
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/04/looks-like-trump-was-right-about-fauci-after-all/
“I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, July 28, 2020.
That, we now know, thanks in part to the release of thousands of pages of Fauci emails, was a lie, and Fauci is starting to look a lot more like the person former President Donald Trump described: the “king of flip-flops,” who “got a lot wrong,” a “self-promoter” and a “disaster.”
Of course, the press had long ago decided that Fauci was a “national treasure,” and just as it treated the lab-leak theory as a Trump-fueled conspiracy, it called Trump’s attacks “unbelievably idiotic.” But Fauci’s lies and misinformation are starting to pile up, calls are mounting for him to be fired. Was he also involved in a cover-up?
Let’s review.
Fauci had already admitted that he’d lied to the public about masks and vaccinations. He told The Street last June he downplayed the use of masks because he was worried about shortages. But an email shows that he believed them to be pretty ineffective. “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out (the) virus, which is small enough to pass through material.”
Later, however, he insisted on wearing a mask even though he was fully vaccinated, telling a Senate hearing that “Let me just state for the record that masks are not theater, masks are protective.” Sen. Rand Paul confronted Fauci, saying “If you have immunity they’re theater. If you already have immunity you’re wearing a mask to give comfort to others.”
Fauci responded: “I totally disagree with you.”
Later, Fauci admitted on “Good Morning America” that it was political theater. He wore a mask, he said on the news program, only because he “didn’t want to look like I was giving mixed signals. But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.”
On vaccinations, Fauci told the New York Times that he’d knowingly downplayed the share of people who needed to be vaccinated to reach “herd immunity” because he didn’t think the country was “ready to hear what he really thinks.”
(We wrote about these follies back in March, arguing that his deceptive propaganda and political motivated policy pronouncements were firing offenses.)
But Fauci’s emails reveal deception and a duplicitousness that are far more troubling.
In May 2020, Fauci insisted to the public that there was no reason to think that novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab in Wuhan. The scientific evidence, he said, “is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that (this virus) evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
But that wasn’t exactly the case. One email to Fauci was from the director of the Scripps Research Institute, who told Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” and some features looked “engineered.” Those same scientists later published a paper in Nature discounting the lab theory, but admitted that “more scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.”
Fauci’s attacks on the lab-leak theory may not have been entirely honest or supported by the science, but they did please Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance. One of the newly uncovered emails showed Daszak praising Fauci for downplaying the lab-leak theory. “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19.” He called Fauci “brave” and said his comments would help “dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins.”
Why does Daszak’s view matter? Because his group had funneled $600,000 in National Institutes of Health grant money to the Wuhan lab in question, which may have used the funds to engineer what later became the pandemic-causing virus.
Daszak was also one of the experts sent by the World Health Organization to Wuhan to investigate the virus’ origins and came back saying no way was it man-made.
The issue of the NIH funding questionable Chinese research came up in a Senate hearing this spring, at which Sen. Rand Paul pressed Fauci about federal funding for so-called “gain of function” research into COVID, the point of which would be to make the virus more transmittable among humans.
Fauci vehemently denied that any NIH funds had been spent on such research. “Sen. Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect. … The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute,” he said during a May 11 Senate hearing.
Two weeks later, however, Fauci admitted to another senator that the funds could have been used for gain-of-function research.
“There’s no way of guaranteeing that (they weren’t),” Fauci told Sen. John Kennedy at a May 27 hearing.
So what, exactly, was Fauci’s role in those funding decisions? And did he try to gloss over the use of U.S. taxpayer money to engineer COVID by insisting the disease occurred naturally? What other Fauci follies are buried in that pile of emails? Inquiring minds — none of whom work for the mainstream press — want to know.
In the wake of these revelations, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler blasted Fauci, saying he “has been wrong, intentionally deceptive, and inconsistent throughout this pandemic.”
Anyone notice that nobody is calling Reschenthaler, or the growing chorus of Fauci critics, “unbelievably idiotic” now?
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