Fauci Responds to Ex-CDC Director’s ‘Disturbing’ Lab-Leak Suppression Accusation
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Anthony Fauci on Thursday forcefully denied suppressing the lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic, after former CDC director Robert Redfield accused the former chief White House medical adviser of sidelining him from conversations about Covid’s origins.
Appearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday, Redfield accused Fauci of intentionally excluding him from a call with virologists in February 2020 because Fauci knew he believed the virus emerged from a Chinese virology lab and didn’t want Redfield convincing other experts of that view.
“I do think it illustrates one point that’s worth really focusing on: when you have a group of people that decide there can only be one point of view, that’s problematic,” he said. “And I’ll keep on saying that’s antithetical to science and unfortunately that’s what they did.”
Asked to respond to the accusation by Fox News’ Neil Cavuto Thursday evening, Fauci insisted he kept open mind about the pandemic’s origins and was not responsible for inviting attendees to the call with virologists.
“I almost have to laugh at that,” Fauci told Fox News. “That’s totally bizarre. First of all, I wasn’t leaning totally strongly one way or the other. I’ve always kept an open mind. As the data evolved, and evolutionary virologists began to look at the data, it looked much more likely that it was a natural occurrence from an animal reservoir. I have always kept a completely open mind that it could be one or the other.”
Fauci went on to call Redfield’s accusations “disturbing.”
During the February 1 call, a group of evolutionary virologists suggested that Covid may have stemmed from a lab accident and may have been genetically engineered, according to the memo. But just three days later, four of the experts who attended that meeting wrote a paper, later published in Nature Medicine, that argued Covid had “mutations” that supported the explanation that it had been transmitted to humans from animals. Emails obtained by the subcommittee revealed that Fauci “prompted” the paper, as one of its authors put it in a cover email to a scientific journal.
During the Wednesday hearing, committee chairman Jim Jordan implied that Fauci dangled a multimillion-dollar grant to induce the researchers to change their previously-held opinions that the coronavirus originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“And then three months later, ‘shazam,’ they get $9 million from Dr. Fauci. Well, isn’t that something?” Jordan said at Wednesday’s hearing.
WATCH: @Jim_Jordan DEMOLISHES Fauci’s COVID origins story pic.twitter.com/k9muabjAS7
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) March 8, 2023
In his Thursday interview, Fauci insisted that the grant had been approved before his call with the virologists and emphasized that the grant had to survive many layers of scrutiny before being approved.
