Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) tore into Dr. Anthony Fauci for dismissing the theory that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese virology lab at the first hearing of the new House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The Wednesday hearing focused on Fauci’s role in pushing the natural origin theory while he was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Jordan questioned witness Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about early suggestions that the virus was created in a lab and how those disappeared from the official discussion in the first months of the pandemic.
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“If it may have been a lab, may have been nature, and we’re supposed to look for it, then why did Dr. Fauci work so hard for just one of those theories? Why was it so important to push one over the other?” Jordan asked. “Three years ago, if you thought it came from a lab, if you raised that, you were called a nutjob, you got censored on Twitter, you were blacklisted on Twitter, you were even called a crackpot by the very scientist who in late January sent emails to Dr. Fauci that said it came from a lab.”
Redfield, who has publicly stated that evidence points to the lab hypothesis, told Jordan that “the most upsetting thing to me was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist because I said it came from a Wuhan lab.”
Jordan noted that in early 2020, Fauci got an email from a fellow doctor who said the “virus looks engineered, virus not consistent with evolutionary theory,” and from another researcher who reportedly said, “I don’t know how this happens in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab.”
Days later, the two colleagues — Drs. Robert Garry and Kristian Andersen — had a conference call with Fauci and wound up retracting their positions with an article in the scientific journal Nature Medicine that promoted the natural origin theory in April. Andersen’s lab was awarded an $8.9 million grant by Fauci’s agency.
“There’s nine million reasons why they changed their minds,” Jordan said.
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He continued, “So, three days after they say it came from a lab, they change their position, and the only intervening event is a conference call with Dr. Fauci and Dr. [Francis] Collins, a call that Redfield was not allowed to be on — the head of the CDC and on the coronavirus task force. And then three months later — shazam! They get $9 million bucks from Dr. Fauci. Now isn’t that something?”
Official conclusions on the origins of the virus are mixed among federal agencies. The Department of Energy recently came down on the side of the lab hypothesis, a view shared by the FBI. Four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council are more confident that the virus had a natural origin, while the CIA and another unknown agency are undecided on the virus’s origins, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
