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Top scientific advisors told Congress on Wednesday there’s mounting evidence COVID did leak from a Wuhan lab and accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of trying to cover up the claims because they didn’t fit is narrative.
Experts, including a former Biden staffer and Donald Trump’s CDC director, testified to the House subcommittee investigating COVID that taxpayer-funded gain-of-function likely caused the virus that likely came from the Chinese facility.
Dr. Jamie Metzl, a self-identified Democrat who worked for President Biden when he was in the Senate, said he favored the lab leak theory because ‘the Chinese government has done everything in its power’ to stonewall investigations.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan also tore into Dr Anthony Fauci for ‘trying to cover his backside’ over the lab leak claims and Trump’s CDC director Robert Redfield claimed the Biden COVID advisor was trying to control the narrative.
It follows the release of the explosive Department of Energy report two weeks ago that the virus responsible for years of lockdowns and restrictions likely did leak from the lab.
The House subcommittee investigating the origins of Covid-19 opened its first hearing with top scientific experts who said they believed the virus had likely leaked from a lab, including a ‘lifelong Democrat ‘ and former Biden staffer
The House subcommittee investigating the origins of Covid-19 opened its first hearing with top scientific experts who said they believed the virus had likely leaked from a lab, including a ‘lifelong Democrat ‘ and former Biden staffer
‘This is the highest paid guy in our government getting all kinds of money to tell us things that were not accurate,’ Jordan said.
‘US tax dollars went to a lab in China, a lab that was not up to code, a lab that was doing gain of function research, and that’s where this thing most definitely came from and Dr. Fauci could not have that news getting out.’
Metzl said China had an ‘incentive’ to find the animal where Covid-19 had originated while pushing the animal-to-human transmission theory, but hadn’t done so.
‘Given that the Chinese government has every incentive to find intermediary host, it’s very significant that hasn’t been found,’ Metzl said. ‘I think it’s very telling after three years we haven’t found it.’
Dr. Paul Auwaerter, an infectious disease expert invited by Democrats on the committee, pointed out it took years to find the intermediary hosts after outbreaks of SARS and MERS.
‘There’s going to be no doubt that a research related origin remains a very serious possibility, if not a distinct probability. There is no smoking gun including a laboratory origin hypothesis. but the growing body and circumstantial evidence suggests that gun that us at very least, warm to the touch,’ Metzl said.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, chair of the committee, said there was no ‘smoking gun’ to prove the virus had spilled out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and but also said there was ‘no evidence Covid evolved from an animal,’ either.
He highlighted the lack of safety practices at the WIV as Dr. Robert Redfield said there was ‘no doubt’ the National Institutes of Health (NIH), State Department, US Agency of International Development and Department of Defense were funding gain-of-function research.
Redfield called for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until there was a ‘consensus’ on its benefit to society.
Redfield said there was evidence of the virus as early as September 2019 and stated three now-declassified ‘highly irregular’ findings pointing to the lab leak theory – he said researchers deleted sequences, changed command and control of the WIV from civilian to military and allowed a contractor to redo the ventilation in the lab, which Redfield called ‘really telling.’
Rep. James Comer, chair of the Oversight Committee, asked all four witnesses about the Proximal Origins paper from early 2020.
‘Yes or no was there science available to make such an unequivocal statement against the possibility of a lab that early in February?’ the Kentucky Republican asked.
Three witnesses said no, Democratic witness Auwaerter said he didn’t have ‘sufficient’ evidence to say.
The paper came days after Fauci had been warned in emails about the potential of lab origin. Fauci did not disclose he was involved in commissioning the paper when he stood in front of a White House press briefing and cited it as evidence to dismiss lab origin.
Referring to Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins’ role in approving gain of function research Comer said the pair ‘got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They got caught supercharging a virus in an unsecure Chinese lab.’
“They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should,’ Comer said.
Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., cautioned his GOP colleagues against ‘villainizing’ public health experts like Fauci with ‘conspiratorial accusations.’
‘Seems like minds on the other side of the aisle are made up [on origins],’ he said.
Redfield said that as CDC director he was shut out of high-level conversations after he told Dr. Anthony Fauci in early 2020 he did not think natural spillover was ‘scientifically plausible.’
‘It was told to me they wanted a single narrative and I had a different point of view.’
Reports have now come out that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, commissioned a scientific paper at the start of the pandemic, known as the proximal origin paper, that cast doubt on the idea that Covid-19 came from a lab.
Referring to the proximal origin paper, Redfield said: ‘It is antithetical to science. Science has debate and they squashed debate.’
Fauci in November testimony at a social media court case said he could not recall Redfield calling him in mid-January 2020 to tell him about the potential of virus manipulation.
GOP Rep. John Joyce, R-Pa., noted the House is set to vote on declassifying the FBI and Department of Energy’s findings that led them to announce coronavirus likely originated in a lab. He asked how important it is to declassify the information.
On the virus’s origin, Redfield said: ‘I don’t think that answers going to come from the scientific community. I think it’s going come from the intelligence community.’
‘I think declassification is very important,’ Redfield added. ‘There are some method and sourcing issues that you guys are going to have to wrestle with,’ he added.
Redfield said that Fauci took the natural origin position because ‘that’s what happened with SARS and MERs,’ but those viruses came about before 2012 when the U.S. wasn’t involved in gain of function research.
Redfield said he tried to explain to Fauci that the virus was far more tailored to human-to-human transmission than SARS and MERS. ‘I immediately said, “Wait a second, this isn’t natural.’”
Democrats focused much of their time on a 2014 book written by witness Nicholas Wade, the former editor of the New York Times science section and Nature and Science magazines.
Democrats noted the book, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance,’ which focuses on biological racial differences, has been cited by white supremacists.
‘I am absolutely offended that you would have the opportunity take this platform and to add anything of significance to it,’ Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said.
‘I’m sorry, too, that Mr. Mfume didn’t like my book. I am not a racist,’ Wade said.
Wade noted that the media had been ‘used’ to establish natural origin as the dominant theory.
‘The most upsetting thing to me was the Baltimore Sun calling me a racist for saying this came from a lab,’ Redfield recalled.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Md., laid blame on former President Trump, who at the beginning of the pandemic praised Chinese President Xi and his transparency around the virus.
He tore into ‘Donald Trump’s fawning, starstruck, sycophantic embrace of everything the Chinese government was telling you in 2020.’
‘I will happily offer a lot more for any colleagues who think that this will somehow absolve the last administration for telling Americans that COVID would magically disappear in Easter time.’
Three high-profile congressional committees – Oversight, Judiciary and Energy and Commerce, have opened their own probes into the origins of Covid-19 and the government’s response to the pandemic.
Fauci himself, who retired at the end of last year, has not yet been called to testify, in part due to the competing jurisdictions of each committee’s probe.
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