The long-serving director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said in an interview with National Geographic published on Monday that it’s just not likely the coronavirus (COVID-19) originated in a lab in Wuhan city.
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” Fauci said. “Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
Is that so? Because those comments contradict other Trump administration officials including the president himself and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the latter of whom told ABC News’ “This Week” that there is “enormous evidence” the Wuhan coronavirus came from a lab, not a Chinese wet market.
“China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories,” he explained to host Martha Raddatz. “These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
So — why would Fauci make such a claim when the real evidence indicates he’s wrong?
Perhaps because he wants to cover up some prior activity that would give him at least some culpability in the creation of the virus?
As Newsweek reported last month, Fauci supported the laboratory now in question with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars “for risky coronavirus research.”
The Obama administration banned all federal funding of all efforts to weaponize three viruses
The magazine reported:
But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
With the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health pledged $3.7 million over six years to fund gain-of-function work — a pledge that followed a previous $3.7 million 5-year investment in a “project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses which ended in 2019,” the magazine reported.
Several scientists have not been supportive of gain-of-function research because it involves the manipulation of viruses in order to explore how they could infect humans because of the risk of starting a pandemic if one were to be accidentally released.
Starting to sound familiar?
And about that 2015 funding. The Times of Israel reported April 25:
Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research—altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious–as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.
This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs.
Due to those accidents, the CDC closed two labs and halted some biological shipments. The agency later noted in an internal report that scientists failed to follow proper procedures to make sure samples were inactivated before leaving the lab. There were “multiple other problems” as well.
So, in October 2014, the Obama administration banned all federal funding of all efforts to weaponize three viruses — influenza, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
But that didn’t stop Fauci, the Times of Israel reported. He “outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving federal funding,” the site noted.
And to be clear, yes — this is the same lab that is now at the center of the COVID-19 controversy.
No wonder Fauci wants us to believe there’s no connection to coronavirus and the lab he has worked diligently to fund with our tax money.
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