Days after Anthony Fauci testified under oath to Congress that the belief that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not a conspiracy theory, he seemed to tell students what he really felt about the origins of the global pandemic.
“A group of evolutionary virologists from all over the world—Australia, Canada, UK, United States, got together and did geospatial studies, virological studies, and epidemiology studies and strongly suggest—haven’t proven, but strongly suggest that the virus emerged from a wet market in Wuhan where there were animals that should not have been sold in the wet market because of not being sure what types of viruses they harbor,” the controversial doctor said at Georgetown University.
Fauci continuing to push the idea that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a wet market in China despite constantly emerging evidence to the contrary is itself notable–but it is particularly interesting that he did so despite swearing to Congress that the belief that it emerged from a lab leak is, suddenly, no longer a conspiracy theory.
After retiring from his job as the highest paid employee in the federal government, Fauci became a professor at Georgetown; his latest remarks came in a speech to the university’s public policy school entitled “Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Lessons from COVID-19.” Students at the DC-based university lavished Saint Fauci with literally blessing them with his presence.
In defense of the Georgetown students, many of the Democrats on the COVID Select Subcommittee were criticized for drooling over America’s former doctor. According to Representative Ronny Jackson, Fauci’s predecessor as Chief Medical Advisor to the President, the subcomittee’s Democrats “spent hours shielding a man who wanted to play God, control the world, and cover up his own role in creating the pandemic.” Ironically, Fauci told students that he never sought out to conduct public policy, but that he just “had to get involved in policy making.” This jibes with his recent laughable challenge for anyone to “show me a school that I shut down.”
As the world comes to grips with how a pandemic was able to wreak such global havoc, Fauci and his counterparts like Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, are trying to rewrite history in their favor–but Fauci’s inconsistencies are particularly notable.
In the span of a few weeks, Fauci went from “testif[ying] that the lab leak hypothesis–which was often suppressed–was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory,” according to Brad Wenstrup, the chairman of the COVID subcommittee, to telling Georgetown students that “we know how SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] emerged, we know how MERS [Middle East respiratory syndrome] emerged, we’re [] suspicious, though we don’t know for sure, that the same thing occurred with SARS-CoV-2.” It is incredibly difficult to reconcile these two claims.
In saying that he is “highly suspicious” that “the same thing occurred” with COVID, SARS, and MERS, Fauci is grouping COVID-19 with two known zoonotic diseases. SARS originated in either bats or civet cats, and its spread was heavily covered up by the Chinese Communist Party. Likewise, MERS originated in bats, then spread to camels, and then humans.
While Fauci has long been reluctant to fault the CCP in any meaningful way for its handling of the COVID outbreak, he did admit that SARS “originated in the Guangdong province of China,” which he noted is an interesting comparison “with what we went through the past four years,” which is at least a subtle admission of Chinese culpability in a coverup. As with SARS, however, China was notably uncooperative. Unlike with China, with countries like Israel, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, “we were getting information in real time,” Fauci said.
Chinese secrecy wasn’t the only obstacle in the course of the pandemic. Fauci repeatedly praised the work of Dr. David Morens, who previously wrote that he tries to conduct his job using his gmail as much as possible “because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly.” Morens also wrote, in emails obtained by the COVID subcommittee, that he “will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.” During Fauci’s testimony, he seemed to have also deleted inconvenient memories, telling Congress that he did not recall “maybe over 100” times, according to Wenstrup.
One of the first moves of the Republican-led House of Representatives last year was to create a subcommittee tasked with investigating the origins of the pandemic–a stark contrast with the Democratic-controlled Senate, which seemingly couldn’t care less about pushing for accountability for the pandemic. While the Fauci hearing is the highest profile event it has done yet, it’s far from the only consequential one. Earlier last year, the COVID subcommittee pressed Fauci allies about their role in “skew[ing] scientific evidence to fulfill Dr. Fauci’s vision of a single narrative in support of a natural COVID-19 origin.”
Given the seemingly obvious contradictions between Fauci’s sworn statements and what he says in planned remarks on college campuses, it will be very interesting to see what he says in his public hearing later this year–and how it differs from what he told students at Georgetown.