Amid the burgeoning controversy over Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails, made public under a FOIA request, one of my takeaways is that some of Fauci's blindspots and inconsistencies are reasonably chalked up to fog-of-war errors based on imperfect knowledge during a crisis -- while others are much harder to defend and explain. I've been calling on Fauci to have the integrity to sit down for a tough, fair interview with my Fox News colleague Bret Baier, whose reporting about the 'lab leak' theory (which Fauci repeatedly dismissed) last year was referenced several times in Fauci's emails, including being referred to as a "conspiracy theory." This is my argument:
Dr. Fauci should sit down with @BretBaier for an interview, since Bret’s reporting came up in several of the newly-revealed emails. How about it, Doc? pic.twitter.com/S9BSeruEfZ
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) June 3, 2021
If you haven't already, read this Vanity Fair piece about the members of the scientific and public health community who agitated against the entirely plausible lab leak hypothesis being taken seriously, coercing a bogus 'consensus' that served their interests, but not the truth. "Throughout 2020," it begins, "the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark." More:
So our tax dollars funded the Wuhan lab's coronavirus experimentation - and bureaucrats didn't want to jeopardize the funding, hence the cover-up...read every word of @KatherineEban's first draft of history in @VanityFair. https://t.co/ww5mpgJOdl pic.twitter.com/r4ibQyiniM
— Elise Jordan (@Elise_Jordan) June 3, 2021
For most of the past year, the lab-leak scenario was treated not simply as unlikely or even inaccurate but as morally out-of-bounds. In late March, former Centers for Disease Control director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN that he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab. “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. “I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.” With President Trump out of office, it should be possible to reject his xenophobic agenda and still ask why, in all places in the world, did the outbreak begin in the city with a laboratory housing one of the world’s most extensive collection of bat viruses, doing some of the most aggressive research?
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As for the last sentence of that excerpt, seeking the truth should have been possible and indeed demanded, even while Trump was still in office, whether people found his policies and rhetoric "xenophobic" or not. Read about how influential people had financial, reputational and political incentives to assist China in its stonewall. "Follow the science" many progressives have intoned endlessly (even as they disregard data and science they dislike), yet scientific and public health elites have done an immense amount of harm to their own collective credibility during the pandemic. It's wild that a former CDC Director received death threats from fellow scientists and was treated as persona non grata, simply because he raised an obvious viable and sensible theory about a devastating plague killing millions. That's a reflection on the degree to which "science" is politicized, not on him or the merits of his thinking. This is both a media scandal and a science scandal -- and it didn't materialize on some relatively trivial matter, but rather on the biggest story in recent years, involving a deadly global pandemic:
“That is an extraordinarily damning admission. Health experts who understood all along that it was entirely possible that the virus emerged from a lab simply refused to examine the hypothesis because it had become associated with the likes of Donald Trump” https://t.co/Dy0M5dYZ7W
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) June 3, 2021
You could see this in, for example, the ACIP proposal not to recommend an age-based approach to vaccine phasing, even though it would save more lives, because of “equity” concerns. Whatever woke nonsense is ongoing in press is much farther along in the health bureaucracy.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 3, 2021
Why would people “trust the science and listen to the experts” when the scientific experts keep smuggling their non-expert political and moral views into their guidance? Scientists who are mad the public doesn’t trust them should tell colleagues to stop discrediting their fields.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 3, 2021
As the most public face of the public health establishment over the past year-plus, it would be a public service to see Fauci held to account, very specifically, about why he shifted from publicly batting down the lab leak theory to now admitting it could be valid -- right in line with the trajectory of elite conventional wisdom. He was receiving information on both sides of the question early last year, including attaboys from a man who seems to have had powerful non-scientific reasons to strenuously suppress the notion that COVID may have escaped from the Wuhan lab to which he'd directed millions in grant money. What, specifically, changed, and why? Based on some of his answers in recent interviews, my waning confidence in Fauci is falling further. This one, for instance, stopped me in my tracks:
Was the first WHO investigation, the one the Biden admin had “deep concerns” about over Chinese meddling, was that too “accusatory”? pic.twitter.com/P8UFIpwrdD
— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) June 3, 2021
China has blamed the US military for starting COVID, based on absolutely nothing. They've bullied foreign governments for telling the truth and asking for a real investigation into the matter. They've punished and disappeared whistleblowers. They've lied repeatedly about virtually all things COVID, roping the compromised WHO into their cover-up. They choreographed a fake 'probe' that denied hand-picked and closely-monitored investigators meaningful access to relevant information. And (mostly unrelatedly), they're also running a genocide against minorities and crushing democracy in Hong Kong. Fauci looks at this and wrings his hands about being overly "accusatory" of the CCP? What? Perhaps even more astounding, he asserts that the truth coming out is in China's best interests, pretending as though our interests are aligned. I am genuinely gobsmacked by the dangerous naivety of that assessment. The Chinese regime has clearly calculated what is in their interests on this, and transparent truth-telling is...not it. The doctor seems to think asking nicely and smiling will work. Amazing. More Fauci:
Fauci on his redacted email about a possible China lab leak: “The idea, I think, is quite far fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves, as well as other people. I think that’s a bit far out, John." pic.twitter.com/GpyIsQWMWE
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 3, 2021
This is a call back to previous smears of Sen. Tom Cotton, who never stated that COVID was unleashed as a bioweapon. He suggested that there were multiple possibilities, including an accidental lab leak. Fauci pooh-poohed that idea for many months, only to suddenly decide it was possible after all. On what basis should we trust his judgment as he calls the bioweapon angle "far fetched"? I happen to agree that I think it's virtually inconceivable that the CCP deliberately unleashed this virus on the world when it did, wreaking havoc on its own population (the elements the regime likes, and isn't ethnically cleansing) and harming the regime's global standing. But I'm not at all convinced that the CCP is above engaging in highly secretive research into potential bioweapons for hypothetical future use, but that the leak itself was premature or accidental. That's a sinister and unproven scenario, to be sure, but I'm not prepared to reject it as totally far-fetched. Why is Fauci? I'll leave you with two points. First, of course he should testify about all of this under oath, as should Doctors Redfield and Collins, even though most Congressional hearings feature far too much unserious showboating. And second, the correct answer to this question is 'not sure,' but the most educated among us seem to be clinging to the unverified and increasingly challenged 'natural, from a bat' hypothesis:
check out the class divide on the lab leak theory https://t.co/iohWx0UEQo pic.twitter.com/TppYJZwYi1
— Allahpundit (@allahpundit) June 2, 2021
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