Anthony Fauci has finally admitted that COVID-19 could have originated in a lab during a testimony before Congress earlier in the week. Donald Trump’s chief pandemic advisor also revealed on the disorganized decision-making process that happened behind the scenes during America’s pandemic response.
The former longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sat down for two days worth of interviews with the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic. The questioning was led by Republican Brad Wenstrup, a congressman from Ohio who practiced medicine for over two decades before joining Congress.
House GOP staff told reporters that the discussion would would focus on the origins of the pandemic, vaccines, and mask mandates.
During his second day of marathon grilling by Congress, the former White House advisor confessed that the lab leak – the idea Covid was engineered and accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan – was ‘not a conspiracy theory’, according to The Daily Mail.
The U-turn is significant because he was the chief architect of a 2020 paper that discounted the theory. Fauci’s friends and former colleagues also spearheaded a paper in the Lancet that called believers conspiracy theorists and racists.
Fauci, 83, sat before the House coronavirus subcommittee for a second seven-hour stretch of questioning on Tuesday about the pandemic response that he oversaw and its myriad flaws.
Fauci has been accused of covering up the possibility of a lab leak because his office, despite prohibitions against it put in by the Obama administration, may have helped fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which served as ground zero of the virus.
Despite constantly lecturing Americans to “trust the data” during the pandemic, Fauci still denies the deep negative impact that closing schools had on American children. He told House lawmakers he was “not convinced” that any learning loss occured due to the school closures his agency supported.
Teachers unions, who used Fauci to validate their closure of schools, have been trying to cast blame elsewhere for the policies, which studies have shown were disastrous for America’s kids.
Anthony Fauci announced his retirement at the end of 2022, right as it appeared Republicans would be able to call on him to testify before the House of Representatives. He currently receives the largest pension in the history of the federal government.
