WashPost’s Rogin: Fauci Lab Leak Denial Was Cover

Dr. Anthony Fauci “intentionally steered” the public away from the COVID-19 lab leak theory to cover the actions of himself and other members of the science community, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin said in an interview.

“You would never have a disaster of any kind — a plane crash;  you would never have a nuclear plant meltdown and say, Oh, we don’t need to know. Oh, forget about it,” Rogin said in the interview with Good Kid Productions.

“You would never do that; it’s crazy,” he added. “But even the new line from Anthony Fauci, now retired, is, Well, anything’s possible. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the lab. And anyway there’s nothing we can do about it, so everybody just move on.”

Rogin’s comments come after Fauci, in recent days, has declared that “we may never know” about the origins of the coronavirus. He also said he has not seen “any data for a lab leak,” despite a determination from the Department of Energy that a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was how the pandemic began. 

“That is a retrenchment of the previous position of a group of scientists, of which he is one member, one influential member, who intentionally steered the media and the public — and the intelligence community by the way — in the wrong direction, on purpose, to cover their own asses,” Rogin said. 

Fauci, who is now retired as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and who has served as a White House adviser on COVID-19, has often cast doubt on the lab leak theory, reports Mediaite.

Fauci told National Geographic in May 2020 that “the scientific evidence is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.” He also accused proponents of the lab leak theory of advancing a “circular argument.'”

Fauci continued to insist in congressional testimony about a year-and-a-half later that “even though we leave open all possibilities, it’s much more likely that this was a natural occurrence.”

Rogan said he thinks Fauci has rejected the lab-leak theory because promoting that would bring scrutiny on his record, including his support of gain of function research on viruses. 

“On that issue [the lab leak theory], I do think he [Fauci] made some serious mistakes and continues to withhold vital information from the American people about how we got into this mess and what we can do to prevent the next pandemic,” Rogin said. 

He also accused mainstream journalists of dismissing the lab leak theory of being “all captured by their deep state sources.”

“The problem with the mainstream journalists who cover this — a lot of them science writers actually — we didn’t understand,” said Rogin. “We always talk about political bias and factionality and source capture amongst political journalists, which is true. National security journalists were all captured by their deep state sources, right? Some of that’s true.”

And the science writers were “totally captured” by Fauci and Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, as their best sources, said Rogin. 

“They told them that it was a conspiracy theory that it came from a lab. And they ran with it because they didn’t know any better. After all, they were captured,” Rogin said.