Fauci has an ‘open mind’ on COVID lab leak

Hit by an expert report concluding that COVID likely leaked from a lab, Dr. Anthony Fauci dodged by saying, “We may never know” the origins of the pandemic, but that “we must all keep an open mind to all possibilities.”

Pathetic, disingenuous bull. Fauci has a miles-long track record of utter closed-mindedness about COVID’s origins, going back to the very start of the pandemic — an effort in which he was aided at every step of the way by a compliant media.

• The doc called the lab-leak theory “a shiny object that will go away” in April 2020. 

• That same month, he said the virus’ “mutations” were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”

• In a May 2020 National Geographic interview, he said “everything . . . strongly indicates” the virus “evolved in nature” and called the lab-leak theory a “circular argument.”

• In March 2021, he slammed former Center for Disease Control head Robert Redfield’s belief in the lab-leak hypothesis as merely “an opinion.”

• June saw him saying that “the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human.”

• In October, he claimed it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses being worked on in Wuhan to have mutated into the one responsible for the pandemic.

• The next month, he claimed that the congressional Republicans grilling him over the issue were contaminated by “a distinct anti-science flavor.”

And on and on and on. Fauci, of course, desperately wanted the theory to go away, likely to avoid scrutiny of his own role in funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab theorized as the pandemic’s ultimate origin. 

Indeed, questioned on that subject before Congress, he lied and lied and lied — only to be proved a liar when the National Institutes of Health admitted passing funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (run by Peter Daszak, who organized his own campaign to suppress the lab-leak theory). 

Of course the same major media outlets that backed him up every step of the way when he fought to suppress all dissent will abet his latest bid to paint himself as a broad-minded seeker after scientific truth.

It’s hard to know which is more disgusting: the servility of the press or the arrogance of Fauci.