OPINION:
Last year Dr. Anthony Fauci pushed back hard disputing me, Sen. Tom Cotton and Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, who first asserted COVID-19 most likely came from a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China. We now know from his recently released emails his pushback was part of a broader cover-up of his likely role in creating the pandemic.
If the virus came from the Wuhan lab — which it almost certainly did — if the virus has been weaponized using so-called gain-of-function tools — which it almost surely has — and if those experiments were paid for by Fauci’s NIH — which they certainly were — then Dr. Fauci is the American godfather of the pandemic.
COVID-19 has killed more than half a million Americans and more than 3.6 million victims worldwide. This deadly virus first appeared within infectious distance of a wet market and China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
After testing thousands of possibilities, scientists have found no “direct progenitor” — an animal from which the virus jumped naturally to humans. We can therefore rule out the wet market, leaving the Wuhan bioweapons lab as the likely origin.
When Sen. Cotton, Mrs. Bartiromo and I first voiced this view, we were attacked and marginalized. Today, everyone from the former CDC Director Robert Redfield and CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta to former New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade favor the lab theory.
A shutdown of the Wuhan lab in October 2019 strongly suggests a catastrophic leak. So, too, does the disturbing fact that at least three workers from the lab came down with COVID-like symptoms in the very next month.
The Fauci cover-up began on Jan. 31, 2020, with an email from Scripps Institute of Research scientist Kristian Andersen. He advised Fauci that while the murderous pathogen resembled a horseshoe bat virus, its “unusual features” indicated it was “potentially engineered.”
Right then, Dr. Fauci should have come clean to the American president that COVID-19 likely was designed in a lab to attack humans. We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives with a more targeted response. We would have demanded immediate cooperation from Communist China and held it financially and morally accountable for the carnage it has unleashed on the world.
Instead, Dr. Fauci appears to have persuaded Mr. Anderson to publish a March 17th article in Nature Medicine completely dismissing the lab origin theory. On April 17th, Dr. Fauci would use that very same study — without mentioning his contact with Mr. Anderson — to argue in a White House press briefing that COVID-19 “is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Here’s the truth: China’s infamous “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli brought the horseshoe bat viruses that resemble COVID-19 to the Wuhan lab from caves 800 miles away. She then used “gain-of-function” experiments funded and authorized by Fauci to enhance the ability of these viruses to attack humans.
The Bat Lady’s experiments were directly funded by Dr. Fauci via grant monies from his agency at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indirectly funded by NIH grants awarded to American collaborators. Scientists implicated include Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina and Peter Daszak of New York’s EcoHealth Alliance. Mr. Daszak even bragged in a TV interview how easy it is to inject material into the backbone of bat viruses to weaponize them.
Most damning, Dr. Fauci, in December 2017, successfully pressed for lifting the ban on the kind of gain-of-function experiments conducted by the Bat Lady, Mr. Baric and Mr. Daszak. Such types of experiments were deemed extremely dangerous by the Obama administration in 2014.
As a White House official at the time, I can tell you Dr. Fauci pulled a fast one when he went through the Trump White House back door for approval to resume gain-of-functions experimentation rather than informing the president or top senior officials. Dr. Fauci was both playing God and playing with a fire now consuming the world.
Dr. Fauci first denied in sworn testimony before Congress that NIH funded gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab. Caught red-handed in that stone-cold lie, he has now admitted to funding the Wuhan lab — yet continues to stone-cold lie about gain-of-function.
While serving the Trump administration, I clashed frequently with Dr. Fauci, and every single thing I said about him then has been proven exactly right today. Instead of telling us his devilish truth, Saint Fauci played hero and savior, cynically positioning himself as the wise sage who knew better than anyone — especially the American president.
Dr. Fauci’s repeated lies — particularly his lies of omission — are either those of a sociopath or a desperate, cornered man. Either way, not one more day should go before his firing. Both Congress and the media must bring Dr. Fauci to account.
• Peter Navarro is the former assistant to the president and Defense Production Act policy coordinator during the Trump administration. www.peternavarro.com
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