by Liz Wolfe at Reason: On Monday, Anthony Fauci—formerly the chief medical adviser to the president during the COVID-19 pandemic and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director—testified before Congress about his role in the pandemic and the origins of the coronavirus.
Fauci, deified by many mainstream liberals, made a few preposterous claims. When Rep. Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) asked, “You agree that there was a push to downplay the lab leak theory?” Fauci responded, implausibly, “None on my part.”
This strains credulity; many, including those questioning him yesterday, have pointed to the fact that Fauci directed funding toward gain-of-function research, including toward the lab in Wuhan, China, that COVID-19 is believed to have emerged from. When social media companies, under pressure from the federal government, worked to suppress the spread of information related to the lab leak, mainstream publications treated it like a crackpot theory (with the exception, interestingly, of some writers at The New York Times). And groups of virologists, who had been encouraged by Fauci, published articles in scientific journals casting doubt on the theory. Together, these actions reveal a more complete picture that contradicts Fauci’s rosy revisionism.
Back in a private testimony in January, Fauci had told Congress that the six-foot social distancing recommendation “wasn’t based on data.” But yesterday, he clarified that he’d meant there was no clinical trial that settled on the six-foot recommendation and that “officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who crafted the recommendation were basing the distance on early expectations of how the virus spread,” per The Washington Post...
More here.
