It appears that Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will have to say something nice about Robert E. Lee to get fired.
At her afternoon news briefing on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said President Biden will not fire Fauci, despite yet another report that proves he misled a Senate committee about NIAID’s subsidies to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those subsidies paid for the genetic fortification of bat viruses so they can infect humans, which means American taxpayers helped create the SARS-Cov-2 virus that caused the global COVID-19 pandemic.
But Psaki did more than back the highly-paid, octogenarian medical bureaucrat. She also disputed the report in the Intercept that showed NIAID did, indeed, pay for those gain-of-function experiments.
Fauci Won’t Be Fired
The Intercept delivered the latest bad news for Fauci on September 6 in a report about two grants to the Wuhan lab. Richard Ebright, head of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, said the research the grants subsidized was most certainly gain-of-function.
The upshot of Ebright’s evaluation of the grants is that U.S. taxpayers did indeed subsidize the genetic manipulation of coronaviruses so they could infect people, and that Fauci heatedly, and repeatedly, denied it in sworn testimony before the Senate.
The Intercept’s report inspired Fox News’s Peter Doocy to ask Psaki when Biden will give Fauci the pink slip:
“You’ve said from that podium that under no circumstance would President Biden ever fire Dr. Fauci,” Doocy wondered. “Is that still the case since Fauci told Congress the NIH never funded gain-of-function research for coronaviruses in Wuhan, but documents published by the Intercept suggest that is not true, which would mean that he misled Congress?”
Answered Psaki:
Well, first, I would say that NIH has refuted that reporting, and I would point you to that.
But let me give you some highlights of that. NIH has never approved any research that would make a coronavirus more dangerous to humans — a reminder that there are previous and different coronaviruses than the existing one we’re battling. And the body of science produced by this research demonstrates that the bat coronavirus sequences published from that work NIH supported were not COVID — the strain, COVID-2 strain. So, what he said was correct.
So Fauci’s job, Psaki said, is “safe.”
Ebright’s Evaluation
Maybe so, but the rest of us aren’t “safe” as long as China’s mad scientists are trying to create bioweapons, and using U.S. taxpayer money and know-how to do it.
That not-insignificant fact aside, Ebright not only told the Intercept that the grants involved gain-of-function research, but also published a long Twitter thread explaining exactly what occurred.
“The materials confirm the grants supported the construction — in Wuhan — of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells,” Ebright wrote:
The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (“humanized mice”).
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses — one not been previously disclosed publicly — was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed.…
… and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
Ebright concluded that Fauci fiddled with the truth under questioning from Senator Rand Paul. “The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” he tweeted.
Lab Leak
If Ebright is right, then Psaki is wrong. And that means President Biden himself is involved in a major deception.
But Fauci’s “untruthful” statements about the research itself are just one disturbing aspect of the pandemic and how it began.
More frightening is that Fauci and others purposely tried to bury the truth. The virus almost certainly escaped from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is closely tied to Red China’s military. The military, in turn, hoped to use genetically fortified viruses as bioweapons.
