Republicans call for Dr Fauci to be fired or resign after umpteen U-turns on COVID and its origins: He now tries to DEFEND giving $600K to Wuhan lab to study how viruses can transmit from bats to humans before the COVID outbreak
Republican lawmakers demanded Dr. Anthony Fauci be terminated from his role as the nation’s top infectious disease expert after he was accused of flip-flopping on key COVID-related topics like mask-wearing and the origins of the coronavirus.
House Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, on Tuesday proposed the ‘FIRED Act’ - whose acronym stands for ‘Fauci Incompetence Requires Early Dismissal.’
'Dr. Fauci is at odds with the [Centers for Disease Control],' Davidson told Fox News.
'He has repeatedly put political science ahead of the science on COVID-19.'
Republicans have criticized Fauci and other public health officials for telling the public to refrain from mask-wearing in the early days of the pandemic before reversing the guidance as the case count increased nationwide last year.
House Rep. Warren Davidson (seen left in December), a Republican from Ohio, on Tuesday proposed the ‘FIRED Act’ - whose acronym stands for ‘Fauci Incompetence Requires Early Dismissal.’ Dr Anthony Fauci (right) on Tuesday appeared before a House committee to discuss the budget
House Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania, told Fox News on Tuesday that the mixed messaging from Fauci was ‘nothing new.’
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), appeared before a Congressional budget committee on Tuesday. He defended allocating $600,000 to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which then paid the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans.
Fauci’s critics also seized on comments he made criticizing the decision by Republican governors of Texas and other states to lift mask mandates in March.
At the time, Fauci, other epidemiologists, and top Democrats, including President Joe Biden, blasted the decision as premature - though COVID-19 cases have continued to drop in those states as well as nationwide.
House Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania, told Fox News on Tuesday that the mixed messaging from Fauci was ‘nothing new.’
‘He has been wrong, intentionally deceptive, and inconsistent throughout this entire pandemic,’ Reschenthaler said.
‘A few examples of Fauci’s failures include: claiming there was very little risk to Americans in January of 2020, opposing President Trump’s China travel ban then crediting it with saving lives, and wrongly predicting an explosion of cases in Texas after Gov. Abbott lifted the state mask mandates.
‘It is long past time for Dr. Fauci to stop talking to the American public. Fauci should resign or be fired immediately.’
Earlier on Tuesday, Fauci defended the United States' 'modest' and 'very respectable' funding of the Wuhan laboratory - which is now at the center of speculation as a possible source of the COVID-19 virus.
Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), appeared before a Congressional budget committee on Tuesday.
He defended allocating $600,000 to a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which then paid the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study the risk that bat coronaviruses could infect humans.
Under the terms of the funding, the money could not be spend on 'gain of function' research - a controversial practice which explores how viruses mutate and become more transmissible or more dangerous.
Fauci said the research was essential, pointing out that the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s was eventually traced back to bats.
'I would have been almost a dereliction of our duty if we didn't study this, and the only way you can study these things is you've got to go where the action is,' he said.
'You don't want to study bats in Fairfax County, Virginia, to find out what the animal-human interface is that might lead to a jumping of species.
'So we had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who were world experts on coronavirus, and we did that through a sub-grant from a larger grant to EcoHealth.'
Fauci added: 'The larger grant was about $600,000 over a period of five years. So it was a modest amount. The purpose of it was to study the animal-human interface, to do surveillance and to determine if these bat viruses were even capable of' infecting humans.
Francis Collins, the director of NIH, had said earlier in the hearing that the American taxpayer money that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not approved to conduct gain of function research.
Funding by the U.S. government of research in Wuhan has become immensely controversial.
On May 10 Tucker Carlson used his Fox News show to question 'the deadly experiments that were going on there'.
The following day Rand Paul, senator for Kentucky, grilled Fauci about the funding - which was reinstated with a different grant in August, NPR reported, after another earlier grant was blocked in April 2020 amid concern over safety at the Wuhan lab.
Paul insisted that the money was being used for gain of function research: Fauci insisted it was not.
'You are entirely and completely incorrect,' Fauci told Paul at the heated hearing.
'The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute.'
Paul, an ophthalmologist, wouldn't let up, repeatedly questioning Fauci on the matter, which has emerged in conservative circles as a theory tied to the origins of the coronavirus.
Rand Paul, senator for Kentucky, on May 11 got in to a heated debate with Fauci about funding
'Could you rule out a laboratory escape?' Paul asked Fauci.
'The answer in this case is probably not. Will you in front of this group categorically say that the COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory.'
Fauci replied: 'I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done and I'm fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China.
'However I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAD categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute,' he added.
Paul told Fauci: 'You're fooling with mother nature here. You're allowing super viruses to be created with a 15% mortality. It's very dangerous and it was a huge mistake to share this with China.
'We should be very careful to investigate where this virus came from.'
Fauci replied: 'I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain of function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
'No matter how many times you say it, it didn't happen.'
Fauci on Tuesday reiterated his comments, telling Mark Pocan, a congressman for Wisconsin, that 'there was nothing in the grant application and or the description of the grant, that would call for what is referred to as gain of function.
'That categorically was not done.'
Fauci is among the scientists now asking for more information about what happened inside the lab - having previously been skeptical about the theory that the virus escaped from a lab.
Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a statement saying that he had been right all along about the 'lab leak' hypothesis.
'Now everybody is agreeing that I was right when I very early on called Wuhan as the source of COVID-19, sometimes referred to as the China Virus,' he said.
'To me it was obvious from the beginning but I was badly criticized, as usual.
'Now they are all saying 'He was right.' Thank you!'
Earlier on Tuesday, it was learned that President Biden's team shut down a State Department investigation into the Wuhan laboratory as a source of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Last fall, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lead an investigation to answer whether China's biological weapons program may have played a role in the pandemic, sources told CNN Tuesday.
But the probe was met with internal opposition by those concerned it was part of political effort by the Trump administration to blame China for the virus.
And when Biden was briefed on the investigation's findings in February and March, he decided to shut it down amid concerns about the legitimacy of the evidence, sources say.
'The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,' said one former State Department official of the probe.
The revelations will lead to uncomfortable allegations for Biden that his team politicized the public health effort, and harmed the nation by shutting down a useful inquiry begun by his predecessor.
The theory of a lab leak had been promoted heavily by Donald Trump, who blamed China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world. Critics said that Trump was blaming China to distract from his own mishandling of the pandemic.
Yet now the idea that the virus escaped from a laboratory in China is gaining mainstream support, with leading scientists who previously expressed skepticism - such as Fauci - now saying it is plausible.
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