We’ve never considered Dr. Anthony Fauci either a saint or a devil: He’s a medical bureaucrat unexpectedly thrown into the limelight by the pandemic. But his usefulness as a government spokesman on COVID issues has clearly come to an end.
On Tuesday, the White House chief medical adviser told lawmakers that the National Institutes of Health under his leadership sent a “modest” $600,000 over five years (via the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study if bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans.
This, after earlier testimony in which he seemed to deny sending any cash, the key being that he qualified that as no funding of “gain of function” research (which involves actually making a virus more dangerous to humans).
Critics such as Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argue that Fauci has no way to be sure the Wuhan facility didn’t use the funds for such work, which other sources show it was doing for someone.
This follows a host of Fauci flip-flops, including his recent abandonment of his months-long pooh-poohing of the “lab leak” theory. Most notoriously, he advised the public against wearing masks to fight COVID-19 before he insisted it was vital (and then came out for wearing two masks).
Apparently his first advice was dishonest: He knew masks were good but feared the public would grab so many that health-care workers wouldn’t be able to get them.
Similarly, he’s admitted to citing ever-higher numbers for the percentage of the population that needs to be vaccinated in order to achieve “herd immunity” not on the basis of any science, but simply in a bid to manipulate the public.
One minute he’s “not convinced” COVID-19 developed naturally, the next he believes it’s “highly likely” — despite NIH’s funding into coronavirus lab research in China — that it did, in fact, originate naturally.
Yes, this virus is “novel,” and Fauci can’t possibly have all the answers all the time. But that didn’t stop him from spouting off like he did for the last year-plus.
As Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) put it on Fox News Tuesday: Fauci “has been wrong, intentionally deceptive and inconsistent throughout this entire pandemic.”
It’s time for the Biden administration to pull the plug on the doctor’s TV appearances.