He’s a doctor in the House, and he’s not happy.
The revelation in a Wall Street Journal report published Sunday that investigators for the United States Department of Energy have concluded that the coronavirus pandemic likely started with a laboratory leak in China has brought new fuel to the fight over the origins of the deadly disease.
And on Fox News on Monday, the Republican representative was spitting fire.
New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew, a dentist and member of the House GOP Doctors Caucus, took to “Fox & Friends First” early Monday to discuss the Journal’s report, which the newspaper attributed to a “classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.”
Van Drew, who switched parties from Democratic to Republican in 2019 over his disgust with the Democrats’ first attempt to impeach then-President Donald Trump, blistered the Biden administration and former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci for what he said was a failure to tell the truth to the American people.
“Certainly, we should have had a president that was strong enough to speak with China, to really tell the World Health Organization to stop lying to us, to tell Big Tech … to let people actually tell the truth, and not to repress those that really know what’s going on or at least have a vision of what’s going on,” he said.
“Dr. Fauci, I mean, the American people are sick and tired of being lied to, day after day, week after week, year after year. And this is just another example.”
Check out the interview here:
The Journal’s report was based on a review by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that summarized the views of the government’s different intelligence agencies about the origin of the virus.
The Department of Energy’s conclusion was reached with a backside-covering “low confidence” assessment, according to the Journal.
Still, it was an indication that someone, somewhere in the DOE had decided that maybe, just maybe, the fact that a killer, never-seen-before virus had sprung up in the same area of China where a research facility conducted work on killer, never-seen-before viruses might not be just a coincidence.
The FBI has reached the same conclusion — that the virus jumped out of a Chinese lab — with “moderate confidence,”
It’s an idea so obvious that even the liberal comedian Jon Stewart has acknowledged it.
And the Department of Energy might not seem like an obvious source for authoritative statements about Chinese virus labs, but at National Review, Jim Geraghty has an enlightening piece about just how strong the DOE report is. It’s well worth a read.
But not everyone in U.S. intelligence is convinced, according to the Journal’s report:
“Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided,” the Journal reported.
For whatever it’s worth — which is not much — the Chinese government has blasted the report, according to The New York Times.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman has demanded that the U.S. “stop defaming China,” according to the Times.
Right. With almost 7 million dead worldwide, thanks to COVID-19, including more than 1 million in the U.S., the biggest thing we need to worry about is whether the Beijing government’s feelings are hurt by anyone stating the obvious.
That, clearly, isn’t a concern to Van Drew.
“We’re going to dig in the House of Representatives,” he said. “The House really wants to know true answers. These are some of the things we talked about even during the campaign. It’s enough. People are tired. They want a government that tells them the truth. They want a government that works for them. We don’t work for the government.
“I hate to say it this way, this is sick stuff.”
He then slammed Fauci for his flip-flopping positions on masking, his statements about the efficacy of COVID vaccines, and his failures to be forthright about the degree the U.S. helped fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the research facility in the Chinese province where the virus began.
And what he said next amounted to a warning shot for Fauci, and the rest of the Biden administration. The House GOP majority is determined to learn the truth, he said.
“It’s been lie after lie, misinformation after misinformation. And it’s about time we crack this egg open and really find what’s actually going on,” Van Drew said.
“You know what most hurtful about Wuhan? Not only did the Chinese, and we know the real truth, poison the world and the United States, I mean, let’s just tell the truth. Hopefully, it was an accident. But not only did they do this, but they lied about it. And we have an administration that doesn’t have the guts to go forward and get the truth out of them.
“And we paid for it. That’s the worst part of all. We paid for the damn lab.”
And the country is paying the price yet again — in the families that lost loved ones, in disrupted lives, in disrupted education, and in a ruptured trust between the American people and their health authorities. (Is there any American with a nickel’s worth of sense who will take the word of the Centers for Disease Control at face value now? Even liberals have to know better.)
It wasn’t all that long ago that the “lab leak” idea was labeled in the province of “conspiracy theorists” and stamped out by the lords of social media.
But reality has a way of asserting itself — as the persistent, murderous failures of socialism prove — and even intelligence agencies in the Biden administration are offering the possibility that the pandemic wasn’t natural at all.
As a Republican and a member of the House GOP Doctors Caucus, Van Drew diagnosed the situation perfectly: Americans are sick of being lied to.
With a Republican majority in the House, there’s at least a chance now that the truth will be the cure.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
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