Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was on fire Wednesday during the first COVID select subcommittee investigating the origins of Covid-19, where former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said he was "sidelined" from internal debates over the origins of the virus, and that former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci didn't appreciate Redfield's support for the theory that it emerged from a lab.
"This was an a priori decision that there’s one point of view that we’re going to put out there, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it is going to be sidelined," said Redfield. "And as I say, I was only the CDC director, and I was sidelined."
The 71-year-old Redfield told Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) that his support for the lab leak theory likely prompted his exclusion.
"I think I made it very clear in January [2020] to all of them why we had to aggressively pursue this," he said. "And I let them know as a virologist that I didn’t see that this was anything like SARS or MERS. … And they knew that was how I was thinking."
Jordan then focused the conversation to two top Fauci advisers - Dr. Kristian Andersen and Dr. Robert Garry - who suddenly changed their stance on lab leak theory. The two notably emailed Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020 where they suggested that anomalies in the virus pointed to a non-natural origin. According to Anderson, the virus had "unusual features" that "(potentially) look engineered," and that other scientists "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
Jordan went on a tear...
"So three days after they say it came from a lab, they changed their position, and the only intervening event was a conference call with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins. Again, a call that Mr. Redfield (CDC Director at the time) was not allowed to be on ... And then three months later, Shazam! They get 9 million bucks from Dr. Fauci. Why, isn't that something?"
Watch (and consider following @VigilantFox):
Meanwhile, lawyers have claimed that statements by Fauci under oath aren't credible due to contradicting evidence.
As The Epoch Times notes,
That includes the claim that Fauci didn’t think he had ever met with Dr. Ralph Baric, an American virologist who helped perform risky research on bat coronaviruses in China.
“I know who he is. I doubt if I’ve ever met him,” Fauci said during the late 2022 deposition—the first time he answered questions under oath since the pandemic began.
Fauci acknowledged the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he headed until around the New Year, provided funding for Baric.
“But you don’t remember ever meeting him in person?” he was asked.
“I don’t recall. I could have met him. I run into several thousands of scientists that we refer to, but I don’t recall, certainly, having a relationship with him,” Fauci responded.
But Fauci’s official calendar lists a one-on-one meeting with Baric on Feb. 11, 2020. And a newly revealed message from a professor who recounted Baric’s account of the meeting showed they talked about man-made virus combinations.
“I talked to Ralph for a long time last night. He sounds beat,” Matt Frieman, a University of Maryland professor, wrote in a Feb. 18, 2020, message. “He said he sat in Fauci’s office talking about the outbreak and chimeras.”
A chimera is a combination of viruses.
The materials, unearthed from Freedom of Information Act requests from the nonprofits OpentheBooks.com, Judicial Watch, and U.S. Right to Know, and other evidence, including a 2020 email of talking points for Fauci that mentioned Baric being “on our team,” show that “Dr. Fauci’s testimony on this point is not credible,” the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana told a federal court in the new filing.
Fauci also claimed that he was not “100 percent certain” of the name of Dr. Shi Zhengli, known for her experiments on bat viruses in China. “I get sometimes confused with Asian names,” Fauci testified.
“Yet Dr. Shi Zhengli, the so-called ‘bat woman,’ is world-renowned as the researcher who may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and has been so since the beginning of the pandemic, and the name ‘Shi’ is included in the title of the article that Dr. Fauci forwarded to Dr. Hugh Auchincloss after midnight on February 1, 2020. Dr. Fauci’s testimony is not credible on this point,” Andrew Bailey and Jeff Landry, the attorneys general, wrote.
Fauci also repeatedly said in the deposition that he could not recall details about a secret phone call, held after he and deputies discussed how the NIAID had funded coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, China, where the first COVID-19 cases were detected. Shortly after the existence of the call became public, though, Fauci told USA Today, “I remember it very well.”
“Dr. Fauci’s testimony about lack of recall is not credible,” the lawyers said.
They also noted that when Fauci did characterize the call, he said that it involved a “good faith discussion back and forth between people who knew each other” and that “the general feeling among the participants on the call is that they wanted to get down to the truth and not wild speculation about things.” After the call, a number of participants wrote papers decrying the theory that COVID-19 started in a lab.
“Dr. Fauci thus seeks to have his cake and eat it too—he claims both to remember little or nothing of what was said on the call, and to clearly remember that the entire discussion was done in good faith and without any bias,” the attorneys general said. “In any event, subsequent communications and events make clear that Dr. Fauci’s testimony on this point is not credible.”
The filing was issued to U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, who is overseeing a lawsuit brought against the federal government for its censorship campaign with Big Tech firms.
The lawyers are asking Doughty to block the government from violating the First Amendment rights of Americans.
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