Dr. Anthony Fauci announced this summer that he’d be stepping down from various government positions in December, in order to pursue the “next chapter” of his life and career. With his protracted farewell tour underway, I’d argue that his departure can’t come soon enough. In an interview with CBS News over the weekend, Fauci tried to blame the Trump administration for the Chinese Communist Party’s flagrant cover-up on COVID’s origins. As others have noted, his timeline here is wrong — and his view of how matters should have been investigated and settled is embarrassingly naive:
The ‘horse out of the barn,’ to borrow his phrase, was COVID itself, and it was out of the proverbial barn for months prior to Fauci’s designated antagonist — Donald Trump — began criticizing Beijing over its scandalous handling of the pandemic’s emergence. Also, the notion that the issue of COVID’s origins could have been settled among scientists, with ‘politics’ left out of it, is preposterous. The CCP reflexively punished medical professionals and scientists, among others, who spoke out in those early days. They run a closed, authoritarian government; the idea that they’d have permitted their scientists to operate with a free hand to pursue the truth is laughable. They interfered at every single step, determined to obscure and bury what happened. They’re still doing things like roughing up and arresting western journalists. Let’s also recall that Fauci himself also had a hand in diminishing the viable-to-probable ‘lab leak’ theory early on, receiving personal thanks for doing so from a man who (like the CCP) was heavily invested in the suppression of that important line of inquiry. And it was actively suppressed for quite some time.