Monday, FNC host Tucker Carlson said the possibility that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci had a role in research that could have led to the spread of COVID-19 to humans warranted a criminal investigation.
Carlson offered a theory that the coronavirus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and Fauci had signed off on funding of gain-of-function research on viruses like COVID-19.
Funding for that type of research had been under a moratorium in the United States.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: How do we assess the Biden administration’s response to COVID? Well, here’s one marker. It tells you pretty much everything that the White House that is supposedly so committed to science, chose as its head COVID coordinator, a man with no background at all in Science or Medicine. His name is Jeffrey Zients.
Zients ran Joe Biden’s presidential transition team. That’s his qualification.
He is a former management consultant from Bain who sat on the Board of Facebook. Jeffrey Zients is a political operative. That’s who is overseeing COVID response for Joe Biden.
The good news is because Jeffrey Zients is nothing close to being an actual scientist, he doesn’t talk like one. Occasionally, he says things whose significance the rest of us can understand clearly.
Listen to Jeffrey Zients from CNN yesterday and it becomes very clear how the White House understands this pandemic. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEFF ZIENTS, WHITE HOUSE COVID-19 RESPONSE COORDINATOR: The light at the end of the tunnel is brighter and brighter. Let’s keep up our guard. Let’s follow the CDC guidance and the CDC guidance across time will allow vaccinated people more and more privileges to take off that mask.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: There it is. “The CDC guidance across time will allow vaccinated people more and more privileges to take off that mask,” end quote. A sentence like that raises so many questions, it is kind of hard to know where to start. But, how about here?
If vaccines work, why are any vaccinated people wearing masks ever anywhere? Seriously, Jeffrey Zients should be required to explain that slowly and with numbers so the rest of us who didn’t serve on the Board of Facebook can understand. No one has asked him to explain that, of course, he hasn’t. Nor has anyone asked Jeffrey Zients just how effective masks are at preventing the spread of COVID-19.
Our public health authorities act as though masks are absolutely critical, but are they absolutely critical? Where are the serious studies that prove that? Do they exist? If they do exist, is there a reason they are being hidden from the rest of us?
And finally, when did masklessness become a privilege? For thousands of years until about 12 months ago, masklessness was the global status quo. Virtually everyone on Earth lived without masks and that was not considered weird. Masks were weird. They were unhealthy and menacing.
Yet, Jeffrey Zients has just informed us that things have changed. Going forward not wearing a mask, even after you’ve been vaccinated is quote, “a privilege,” a Scooby snack, a gold star, a pat on the head that may or may not be granted to you exclusively by the Democratic Party on the basis of no science, but purely because they’re in charge and you’re not, and that’s called public health. And it’s absolutely critical to the existence of our species that you comply with it reflexively without asking questions or thinking about it.
And this will all continue, Jeffrey Zients explained, quote “across time.” What does that mean exactly? How long will this terrifyingly irrational exercise continue? For the answer to that question, we go now to a man even more partisan than Jeffrey Zients.
Here’s the nation’s most highly credentialed political operative, Tony Fauci, letting you know that actually, this mask thing is never going to end.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHUCK TODD, MSNBC HOST: But is the mask going to be something we have with us in a seasonal aspect?
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES: You know, that’s quite possible. I think people have gotten used to the fact that wearing masks clearly if you look at the data diminishes respiratory diseases. So it is conceivable that as we go on a year, or two or more from now that during certain seasonal periods, when you have respiratory-borne viruses like the flu, people might actually elect to wear masks to diminish the likelihood that you’ll spread these respiratory borne diseases.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: A year or two or more from now, in other words, never. You’re never taking off the mask. Get ready for a lifetime of filthy wet cotton covering your mouth, reduced oxygen flow to your brain, and a world where every stranger looks the same because no one has a face.
When Kamala Harris and her husband kissed the other day while wearing masks, they were giving you a preview of your daughter’s wedding. In a masked world, human beings never really touch each other.
Is that public health? No, it’s not public health, it is a kind of punishment.
Tony Fauci is punishing the country, you, us, everyone. The question is why is he doing that? Maybe he likes it. That’s possible.
But you’ve got to think that at least part of Tony Fauci’s authoritarian germ hysteria is a cover for something else. Could it be that Tony Fauci is trying to divert attention from himself and his own personal role in the COVID-19 pandemic?
Now, what do we mean by that? We cannot recommend more strongly a new piece by Nicholas Wade who for more than 50 years has been one of the preeminent science writers in the world. For 30 years, Nicholas Wade worked for The New York Times. He edited the science section there, but this piece did not run in “The New York Times,” it ran on “Medium.” And the piece explains where this virus almost certainly came from.
In it, Nicholas Wade makes it clear that more than any other single living American, Tony Fauci is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Wade lays out a nearly insurmountably large amount of evidence that this virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Central China. It seemed to make sense, this show and others had raised the possibility from the early days of the pandemic. But this piece, all but proves it.
At the time the outbreak began last fall, the Wuhan lab was conducting experiments on how to make bat viruses infectious to human beings. Those experiments were funded by American tax dollars. Those experiments were — their funding — approved and directed by Tony Fauci in Washington — by Tony Fauci.
That is hard to believe, but it’s true, and the piece lays it out.
Many of the Wuhan experiments fell under the direction of a Chinese researcher called Shi Zhengli, known as the “bat lady.” She was China’s leading expert on bat-borne viruses. Her job was to genetically engineer coronaviruses so that they infect human beings and do so as easily as possible.
This work, Nicholas Wade notes involved, quote, ” … doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronavirus infect human cells.” Now, why was this research going on? We’ll have to ask the scientist who did it.
But the fact remains, these were some of the most dangerous experiments ever conducted by mankind, and yet we know that China was not taking necessary safety precautions and we should not be surprised by that.
Several years ago, American diplomatic cables warned about low and lax standards at the Wuhan lab. In fact, the Wuhan facility was classified as a Biosafety Level 2 Laboratory. What does that mean? Well, according to Richard Ebright, who is a molecular biologist at Rutgers, that is approximately the same level of safety that you would find in a dentist’s office in America.
So that lab, conducting research experiments on the coronavirus and how to make it transmissible to human beings resulted almost certainly in the infection of a lab researcher and the virus spread from there.
The first coronavirus virus patients in fact did not come from the so-called wet market as we heard, that was a lie. The first patients of the coronavirus in fact were employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at the lab.
So once again, why would the Wuhan lab be conducting experiments like that in the first place? Well, we know that Tony Fauci had authorized payment for the research. For five years, from 2014 to 2019, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases which Tony Fauci runs and has for decades, pumped money to a group called the EcoHealth Alliance.
The EcoHealth Alliance is run by man whose name you may recognize, Dr. Peter Daszak. Daszak contracted with Dr. Shi to conduct gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan lab.
Just before the pandemic became public knowledge on December 9th, 2019, Peter Daszak sat for an interview that was streamed online. In that interview, Daszak bragged about how easy it is to manipulate coronaviruses in lab experiments.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. PETER DASZAK, ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE: Coronavirus is a pretty good, I mean, you’re a virologist, you know all this stuff, but you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. The spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus, zoonotic risk.
So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this, insert into backbone of another virus right and do some work in the lab.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, just days after that was shot, it became clear that this new version of coronavirus, this novel coronavirus, what we now call COVID-19 was running rampant through Wuhan, then China and then the world.
Since then, since the pandemic began, Peter Daszak, not surprisingly, has appeared on virtually every media platform available to him to deny in the most strenuous and dismissive terms the Wuhan lab could be in any way linked to the outbreak since, of course, he has very personal motives for claiming that, quote: “The idea that this virus escaped from the lab is just pure baloney,” he said last year, but that was a lie. It’s not pure baloney, and a lot of smart people knew that right away.
One of those People as Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute at Harvard and M.I.T. She bravely wrote a paper about how the coronaviruses genome hadn’t changed much over time, and that was odd, because that genome had gone through trillions of replications.
According to Chan, that fact imply that the virus was designed for human-to-human transmission from the outset. The former Director of the CDC also clearly understood this and he, too, argued that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. ROBERT REDFIELD, FORMER DIRECTOR, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION: I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped. Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine.
Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Millions of people have died of COVID-19. So it’s not a matter of score-settling or blame assignment to figure out where it came from. If you want to prevent the next global pandemic, you have to figure out how this one started.
And so the World Health Organization said it would get to the bottom of it. The World Health Organization, of course, is beholden to China, and so it tried to hide the basic facts of the origins of this pandemic. And to hide those facts, WHO appointed none other than Peter Daszak as the only America-based representative on the investigative team looking into where the virus came from.
In what turned out to be a sham report, that team concluded that it is quote, “extremely unlikely” that the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Again, that’s not true.
The WHO’s investigation in the origins of the virus was fraudulent and that matters to public health globally. But one thing you’ll notice is that Tony Fauci did not say that. Why? Because once again, he is implicated in it personally. The gain-of-function research that Peter Daszak was bragging about in the video we just showed you had in fact, been banned explicitly by the U.S. government.
There was a federal moratorium on the funding of exactly the kind of gain-of-function experiments that went on at the Wuhan lab due to disastrous effects. So why didn’t the U.S. government halt its funding of the lab in Wuhan? That is a central question and Nicholas Wade, to his great credit, looked into it. And here’s what he found, quote, “Someone wrote a loophole into the moratorium. The moratorium specifically barred funding of any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on page two of the moratorium document states that quote, ‘an exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the U.S. government funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.'”
And that’s exactly the loophole that was exploited. Who signed off on this? Tony Fauci, possibly, along with Francis Collins, the Director of the NIH invoked that special exemption in order to keep funding the Wuhan lab and the deadly experiments that were going on there, the experiments that clearly went so wrong.
According to Richard Ebright quote, “Unfortunately, the NIAID Director (that would be Fauci) and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to pause, preposterously asserting that the exempted research was, quote, ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security and thereby nullifying the pause.'”
This wouldn’t have happened if Tony Fauci didn’t allow it to happen. That is clear.
It’s an amazing story. It is a shocking story.
In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation currently underway into Tony Fauci’s role in the COVID pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country and changed it forever. So why isn’t there a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in this pandemic?
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor