Calls for Dr. Anthony Fauci to resign or be fired have intensified over the infectious disease expert’s continuously shifting positions.
“Dr. Fauci represents everything that President Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address: the scientific-technical elite steering the country toward their own ends,” said Republican Rep. Warren Davidson, who introduced the Fauci Incompetence Requires Early Dismissal Act earlier this month.
“Under Dr. Fauci’s guidance, Americans have lost confidence in the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, leading to confusion and serious government overreach that has threatened Americans’ livelihoods and freedoms,” Davidson said in a statement.
Republicans have zeroed in on Fauci’s admission that the National Institutes of Health sent $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help study if bat coronaviruses could be transmittable to humans.
WHY FAUCI IS SUDDENLY WILLING TO ENTERTAIN THE COVID-19 LAB LEAK THEORY
The controversy comes as GOP Rep. Guy Reschenthaler revealed this month that he discovered the Obama administration had funneled $1.1 million to the Wuhan lab through the EcoHealth Alliance. Reschenthaler is also calling for Fauci’s dismissal.
“He has been wrong, intentionally deceptive, and inconsistent throughout this entire pandemic. A few examples of Fauci’s failures include claiming there was very little risk to Americans in January of 2020, opposing President Trump’s China travel ban, then crediting it with saving lives, and wrongly predicting an explosion of cases in Texas after Gov. Abbott lifted the state mask mandates,” Reschenthaler said in a Fox News interview Tuesday.
“It is long past time for Dr. Fauci to stop talking to the American public. Fauci should resign or be fired immediately.”
Speaking at a Poynter event over the weekend, Fauci admitted he was now not certain that COVID-19’s origin was natural.
“No, actually. I am not convinced about that. I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,” Fauci said. “Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out. So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus.”
The comments were a departure from his thoughts last May, when he expressed more confidence in the pandemic’s natural origin.
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” Fauci said at the time.
“Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” he added.
The doctor’s change of heart also came under fire from Chinese state media, which accused Fauci of hyping a “groundless narrative.”
“Fauci attempted to hype the old and groundless narrative that the virus was leaked from a lab in Wuhan,” Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin wrote. “Fauci says ambiguously, but he knows he is fanning a huge lie against China. Rumors and slander against China can be seen everywhere in the US media, and politicians lie about China without any bottom line.”
China has continuously denied the suggestion that COVID-19 could have originated in one of its labs, despite suspicion from some that the country was being intentionally deceitful.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“This is a blatant lie, a conspiracy created by US intelligence agencies and the media outlet to slander China, and China has denied it. Is it a coincidence that Fauci repeated such lines?” Hu said.
