Nearly 50 years ago, two iconic Tennesseans posed the pivotal question that led to the unveiling of one of the biggest political cover-ups in American history. Fred Thompson, then-counsel to the Watergate Committee, wrote the question for then-Sen. Howard Baker, who asked, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
Today, we must ask: What did Dr. Anthony Fauci know, and when did he know it?
The newly published emails from Buzzfeed’s FOIA request reveal something that, for the sake of this nation, we hope isn’t true: that Dr. Fauci, the famed immunologist, may have known about COVID-19’s origins since the earliest days of the pandemic. On Feb. 1, 2020, well before COVID-19 raged through the United States, Fauci received an email from Dr. Kristian Andersen, a California virologist, who discovered a genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Other emails from that same day reveal Fauci was perhaps concerned that the gain-of-function research experiments in Wuhan could potentially be tied back to funding from his employer, the U.S. taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health. Fauci circulated a paper with his colleagues about gain-of-function research into bat coronaviruses authored by none other than Dr. Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist known for conducting such research.
In public, however, Fauci repeatedly dismissed concerns that COVID-19 was man-made, despite being warned early on that COVID-19 may have been engineered.
If Fauci suspected in early February that COVID-19 could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, why did he repeatedly downplay that possibility and push the narrative that it came from a wet market? Could it be because the Wuhan Institute of Virology received $600,000 of funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the very organization Fauci runs?
Interestingly, Dr. Peter Daszak, whose organization funneled that grant money from the NIAID to the Wuhan Institute, sent Fauci an email in April thanking him “for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” This exchange came just days after Fauci publicly stated, “The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Recent reports indicate that Beijing knew about COVID-19 well before it alerted the world. These reports rightfully infuriate every American, and truthfully every person on this planet, whose lives have been completely altered the past 15 months. And now, we discover that America’s top doctor leading our COVID-19 response may have also known about COVID-19’s origins from the very beginning.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis last year to provide oversight of our nation’s response to COVID-19. As the sole physician appointed to this committee on day one, I have repeatedly urged Jim Clyburn, the Democratic chairman of the committee, to investigate COVID-19’s origins and the Chinese Communist Party’s role in covering up the pandemic. Clyburn has repeatedly refused my requests.
It is well past time for Fauci to testify before this committee under oath and tell us the truth. It’s time for people to know: What did Dr. Fauci know, and when did he know it?
Mark Green represents Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a physician, former healthcare CEO, and U.S. Army Special Operations veteran. He is a member of the Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
