The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held its first hearing on the origins of the pandemic on Wednesday.
Lawmakers focused on a Jan. 31, 2020, email from Scripps Research Institute virologist Dr. Kristian Andersen to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Andersen said he and several of his colleagues believed the virus could be manmade.
According to Fox News, Andersen wrote “some of COVID-19’s features look possibly engineered.” He added, “The genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Immediately, Fauci took steps to shut down the conversation about the lab leak theory among members of the science community. The following day, Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins organized a conference call with at least 11 virologists including Andersen, according to a Sunday memo from the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The memo stated, “New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal.”
In January 2022, Fox News obtained notes from the call that revealed Fauci’s deliberate decision to suppress the lab leak theory of origin. His stated reason was concern over “how the public would react to news of possible Chinese government involvement.”
According to Fox, Collins worried that “‘science and international harmony’ could be harmed and accusations of China’s involvement could distract top researchers.”
Within days of this call, several of the virologists, including Andersen, wrote a paper that supported the zoonotic theory of origin.
Fox noted that “private communications show that various drafts were sent to Fauci and Collins for approval.”
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The paper was published in Nature Medicine on Feb. 16, 2020. In August 2020, Andersen announced his lab received an $8.9 million research grant from NIAID.
Left out of the loop entirely was then-Centers for Disease Control and Protection Director Dr. Robert Redfield.
Fauci and Collins apparently had no use for Redfield, who was then and remains an advocate of the lab leak theory.
Redfield appeared before Congress on Wednesday. During questioning from Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Redfield said he had been kicked off of Twitter and called a “racist” by the Baltimore Sun.
Redfield had been a member of the coronavirus task force that was created on Jan. 29, 2020, yet Fauci allegedly excluded him from all of the virologist’s emails and conference calls.
Jordan asked former New York Times writer Nicholas Wade if any scientific evidence had come to light between Andersen’s first email to Fauci and his complete dismissal of the lab leak theory in his paper just days later.
Wade replied: “What is pertinent to me is that there’s no new scientific evidence that we can see that came available between these dates, Jan. 31 and Feb. 4.”
“Well, if you’re looking at the timeline, on May 21, just a few weeks after the Nature Medicine article had come out, two of the signatures of the original email to Dr. Fauci, that’s Dr. Andersen and Dr. [Robert] Garry, were awarded a $9 million grant for research.”
Jordan stated, “There’s 9 million reasons why they changed their mind.”
He then summed up the whole story for his colleagues. “Three days after they say it came from a lab, they changed their position and the only intervening event is a conference call with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, again a call that Mr. Redfield was not allowed to be on … and then three months later, shazam, they get $9 million bucks from Dr. Fauci. Well, isn’t that something.
“That’s why we want to talk to these guys. That’s why Chairman [Republican Rep. Brad] Wenstrup [of Ohio] wants to bring in Dr. Andersen and Dr. Garry and ask them a series of questions so we can get to the bottom of this,” Jordan said.
“Here’s the key question: I’m just a common sense guy from Ohio … I majored in economics … one of the things they tell you about is a thing called opportunity cost. So when you’re spending your time making sure that the country believes only one of these theories, you could have been doing what Dr. Redfield was doing in our government — trying to figure out how we deal with this virus.
“And what was Dr. Fauci doing?” he asked rhetorically. “He was trying to cover his backside and everybody knows it.”
“This is the highest-paid guy in our government getting all kinds of money to tell us things that were not accurate. Cause we now know U.S. tax dollars went to a lab in China, a lab that was not up to code, a lab that was doing gain of function research and that’s where this thing most definitely came from and Dr. Fauci had to prove — no, no, he can’t have that news getting out.”
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) March 8, 2023
In the video below, Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky asked Redfield if he believes Fauci excluded him because of his belief the virus had come from the Wuhan lab.
Redfield explained, “I let them know as a virologist, that I didn’t see this was anything like SARS or MERS because they never learned how to transmit human to human. I felt this virus was too infectious for humans; there was a lot of evidence that the lab published in 2014 that they put the ACE2 receptor into humanized mice so it could infect human tissue.”
“I didn’t know I was excluded. I didn’t know there was a February 1st conference call until the FOIA came out with the emails, and I was quite upset as the CDC director that I was excluded. … I was told they made a decision that they would keep this confidential until they came up with a single narrative which I will argue is antithetical to science.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC Director, says Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins excluded him from meetings because they wanted to maintain control over the narrative surrounding the origin of SARS-CoV-2:
“As a virologist, this wasn’t anything like SARS or MERS because they never… https://t.co/YF7AFWwDZ4 pic.twitter.com/xE1IRRXE6m
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023
Below, Redfield answers questions from Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
Dr. Kristian Andersen Pulled a 180 on His Stance on the Origins of COVID in Just 4 Days
January 31, 2020: “Features (potentially) look engineered,” and the genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
February 4, 2020 (After Speaking w/ Fauci): “The main… https://t.co/9F42zEHR46 pic.twitter.com/AZRmwcDY9f
— The Vigilant Fox 🦊 (@VigilantFox) March 8, 2023
The committee will no doubt ask Andersen and Garry to testify in the weeks to come. And then they will call on Fauci to explain what has become increasingly clear to all of us. At a time of great peril, he was more interested in covering up his involvement with dangerous gain of function research than he was in helping Americans navigate the deadly pandemic.
