WHEN REALITY BITES: No, Sen. Durbin, Anthony Fauci Is Anything but a Hero

Viewers of Dr. Anthony Fauci's return engagement earlier this week with Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs chairman Rand Paul (R-Ky.) saw a remarkable display, put on by the formerly highest-paid federal employee.

President Joe Biden granted Fauci a comprehensive pardon for the period of Jan. 1, 2014, through Jan. 20, 2025. The pardon covered any federal offenses he may have committed during his service as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as his tenure on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the White House COVID-19 Response Team, and as Chief Medical Advisor to the President.

Despite having such a comprehensive pardon, which freed him from federal prosecutions, Fauci refused to answer 119 questions posed to him by Paul and other committee members. Most of the questions Fauci refused to answer concerned statements, motivations, and actions by him during the period covered by the pardon.

The most revealing issue involved in those questions concerned what Fauci knew and believed about the origins of the COVID-19 virus that killed more than 1 million Americans in 2020-21 and when he knew or believed it.

These particular questions were prompted by the obvious contradiction between Fauci's many claims that the virus was transmitted from bat meat sold in a meat market in Wuhan, China, and what he told his diary about the virus showing characteristics of being made in a lab. A lab like the one operated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Wuhan.

Despite Fauci's refusal to answer questions, here's how Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) described him following the hearing's conclusion:

Dr. Fauci is a deeply caring physician, a brilliant scientist, an extraordinary public servant, a humanitarian, & a patriot—whose work has helped save tens of millions of lives. It is a shame to watch him be dragged in front of Congress in the name of bogus conspiracy theories.

Durbin's comments were typical of those offered by other Democratic members of the committee. For these Democrats, Fauci is a national hero. Their fundamental problem, however, is Fauci's actual record, including what he himself wrote in his diary (which he, unbelievably, kept on his government computer, thus making it a public document!).

And now let us introduce these Democratic senators to the facts about Fauci, as compiled by Just Facts Daily (JFD). What JFD documents is a long record of Fauci double-talk, misrepresentations, and evasions:

IN FACT, Fauci funded gain-of-function research that likely caused the Covid-19 pandemic, lied about it to Congress, and repeatedly botched the response to the outbreak, potentially killing tens of millions of people. Here are the specifics:
In 2012 — 7 years before SARS-CoV-2 emerged — Fauci wrote in an academic journal that a “moratorium on gain-of-function research” for a “highly pathogenic” virus “should continue” until certain conditions are met, but “scientists working in this field might say — as indeed I have said — that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
During 2014 to 2019, Fauci’s division of the National Institutes of Health [NIH] gave $1,413,720 of U.S. taxpayer money to Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology via a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance.
On February 1, 2020 — one month after the first cases of C-19 were reported — Fauci emailed some of his colleagues that he and NIH Director Francis Collins spoke with “several highly credible scientists” who “were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates” of SARS-CoV-2, “there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted.”
In the same email, Fauci wrote, “The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”

But then look at what happened next:

One day later on February 2, virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University — who participated in the meeting with Fauci — wrote about the molecular structure of C-19, “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature,” but “in the lab it would be easy to generate” it.
Two days after that on February 4, Garry and other scientists who were in contact with Fauci and had privately written that C-19 was likely created in a lab, sent to Fauci the draft of a paper in which they claimed, “It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation.”
After that paper was formally published, Fauci touted it during an April 2020 press conference to allege that the structure of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”

A key issue in all of this was whether the federal government had directly or indirectly funded the kind of "gain-of-function" research necessary for the process of altering a naturally occurring virus to enable it to be transmitted to humans. As JFD demonstrates, Fauci strenuously and repeatedly denied that his agency provided such funding:

Testifying before Congress in 2021, Fauci denied 3 times that the NIH ever funded “gain-of-function research” at the Wuhan Institute.
In 2023, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that some of the money Fauci’s team gave to the Wuhan Institute was used to fund “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized” coronavirus strains.
Buried in a footnote, the same GAO report reveals that the research to create these coronaviruses “was not subject to” a “gain-of-function research funding pause,” and the lab conducted a “limited” experiment “to test whether the spike protein from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses” could bind “to the human ACE2 receptor,” which is exactly what SARS-CoV-2 does.
The NIH claimed that this research “could not have been the source” of the “Covid-19 pandemic” because “NIH analyzed” the “experiments” and “concluded that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses were genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2.”
However, a study published by the journal Nature in 2022 found that “SARS-CoV-2 progenitor bat viruses genetically close to SARS-CoV-2” “circulate in cave bats living” in “northern Laos,” and NIH grant documents for EcoHealth Alliance show that Fauci’s team funded “experimental work” at the Wuhan Institute to “understand the ability of bat coronaviruses to bind to human receptors” with bats from multiple locations, including “Laos.”

Ironically, Paul told reporters after the hearing that he would have accepted a simple apology from Fauci for any mistakes he may have made in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. Assuming the validity of the Biden pardon, Fauci cannot be taken to federal court for anything he did or failed to do during the relevant period. The homeland security panel is expected to approve a contempt citation for Fauci in a meeting on Aug. 5.

But there is another angle to the Fauci saga that is just beginning to play out: Fauci likely is not immune to prosecution by state authorities, including Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who told Fox News after the Paul hearing, "In light of recent reports exposed by Senator Rand Paul, we will investigate any and all potential violations of Florida law involving Anthony Fauci. Our inquiry will focus on what Fauci knew, when he knew it, and how he misled the American people. We will examine the physical and monetary harms to Floridians that may have resulted from his deceptions and determine whether his conduct exposes him to liability under state law."

Don't be surprised if other states' Attorneys-General follow Uthmeier's lead. Stay tuned. Fauci may yet get what he least wants: his day in court.

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