Republican House Minority Whip Representative Steve Scalise said in a memo drafted by Republican leadership on the House Select Committee on the Covid-19 pandemic that Dr. Deborah Birx’s closed-door testimony before the committee confirms the world was “misled” on the origins of the coronavirus vaccine.
The memo provides “key takeaways” from Birx’s recent testimony, given on Oct. 12 and 13, which provides insight into the U.S. government’s pandemic response and the origins of the virus.
Her testimony confirms that the Wuhan Institute of Virology engaged in research supported by the United States.
The memo highlights several revelations made by Birx, including that “neither the federal government or state and local governments are doing everything that they could at this moment,” along with saying there were preventable deaths.
Birx’s testimony confirmed to the committee that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was using American taxpayer-supported gain-of-function research.
It was recently revealed that the National Institute of Health (NIH) gave the Wuhan lab the funds used for gain-of-function research conducted on bats. Gain-of-function methods involve manipulating viruses to make them more infectious.
Covid-19 origins
Scalise says that “President Biden and the Democrats have politicized Covid from the start and refused to acknowledge its origins from China. Republicans have sounded the alarm on these issues for well over a year, and Dr. Birx’s closed-door testimony confirms that the world was misled.”
“Perhaps most disturbingly, she acknowledged that the Biden Administration in many cases has contributed to vaccine hesitance and could be doing more to work with governors to prevent deaths. The Biden Administration must be held accountable for their mismanagement of this pandemic,” said Scalise.
In her testimony, Birx reportedly criticized the administration’s strategy of blaming the continuing pandemic on the unvaccinated.
According to the memo, Birx stated, “…You don’t single out a group and blame what occurs on that group. It is your responsibility to get in with that group, to talk to that group, to listen to that group and come to a place where that group can agree to an understanding on the role of vaccines.”
Birx continued, saying, “We should not be stigmatizing and further putting people in a box that implies that they somehow don’t have — that they’re somehow not processing the information. We never alienate and further alienate individuals in communities by stigmatizing them for being in one position or another.”
Birx reportedly also aimed China’s role in suppressing information on the virus to the World Health Organization (WHO) at the start of the pandemic.
Birx said she believes “that there had to be evidence of human-to-human transmission weeks before the WHO or the world was notified” and noted that China “misled” the entire world on the virus.
Additionally, Birx said she believes that China gave false information to the WHO. The misinformation resulted in a delay of accurate details of two weeks before worldwide confirmation of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.
In previous testimony, Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor, denied to Congress that the NIH was funding any gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci’s denials drew accusations of lying from Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky. Fauci’s testimony is now being reexamined to see if any laws have been violated.
Fauci’s denials have received increasing scrutiny after a letter from an NIH top official, Dr. Richard Enbright, was released that “corrects untruthful assertions” by former NIH head Dr. Frances Collins and Dr. Fauci. Collins recently announced he would be leaving his role at the end of the year, saying that his resignation had nothing to do with the origins of the Covid-19 controversy.
