Pressure is increasing on Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to the president, to appear again before House committees and answer questions about the origins of the Covid-19 virus.
Republicans are demanding unredacted versions of the trove of e-mails be released and that Fauci appear and answer questions about a possible lab leak early in the pandemic.
House Republican whip Steve Scalise, R-LA, and Representative James Comer, R-KY, recently wrote to the House Oversight Committee and House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus and explained it was “imperative” that Fauci appear before them again.
Reps. Comer and Scalise emphasized that full access to the e-mails and further questioning of Fauci is crucial to determining the origin of the Covid-19 virus.
“It is now imperative that Dr. Fauci come before our Committees to provide information related to the origins of the novel Coronavirus as well as the U.S. government’s role in funding research that may have contributed to the development of the novel Coronavirus,” they wrote.
“The American people have a right to know what our government knew about the origins of the pandemic and when it was known.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, also is taking the lead by demanding more information from Fauci, the U.S. government, Big Tech, and Facebook.
Cruz contends that the e-mails show a systemic and calculated effort to “mislead the American people.” The 866 pages of Fauci’s e-mails were recently released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.
“This e-mail dump that came out makes clear that this is not just being sloppy, it is systematic and systemically an effort to mislead the American people,” Cruz maintains.
“He wasn’t doing it alone, but he was doing it with much of the U.S. government behind him and with Facebook and Big Tech operating as an extension of the U.S. government to silence any views that disagreed not with the science,” said the Texas senator.
Cruz charges that Dr. Fauci wasn’t looking for or interested in the science.
“He was suppressing the science…trying to silence anything that disagreed with the political narrative that was convenient that he was pushing at that point,” Cruz said.
Calls for unredacted e-mails
Reps. Scalise and Comer, Sen. Cruz and other critics have seized upon the released e-mails insisting that Fauci knew more about “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology than he stated.
Comer and Scalise have called on the committee’s chairwoman and chairman, demanding the public release of unredacted versions of Fauci’s e-mails.
After the e-mail release, former President Donald Trump said that the e-mails showed that he was right all along. He also repeated demands that China pays ten trillion dollars for its role in causing “death and destruction.”
“Now everyone, even the so-called ‘enemy,’ are beginning to say that President Trump was right about the China Virus coming from the Wuhan Lab,” the former president said in a release.
“The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore.”
