Peter Navarro, who was President Trump’s trade adviser when the COVID-19 pandemic began, charged in an interview that Dr. Anthony Fauci is the “mastermind of a cover-up.”
Navarro said Fauci lied to the American people about the origin of the pandemic and recruited scientists to produce a paper declaring the claim that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab was an unfounded conspiracy theory.
“Somebody needs to grab him by the nape of the neck and drag him to Capitol Hill and put him in the hot seat,” Navarro told Steve Cortes in a Newsmax TV interview Monday night.
“Let Rand Paul and everybody else have at it with him. Get to the bottom of this. There is blood on this man’s hands. He is not a hero. He is not a saint.”
Navarro said that the first time he met Fauci was Jan. 28, 2020, in the Situation Room at the White House.
“I immediately got into a strong argument with him. I was for the travel ban. The president sent me there to argue it. He was dead set against it. I won that particular argument,” he said.
Navarro contended that the travel ban saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
“If we would have listened to Fauci a lot of people would be dead right now,” he said.
Later, Navarro said, he and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., began presenting evidence that the virus came from a lab.
“And all we got was a raft of criticism,” he said.
Now, amid mounting evidence, even Fauci has admitted that he can’t rule out a lab leak.
“Fauci was part of the coverup to try to shut me and Cotton up,” Navarro said.
At the press briefings, Fauci “basically denied that this thing came from the lab, lied to the American people when he knew it probably did.”
Further, Navarro said, Fauci “recruited” scientists to declared that the virus had a natural origin and to dismiss anyone promoting the lab-leak theory as a nutty conspiracist.
“Fauci was mastermind of a cover up,” Navarro said. “The cover up is always worse than the crime.”
The editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch contended Wednesday that “the entire allegation” of a cover up is based on emails recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in which “Fauci and another scientist discussed that theory but didn’t publicly endorse it — not exactly a smoking gun.”
However, one of the emails from a virologist shows Fauci was warned that the novel coronavirus had possibly been “engineered” at the same time he was publicly downplaying the lab-leak theory.
Fauci also received a “personal thank you” for backing the natural origin theory from Peter Daszak, the head of a nonprofit that used a $3.4 million government grant to fund research at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Post-Dispatch board charged that the “political right” is painting Fauci as a “villian,” concocting “a new spate of false allegations aimed in part at political fundraising.”
“When the history of the pandemic is written, Dr. Anthony Fauci will undoubtedly be recognized as a hero in the story — the nation’s top infectious disease expert who fought to get America to understand the coronavirus threat and respond to it based on the science, while gingerly handling a president who often seemed determined to make it all worse,” the board wrote.
Accusing critics of being “anti-science extremists” who are “willing to put self-serving politics ahead of the public good,” the paper insisted the lab-leak theory “remains unlikely.”
However, last month Fauci was asked in an interview if, after mounting evidence of a lab leak, he was “still confident” that the virus evolved naturally.
“No, actually … I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,” Fauci said.
And last week he admitted to lawmakers that NIH had allocated $600,000 to the Wuhan lab to fund research on whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans. The money was sent via Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.
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