OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Republicans will launch an investigation into Dr. Anthony Fauci if they win back control of the U.S. House in November’s midterm elections, says Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan.
During an interview on Sunday Morning Futures, Jordan said Republicans will “uncover” what Fauci knew about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, an ally to Jordan, released Fauci’s financial records over the weekend. The records appear to show that Fauci and his wife have a combined net worth of around $10 million.
Records also showed that Fauci and his wife were paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend four galas and ceremonies — three of them virtual — during the pandemic.
Jordan argued that these revelations and recently released emails prove there’s a “need to investigate Fauci.”
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this,” Jordan said, adding that his colleagues would push for a congressional investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
“Because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab,” Jordan argued. “The top scientists in the country were saying it came from a lab. One scientist says we got the notes now from the conference call on February 1st. One scientist says, ‘I don’t see how this can happen in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab.’”
“And yet just in a matter of days, they changed their position, write the article that appears in Nature of Medicine Magazine, which then gets cited in the now-famous letter The Lancet, which became the gospel for the fact that Fauci can go out and tell people it didn’t come from a lab when in fact they knew it did,” Jordan continued.
“The interesting thing is. We point this out. We just learned this last week, the two doctors who were most adamant that this thing came from a lab early on: one is Dr. Kristian Anderson. On Jan. 31, 2020, he says this to Dr. Fauci in an email: ‘Virus looks engineered. Virus not consistent with evolutionary theory.’ So, he knew it came from a lab,” he added.
“They changed their position,” Jordan argued. “And a few months later, guess what? They get an $8.9 million, both him and Dr. [Robert] Garry – the guy who said it couldn’t happen naturally.”
WATCH:
Jordan’s comments came after
Republican leaders on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees have released excerpts of emails that they say reveal National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci knew that COVID-19 may have been intentionally modified and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In a letter, GOP Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan noted a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call that included Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, where the virus’ origins were discussed.
“It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated,” the Republicans’ letter said.
The congressmen said that “it is unclear if either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever passed these warnings along to other government officials or if they simply ignored them.”
The letter said other scientists participated in the call, four of whom wrote a paper titled, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” that they sent to Fauci and Collins three days after the call.
Republicans are questioning whether Fauci and/or Collins played a role in the “lab leak” theory being dropped.
“It is unclear what, if any, new evidence was presented or if the underlying science changed in that short period of time, but after speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak,” Comer and Jordan said, adding that they do not know whether Fauci or Collins edited the paper before it was published in Nature Medicine.
One email that detailed the meeting in question came from Dr. Jeremy Farrar to Collins, where Fauci and current NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak stated that “a likely explanation” could involve “accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans[.]”
Discussing the similarities to a bat coronavirus and the very specific differences, Farrar said he “just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.”
In response, however, Collins wrote that he was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely.”
In April, just a few months later, Collins, Fauci, Tabak, and others were emailing about a “very destructive conspiracy” detailing the lab leak theory.
“I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this. But probably didn’t get much visibility,” Collins said.
“I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in time,” Fauci wrote back.
Comer and Jordan are asking HHS for information about whether Collins or Fauci warned the White House about the “lab leak theory” between Feb. 1 and Feb. 4, 2020.
