DAVID MARCUS: Democrats love whistleblowers, unless they attack Saint Fauci
It was an amazing sight in the Senate on Wednesday, as the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, led by its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., held an explosive hearing featuring a CIA whistleblower testifying on COVID origins, and not a single Democrat bothered to even show up.
Every chair on the left of the dais sat empty as high-ranking CIA official James Erdman outlined the duplicity and lies, not just of the government during COVID, but especially of disgraced former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, which is precisely why the cowardly Democrats took the morning off.
According to Erdman, suppression of the lab leak theory, now widely accepted as how the COVID pandemic began, "was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci, injecting himself into the IC [intelligence community]."
What followed was a detailed description of how, at every turn, Fauci put scientists in oversight positions in place who not only backed up his wet-market theory, but in some cases were arguably complicit in the creation of COVID and the subsequent coverup.
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Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pulled no punches, saying the reason Fauci lied was "because he helped fund the Wuhan lab. He supported and funded gain-of-function research, and then he tried to cover it up, and then he worked to cover it up from the American people," adding, "I hope he’s indicted."
I asked Rutgers professor and molecular biologist Richard Ebright, a longtime Fauci critic, about why he thought the true story of COVID’s origins is taking so long for the public to hear. His answer was troubling.
"Misfeasance and malfeasant science administrators," Ebright told me. "Notably, [former National Institutes of Health Director] Francis Collins and Fauci, deliberately misinformed the public about the origin of COVID, and many scientists, science journalists and general journalists joined them in deliberately misinforming the public about the origin of COVID."
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Ebright is not some conspiracy theory podcaster. He is, in fact, the very type of world-class expert that Fauci deliberately banned from the official scientific conversation about COVID. Any voice opposed to the wet-market theory and the immiserating public policy of lockdown was labeled a kook.
Ebright believes all of us were intentionally misled.
"All informed persons, without exception, understood by January-February 2020 that COVID likely entered humans through a research-related incident, involving reckless gain-of-function research performed in Wuhan and enabled by U.S. government funding approved by Collins and Fauci in violation of U.S. government policies prohibiting funding for such research."
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Given all of this, and the fact that COVID impacted, in generally harmful ways, every single American citizen, it is not just shocking, but utterly unacceptable that not one Democratic senator could be bothered to even show up to Wednesday’s hearing.
A cynic might suggest that this avoidance by Democrats owed to the fact that they would have been expected to hopelessly defend Fauci, who they helped to turn into a cross between a folk hero and a religious icon, and who clearly was not straight with us.
If Fauci was just honestly wrong about the lab leak theory, that would be one thing and deserving of reputational damage. But if he was knowingly wrong, and hiding his own role in gain-of-function research, then we are in crime of the century territory.
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The absent Democratic senators are doing the only thing they can do, indeed the only thing that any of the mad authoritarians who authored our COVID response can; they are ignoring it now and pretending it didn’t happen.
Trillions of dollars lost, millions of hours of kids' education lost, family members dying alone in empty hospitals, and we are not even being offered an "Oops," much less an apology. Instead, Democrats want us to shut up about it.
I asked Ebright what the worst case scenario is if we fail to fully understand what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. He was blunt.
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"Reckless gain-of-function research continues, and continues to receive U.S. government funding," he said. "This sets the stage for a next, possibly even worse, lab-generated pandemic."
In the end, that is what all of this is really about and why the Democratic senators who played hookey should be ashamed of themselves. They would rather put America at grave risk than admit they were wrong about COVID.
So long as the Democrats remain deaf, dumb and blind as to the ever-growing allegations and evidence of Fauci’s malfeasance, the American people will never get the full story. But that doesn’t mean Republicans can’t keep discovering pieces of it.
According to Hawley, there are already enough pieces for an indictment of Fauci. And who knows what remains to be discovered?