Isaac Schorr of National Review Online highlights the latest pronouncements from America’s most famous COVID-19 scold.
Dr. Anthony Fauci joined CBS This Morning on Wednesday for a segment in which he defended and misrepresented his record of public statements on the coronavirus’s origins.
“If you go back then, even though you lean towards feeling this is more likely a natural occurrence, we always felt that you gotta keep an open mind — all of us. We didn’t get up and start announcing it, but what we said: ‘Keep an open mind and continue to look.’ So I think it’s a bit of a distortion to say that we deliberately suppressed that” argued Fauci.
Unfortunately for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, a byproduct of his near constant media presence is an extensive stock of quotes that can be pointed to when he accuses others of distorting his record.
In a May 2020 interview with National Geographic, Fauci not only stated that “if you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” but also accused those of disagreed with that assessment of advancing a “circular argument.”
The month before that, Fauci used a question about the lab-leak theory to pour cold water on it, citing a single study as near-definitive evidence that the virus had emerged naturally. …
… Discussion of the lab-leak theory was censored by social media giants and dismissed by mainstream news outlets for the better part of a year based on a supposed “scientific consensus.” But it’s gained more currency in recent weeks, thanks to mounting circumstantial evidence, including new reporting that employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with the virus in the fall of 2019.
