OPINION:
The June 18 bombshell from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is as damning an indictment of America’s legacy media as it is of Anthony Fauci.
Supported by newly declassified records, ODNI now accuses Dr. Fauci of funding dangerous coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, secretly steering intelligence assessments toward a natural-origin narrative, ruthlessly suppressing dissent and misleading Congress about his contacts with intelligence officials.
Yet the same media organizations that canonized Dr. Fauci during the pandemic emergency now refuse to treat these charges seriously. Here is how serious this is:
• COVID-19 killed more than 1.2 million Americans and more than 7 million people worldwide. The World Health Organization estimates roughly 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 alone.
• A University of Southern California model put the pandemic’s total cost to the United States at $14 trillion through 2023. The International Monetary Fund estimated cumulative global output losses of nearly $13.8 trillion through 2024.
• Let’s not forget the closed schools, delayed cancer screenings, missed medical treatments, elderly Americans isolated in their final months, mental health collapse, substance abuse, family breakdown and a generation of children set back by lockdown madness.
In April 2020, on Fox News, I told Maria Bartiromo that the virus almost certainly came from China’s Wuhan bioweapons lab. For that, the media ridiculed me.
Now the FBI agrees with me. The Department of Energy and the CIA have reached similar conclusions.
Enter stage left, Anthony Fauci. If the virus came from the Wuhan lab, Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases almost certainly funded its creation.
Fact: Dr. Fauci’s federal grant to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance says researchers cultured SARS-related bat coronaviruses, inserted spike genes from other viruses into viral backbones and tested the resulting viruses in mice engineered with human ACE2 receptors.
Some constructs produced lethal infections. Some showed greater viral growth. The stated purpose included helping design vaccines and therapeutics against potentially emerging viruses.
Talk about a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein — or simply Dr. Fauci playing God. The cover-up was worse.
Dr. Daszak helped organize the February 2020 Lancet statement branding any suggestion of a non-natural origin as a “conspiracy theory.”
That was not prestigious science. It was a conflicted grant recipient protecting Dr. Fauci’s funding trail back to Wuhan.
Then came the now-infamous “Proximal Origin” paper by Kristian Andersen and co-authors. On Jan. 31, 2020, Dr. Andersen warned Dr. Fauci that the virus appeared to be engineered. The next day, Dr. Fauci, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar and the eventual “Proximal Origin” authors joined an emergency call.
The result was a paper claiming that SARS-CoV-2 was neither a laboratory construct nor “purposefully manipulated.” Dr. Fauci then cited that paper from the White House podium as if it were independent proof of the natural origin of the virus.
That was the laundering operation: Dr. Fauci was warned, he joined the private discussions, “Proximal Origin” supplied the scientific-looking cover, and Dr. Fauci used it publicly to bury the Wuhan lab trail — without disclosing his own fingerprints on the Wuhan research.
Meanwhile, the media did not ask the right or tough questions. They simply reinforced the Fauci narrative.
The Washington Post characterized Sen. Tom Cotton’s call for investigating the Wuhan lab as a “debunked” conspiracy theory. NPR told its audience that a laboratory accident was “virtually impossible.”
CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and their fellow travelers treated lab-origin skeptics such as myself as cranks, racists, hacks or Trump stooges.
These Trump derangement syndrome media spinsters understood the politics. The pandemic was damaging President Trump.
If the American people had learned before the 2020 election that Dr. Fauci’s agency had financed the gain-of-function research that may have created the Wuhan virus — and that a lab leak was a serious, even leading, explanation — the entire script would have flipped.
Mr. Trump’s early travel restrictions on China would have looked prudent rather than xenophobic. Communist China, not Mr. Trump, would have been blamed for the catastrophe. Dr. Fauci would have faced questions about funding, oversight, conflicts and concealment.
Instead, St. Fauci was showered with magazine covers, television adulation and celebrity.
With the ODNI big reveal, it is time for Congress to subpoena all those in the bureaucracy, the scientific community and the media that hid the truth from us.
Autopen be damned; it is time for St. Fauci to be held accountable for his sins.
• Peter Navarro is the White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. www.peternavarro.com
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