By Graham J Noble
Anthony Fauci, the former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was better known to most Americans as the federal government’s point man on pandemic response. To hear him recount his version of how the COVID-19 outbreak was dealt with, however, one would think Fauci had little to no influence over any of the decision-making or the improvised science used to justify those decisions. Such was the case when the doctor appeared before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on June 3.
It is difficult to forget the protracted fight over the originsof the virus that caused a virtual shutdown of the global economy. Every American remembers the lengths to which the leaders of the medical community and large swaths of the media went to persuade the nation that COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans in a so-called Chinese wet market. Alongside that narrative, an enormous amount of effort was expended trying to silence those who expressed a suspicion that this particular strain of COVID was developed in a Chinese virology lab and then escaped.
This latter theory of the virus’ origin has gained significant ground since the height of the pandemic. But there is still no denying that the powers-that-be wanted it suppressed. At his hearing, Fauci insisted he had nothing to do with the attempts to kill what became known as the “lab leak” theory. Still, the former NIAID director is on record supporting the animal-to-human transmission narrative. It seems unlikely that the doctor was unaware that differing voices were being ridiculed, shouted down, censored, and, in a few........