GOP Rep. Comer: Emails Show Fauci, Collins Knew Lab Origin of COVID Was Plausible in February 2020

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. James Comer (R-KY) discussed emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee that White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins were made aware of the prospect that COVID-19 emerged from a lab and wondered why Fauci wasn’t transparent with the public about that possibility and argued that because of missed early opportunities to investigate the origin, “the Chinese government had all this time to go in and clean their tracks, and the American people, and the world, for that matter, may never know the true origination of COVID.”

Comer said the “most pressing” question is “what did he do with the information, what happened between the time of the first emails from his advisers, around a dozen scientists and virologists that sent emails early on in early February of 2020 that said it appears that this [virus] was man-made and it appears that it leaked from the Wuhan lab. Three days later, Dr. Fauci had a conference call with these scientists who raised these concerns and he published a letter, all of the scientists then signed on the letter saying that any consideration that this was man-made or could have come from the Wuhan lab was just a conspiracy theory. Now, what changed over that three-day period and why wasn’t Dr. Fauci transparent with the Trump administration and the public about the fact that this could have, in fact, been man-made in that lab in Wuhan?”

He added, “And think about the missed opportunities in the early days…someone from the United States government could have gone in and investigated this Wuhan lab, and what we fear is, the Chinese government had all this time to go in and clean their tracks, and the American people, and the world, for that matter, may never know the true origination of COVID. But the more that we dig up, the more it looks like Dr. Fauci was trying to conceal important information.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett

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