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Dr. Anthony Fauci testified Monday before the House panel investigating the origins of COVID-19, defending pandemic-era restrictions and again sharply denying financial support for gain-of-function research with coronaviruses.
Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, took questions under oath before the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Here are seven highlights of the panel’s hearing.
Fauci fielded questions from several lawmakers on National Institutes of Health grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based organization that in turn funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. NIH includes the agency directed by Fauci for nearly 40 years, until his retirement at the end of 2022.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a suspension of funding to the EcoHealth Alliance.
COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan. The FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies reached a consensus that the virus that causes COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak there.
Before taking questions from the House panel, Fauci affirmed in his opening remarks that “according to the regulatory and operative definition, … the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
However, NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak had told the House panel that under the generic definition of gain-of-function research, NIH indeed funded such research at the Wuhan lab.
Critics of Fauci have said the NIH used EcoHealth to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is suspected to have led to the initial spread of COVID-19.
The term “gain of function” describes a risky process of making a pathogen more dangerous or contagious for the purpose of studying a response.
During the hearing, Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., asked: “Dr. Fauci, did the National Institutes of Health fund the potentially dangerous enhanced potential pandemic pathogens gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?”
Fauci replied: “I would not categorize it the way you did.”
“The National Institutes of Health gave a sub-award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded research on the surveillance on the possibility of emerging infections. I would not characterize it as dangerous gain-of-function research,” he explained.
Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, pressed Fauci about accountability for COVID-19.
“Your name is on every single grant,” Cloud told Fauci. “Yet, you absolve yourself of every single responsibility by saying it goes to this committee that has a number of people on it and it’s approved in block. So, there is no accountability for anything, any of the taxpayer dollars that are going forth.”
Fauci objected.
“We fund thousands of grants,” Fauci said. “It would be physically impossible for me to go through every single grant in a detailed way to understand it.”
Cloud followed up by asking, “Why does your signature go on it?”
Fauci replied: “Because someone has to sign off on it and you trust the expertise and the competence of the staff that go over it.”
Fauci said some of his top staff, mainly Dr. David Morens, for years a senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, violated NIH policy on public records.
Morens last month admitted to Congress that he used private email to dodge disclosure of public information about NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, the organization that worked and helped fund the Wuhan lab.
House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., pressed Fauci on the issue of his longtime senior adviser.
“Did you ever delete an official record?
Fauci replied, “No.”
Comer asked, “Dr. Fauci, did you ever conduct official business via [personal] email?”
Fauci replied: “To the best of my recollection and knowledge, I have never conducted official business via my private email.”
Comer later said there was a “troubling pattern” among Fauci’s inner circle.
Fauci said, “Using a personal email for official business violates NIH policy.”
Comer asked: “On April 28, 2020, Dr. Morens edited an EcoHealth press release regarding the grant termination. Does that violate policy?”
Fauci replied: “That was inappropriate for him to be doing that for a grantee, as a conflict of interest among other things.”
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., pressed Fauci on whether he tried to suppress the lab leak theory, quoting him.
“You have said, ‘I’ve heard these conspiracy theories and like all conspiracy theories, they’re just conspiracy theories.’ That’s what you told the American people,” Malliotakis said. “So would you like to clarify what science were you following then versus now?”
Fauci said he didn’t mean everyone was a conspiracy theorist, before launching into a scenario comparing himself to a fictional movie character played by actor Matt Damon.
“I don’t think the concept of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory,” Fauci said. “What is conspiracy is a kind of distortion of that particular subject, like it was a lab leak and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, read aloud communications from Meta executives, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, noting that the Biden administration suppressed posts about a leak from a Chinese lab.
“Why was it so important that the virus not have started in a lab?” Jordan said.
Fauci replied: “It wasn’t so important that the virus not [have started in a lab]. We don’t know.”
Jordan followed up.
“Well, it was important to someone in the Biden administration. So much so that the top people at Meta, the top people at Facebook, are asking, ‘Why are we getting all this pressure to downplay the lab leak theory?’” the Ohio Republican said.
Fauci protested, “What does that got to do with me?”
“I’m asking you because you’re the expert on the coronavirus. Why was the administration so pushing not to have the lab leak theory?” Jordan asked.
Fauci replied, “I can’t answer that. I’ve kept an open mind.”
“Kept an open mind,” Jordan said, using a skeptical tone.
Speaking about COVID-19 vaccines, Fauci seemed to admit to Cloud, a Texas Republican, that they had limited capacity to stop the spread of the disease.
“It is very, very clear that [COVID-19] vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Fauci said.
“Did the vaccines stop anyone from getting COVID?” Cloud asked.
“Early on, it became clear that—,” Fauci began.
Cloud interrupted: “They didn’t.”
“Actually no,” Fauci said. “In the beginning, it clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people but the durability of its ability to prevent infection was not long. It was measured in months.”
Cloud asked: “And it didn’t stop you from spreading [COVID-19], either?”
Faudi answered: “Early on, it prevented infection, but it became clear that it did not prevent transmission when the ability to prevent infection waned.”
Cloud listed COVID-19 mitigation efforts and asked whether Fauci would do anything differently if given another chance.
Fauci doubled down on his recommendations at the time.
“Business closures?” Cloud asked.
Fauci: “Early on, when 5,000 people were dying a day, yes.”
Cloud: “Church closures?”
Fauci: “Same thing.”
Through several questions, Cloud also asked about school closures, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates for children and adults.
“These were important when we were trying to stop the tsunami of deaths that were occurring early on,” Fauci responded. “How long you kept them going is debatable.”
However, early in the hearing, subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, listed the negative effects of many pandemic measures.
“Any dissent from your chosen position was immediately labeled as anti-science,” Wenstrup said. “Anything less than complete submission to the mandates could cost you your livelihood, your ability to go into public, your child’s ability to attend school.”
Wenstrup continued:
Families were thrown off planes and shamed when their 2-year-olds struggled to wear a mask. Children with disabilities lost access to therapies that they and their families depended on. Students were out of the classroom and told to attend school remotely even when the science clearly demonstrated it was safe for them to go back in the classroom.
This harmed low-income students the most. How were single-parent households supposed to teach their own children and work at the same time? Dr. Fauci, you oversaw one of the most invasive regimes of domestic policy the U.S. has ever seen, including mask mandates, school closures, coerced vaccinations, social distancing of 6 feet, and more.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., gave Fauci an opening to defend his COVID-19 policies.
“Do you think the American public should listen to America’s brightest and best doctors and scientists, or instead listen to podcasters, conspiracy theorists, and unhinged Facebook memes?” Garcia asked the immunologist.
Fauci replied: “Listening to the people who you just described is going to do nothing but harm people because they will deprive themselves of lifesaving interventions, which has happened.”
Fauci said research has shown this to be the case.
“People that refuse to get vaccinated for any variety of reasons [were] probably responsible for an additional 200,000 to 300,000 deaths in this country,” Fauci said.
The post 7 Highlights as Fauci Testifies Under Oath on COVID-19 appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump has put the issue of world government at the forefront of the 2024 presidential race, vowing to “protect American sovereignty” and the U.S. Constitution from the designs of unelected global bureaucrats.
Trump took aim at global governance institutions in general, and the World Health Organization specifically, on Saturday, promising to shred and annul the WHO Pandemic Agreement unless President Joe Biden submits the document to the U.S. Senate for ratification, as required for treaties.
“As we speak, Joe Biden’s minions are in Geneva, secretly negotiating to surrender more of our liberty to the World Health Organization,” Trump told the Libertarian National Convention, eliciting a fulsome chorus of boos. “Drafts of the agreement show that they want to subjugate America to foreign nations, attack free speech, [and] empower the World Health Organization to redistribute American resources.”
Multiple drafts of the proposed accord show the WHO limiting national sovereignty by demanding nations follow its regulations on “routine immunization” and “social measures,” turn over 20% of all vaccines for global redistribution, and abide by the agreement’s terms even after they withdraw.
“They’re going to take our money and send it all over the world to other countries that we need for our own citizens,” in the event of a pandemic, Trump told the crowd in Washington on Saturday, warning that a pandemic “could happen again” in the United States.
His comments came just days after the Department of Health and Human Services took the first steps to deny future federal grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that funded gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I will protect American sovereignty from the creeping hands of global government,” promised Trump.
By contrast, the Biden administration has signaled its desire to sign the agreement, which WHO downgraded from a “legally-binding treaty” after Biden realized the U.S. Senate would never ratify the controversial document.
“I am hereby demanding that Joe Biden submit these monstrosities to the Senate as treaties,” declared Trump on Saturday. “If he does not, I will rip them up and throw them out on Day One of the Trump administration.”
Opposition to the WHO pandemic treaty-turned-agreement has spread throughout America, including all 49 Republican U.S. senators, two dozen Republican governors, and 22 state attorneys general.
“The globalists are making a run over American sovereignty,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., on the most recent episode of “This Week on the Hill,” hosted by Tony Perkins. “We can’t allow these global organizations to dictate to us what our policy is going to be.”
Although the body tasked with drawing up the agreement, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, failed to finalize its text before the World Health Assembly commenced its annual meeting in Geneva on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus insisted the globalists would eventually prevail. “I remain confident that you still will” complete the global power transfer and have it adopted, he told delegates Monday. “Where there is a will, there is a way.”
But the internationalists compiling the sovereignty-destroying agreement will proceed from a radically government-centered philosophy alien to the American founding, experts say.
“Some of these nations come from a very different governance perspective than the United States,” one which “says it’s normal to look to the federal government to deal with these problems,” Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at Family Research Council—who is currently in Geneva monitoring the World Health Assembly proceedings—told guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” Tuesday.
“Constitutionally, there are areas enumerated to the federal government under our Constitution. If they’re not, the issue in theory should be left to the states,” Weber told Hice. “We have a philosophy of government going back to our founding which depends on a self-governing, moral, and religious people. So, this really sets the stage for people in the United States to say, ‘Why should the federal government be tackling [this] issue in the first place?’”
Trump also cited constitutionalist themes in his pitch for libertarians to endorse his candidacy at Saturday’s convention.
“I unbound the United States from globalist agreements that surrendered our sovereignty. I withdrew from the Paris accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun U.N. arms treaty. And I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization,” said Trump, emphasizing that any institution of global governance is “not a good thing, not a good thing.”
Trump delivered a message precision-targeted to libertarian concerns. “Marxism is an evil doctrine straight from the ashes of hell,” said Trump. “We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars around the globe.”
“We will shut down our out-of-control federal Department of Education and give it back to the states and local governments. I will return power to the states, local governments, and to the American people. I am a believer in the 10th Amendment,” said Trump. “I will always defend religious liberty and the right to keep and bear arms. And I will secure our elections.”
Trump also pledged to put a libertarian in his Cabinet and in senior posts of his administration.
“What you’re witnessing under Biden is a toxic fusion of the Marxist Left, the deep state, the military-industrial complex, the government security and surveillance service, and their partners all merging together into a hideous perversion of the American system,” he said.
Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle also invited Biden and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to address the convention. RFK Jr., who has said the WHO Pandemic Agreement “should be dead in the water,” delivered extended remarks to the delegates Friday afternoon. Biden demurred. Former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, former Rep. Ron Paul, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also spoke at the convention.
Trump vied for the party’s backing, quoting at length a Deroy Murdock article, “The Libertarian Case for Donald J. Trump,” and encouraging delegates to nominate him—but only “if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3% every four years.”
The 3.3% of the 2016 vote, won by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican, actually represented an outlier for the Libertarian Party, which typically claims to 0.5%-1% of the presidential electorate.
Ultimately, the collected Libertarian Party delegates nominated Chase Oliver, an Atlanta-based activist who describes himself as “pro-police reform, pro-choice,” as well as “armed and gay.”
Oliver supported COVID-19 lockdowns and mask mandates, opposed bills protecting minors from transgender injections and surgeries, and posed with a drag queen. The Georgian, who forced a runoff in the 2022 Senate race that saw Democrat Raphael Warnock defeat Republican Herschel Walker, plans to gear his campaign toward young people, “in particular those who are upset with the war going on in Gaza.”
Some hope liberty-minded voters will ignore the Libertarian Party’s official endorsement and support Trump out of prudence. Walter Block, an economics professor and prolific libertarian author, urged libertarians in swing states to vote for the 45th president this November. “In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we could make the difference,” wrote Block in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday.
He reminded readers that “Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen received roughly 50,000 votes in Arizona in 2020, when Mr. Trump lost the state by about 10,000 ballots.”
Absent a more conservative government, America may be yoked to the WHO Pandemic Agreement without Senate ratification, circumventing the democratic process.
“It only breeds more public distrust when people are not able to fully share their concerns and air their grievances,” Weber told Hice. “The people of the United States need to be heard in terms of their concerns about the WHO, about the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, about the way their health information might be distributed or shared, or given over to some government program.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
The post Trump Vows: I Will Rip Up, Throw Away WHO Pandemic Agreement appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Germany has scrapped a requirement for its military service personel to be vaccinated against COVID-19 after being in place since late 2021.
The post Germany Ends Coronavirus Vaccine Mandate for Military Members appeared first on Breitbart.
The administration of President Joe Biden suspended Peter Daszak, a key figure in the still-murky evolution of the Wuhan coronavirus, and his EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) from federal funding for failing to adequately monitor the activities it supported at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The post U.S. Bars Peter Daszak from Funding for ‘Improper Conduct’ at Wuhan Lab appeared first on Breitbart.
Mothers are back to work in droves in Biden's inflated economy after the government shuttered businesses and closed schools during the pandemic.
The post U.S. Department of Labor: More Mothers Working Than Before Pandemic appeared first on Breitbart.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not like Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record—and Donald Trump’s.
CNN reporter Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs, and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed that other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk; namely, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 156.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics—for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic—most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies—drove massive job losses. Nonfarm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So, Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
But that wasn’t Biden’s worst mangle. He claimed to CNN that “no president’s had the run we have had, in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.”
That’s ridiculous! It’s a baldfaced lie. Inflation was 1.4%, again, due to the pandemic. Burnett didn’t check his facts, during or after the interview. She pushed him to acknowledge inflation was bad, but she didn’t suggest he was lying.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted: “And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward.”
And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward… https://t.co/1lgapFWYgp
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 9, 2024
That would be Daniel Dale, who’s almost entirely deployed on TV to “fact-check” Trump. Since Trump’s Manhattan trial began in mid-April, Dale has appeared nine times to “check” him. He has not appeared to check anyone else. On April 18, Jake Tapper said, “He’s handy to have around at times like this.”
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here and declaring it “false” is a lame spin.
On Tuesday, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor—and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying leftist billionaire George Soros is “a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
If a conservative DA received big money from a pro-Trump PAC, CNN would call him or her “Trump-backed” without hesitation. CNN deploys Dale not as a “fact-checker” as much as a spin spoiler.
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The post CNN Fails to Fact-Check Biden’s Falsehood-Filled Interview appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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