Making the Sunday rounds, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared on television shows warning that the United States is "certainly" still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and that House Republicans should "keep the politics out of" investigations into the virus' origins.
"As a public health official," Fauci told Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" Sunday, "I don't want to see anyone suffer and die from COVID. I don't care if you're a far-right Republican or a far-left Democrat, everybody deserves to have the safety of good public health and that's not happening."
President Joe Biden's chief medical officer went on to add that the United States is still seeing 300 to 400 deaths per day and that the "uptake" of the new vaccine booster is "less than 15%. It's somewhere between 11% and 15%. We've got to do better than that."
House Republicans have vowed to investigate Fauci when they retake the majority in January. And on Wednesday, he sat for a deposition in relation to the COVID-19 social media censorship lawsuit. Attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana quizzed Fauci for seven hours.
"Since we filed our landmark lawsuit, we have uncovered documents and discovery that show clear coordination between the Biden administration and social media companies on censoring speech, but we're not done yet. We plan to get answers on behalf of the American people. Stay tuned," Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt said Tuesday.
In his first round of TV appearances, Fauci told Margaret Brennan on CBS's "Face the Nation" that the evidence is "quite strong" COVID-19 occurred naturally.
"They're very suspicious of anybody trying to accuse them," the retiring head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said of the Chinese government. "We need to have an open dialogue with their scientists and our scientists, keep the politics out of it."
During his interview, Fauci pushed against the notion that the Chinese Communist Party covered up the pandemic's origins.
"Last year, President Biden said the United States is asking China for more data about the origins," Brennan said. "Have you seen anything that Beijing has produced?"
"No," Fauci responded, "you know, one of the ... problems is that — and this is historic; it goes way back to bird flu, the H5N1, the H7N9, the original SARS-CoV-1 — that the Chinese — not necessarily the scientists that we know and we have dealt with and collaborated with productively for decades, but the whole establishment, a political and other establishment in China — even when there's nothing at all to hide, they act secretive, which absolutely triggers an appropriate suspicion of like, 'What the heck is going on over there?'"
According to a report from Vanity Fair, "In September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its [own] database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests."
According to a document known as a "Memorandum of Understanding of Cooperation Between Wuhan Institutue of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galeveston," both the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Galveston National Laboratory in Texas can ask the other to destroy any so-called "secret files" or any documents, communications, data or equipment resulting from their collaboration — along with any such copies.
But in his interview, after Fauci told Brennan COVID-19 investigations shouldn't be politicized, the doctor criticized former President Donald Trump for his comments against China in the early months of the pandemic.
"What happens," Fauci said, "is that if you look at the anti-China approach that clearly the Trump administration had right from the very beginning and the accusatory nature, the Chinese are going to flinch back and say, 'Oh, I'm sorry; we're not going to talk to you about it,' which is not correct. They should be."
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.