Former President Donald Trump's senior adviser Peter Navarro told Newsmax Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci has "blood on his hands" from the COVID-19 pandemic due to his "lie of omission" about the possible origin of the virus at a Chinese lab.
"Now we're in a situation where, because Fauci lied, Americans did indeed die," Navarro said on "Eric Bolling: The Balance" Wednesday. "There is blood on his hands. He should have been fired a year ago."
Navarro said that he first met Fauci in the Situation Room at the White House in January 2020, and that emails unearthed since show that he knew the likelihood of the COVID-19 virus having come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
If he let the Trump administration know about that, Navarro said, the administration would have devised better ways to manage the virus, and demanded China turn over the genome so a more effective vaccine could be produced.
"What we would have done is pressured the Chinese Communist Party relentlessly to give us the original genome of the virus, which to this day, we still do not have," he said. "Why is that important? It's because the quasi-vaccines we would wind up designing with this experimental gene therapy technology are really blunt instruments relative to what we could have done if we had had that information."
He said Fauci not only "certainly" knew the virus came from the lab, but he also knew he was assisting in funding gain of function research at the lab.
"I believe Fauci knew on January 28, 2020, which he did not tell us. He knew that the virus certainly came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology because it popped up literally within yards of this place," he said. "(Fauci) knew that he had sponsored what's called gain of function experiments in this lab, which basically can turn harmless bat viruses into human killers."
Navarro said that not only could the Trump administration have been in a better position to battle the pandemic, but that Fauci's "lie of omission" probably caused Trump to lose the 2020 election.
"What's interesting to me, it's not just that Fauci wound up killing millions of people worldwide with that lie of omission," he said. "I believe that if he'd simply come clean, President Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office right now, because at that point, we could have taken stronger action to defeat the virus."
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