Editors at National Review Online ponder new information about the federal government’s top COVID scold.
When Anthony Fauci appears before Senator Rand Paul and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, expect fireworks. …
… This past weekend, Paul released a gargantuan 1,141 pages of Fauci’s notes. Very little in these pages enhances Fauci’s already deeply tarnished reputation.
Most notably, on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:
“It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread.” …
… America and the world spent most of the next two years in an increasingly furious debate over whether the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, perhaps from a pangolin; or from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronavirus found in bats); or somewhere else. Fauci apparently knew — notice he didn’t write “believe” or “theorize” — he could rule out the wet-market theory but never felt obligated to share that conclusion with the rest of us. Instead, he repeatedly dismissed and downplayed the lab-leak theory.
Fauci has insisted he’s not responsible for the far-reaching and strict lockdown policies that many states and localities enacted during the pandemic. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he told the New York Times magazine in 2023. And yet, here’s Fauci’s personal writing from March 15, 2020:
“I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV). I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC. He said that he would base this on my recommendation.”
