I want to call your attention to an actually headline on the Fox News website today. This is a sceen shot; I am not going to link to this crap.
I found that online today, mind you.
As I understand it, recently Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro teamed up to release a new conspiracy theory that Dr. Anthony Fauci is personally responsible for covod-19. “For whatever reason, Dr. Fauci wanted to weaponize that virus and he is the father of it,” Navarro wrote. “He has killed millions of Americans, if that thing came from the lab, and I’m 99.999% sure it did.”
Before we go any further, do note that fact-checkers went after the new claims back in February and found them to be bogus.
Today there was another Senate hearing in which Rand Paul made an ass of himself arguing with Dr. Fauci. They might as well make this a Netflix series.
During a Senate hearing on the pandemic response, Paul alleged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been sending funding to the Wuhan lab, which then “juiced up” a virus that was originally found in bats to create a supervirus that can infect human cells.
Paul pressed Fauci on the theory that the novel coronavirus was created in the Wuhan lab, and then somehow escaped, either because of an accident or because it was deliberately released.
“Sen. Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect,” Fauci said. “The NIH has not ever, and does not now, fund ‘gain of function research’ in the Wuhan Institute.”
Paul continued to argue with Fauci, who is the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), accusing him of cooperating with the Chinese government, and supporting the laboratory that bioengineered a deadly virus.
Fauci noted that although the NIH did fund a project at the Wuhan lab, it was not meant for “gain of function” research into human-made superviruses.
I had to look up what “gain of function” meant. This is from Forbes:
While the NIH did provide funding to a New York based non profit called EcoHealth Alliance that conducted research on bat coronaviruses, there’s no evidence to support the theory the scientists “juiced up” Covid-19 in the lab, as Paul claimed, or that the money funded gain of function research.
Moving on, Paul asked if Fauci could “categorically say that the COVID-19 could not have occurred through serial passage in a laboratory?”
“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done,” Fauci responded, before adding he is “fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China.”
That last remark led to a headline in Murdoch’s New York Post that “Fauci admits COVID-19 could have come from Wuhan lab.” I’m not linking to that crap, either.
Tucker Carlson waded into it last night, I take it. Aaron Blake:
While talking about National Institutes of Health funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Carlson referred to “the deadly experiments that were going on there” — which is valid, given that’s the kind of thing virologists do.
But he then referred to them, as if the lab-leak theory were proved, as “the experiments that clearly went so wrong.”
Again, there is no firm evidence that the spread of the coronavirus was the result of experiments that “clearly” went “so wrong” in the Wuhan lab. Carlson has a knack for suggesting things without saying them directly, but this veered in a much more conspiratorial and unproven direction than usual.
“This wouldn’t have happened if Tony Fauci didn’t allow it to happen — that is clear,” Carlson continued, referring to the funding. “It’s an amazing story. It is a shocking story. In a functional country, there would be a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in the covid pandemic that has killed millions and halted our country, changing it forever. So why isn’t there a criminal investigation into Tony Fauci’s role in this pandemic?”
The pandemic wouldn’t have happened if Dr. Fauci hadn’t allowed it to happen? Does that mean Anthony Fauci is the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
Seriously, this is way out of bounds, even for Tucker Carlson.