U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Francis Collins finally admitted under oath that the conclusion the COVID-19 virus originally escaped from a Chinese lab was not a conspiracy theory despite him being one of the leading officials behind the effort to suppress and discredit it as such.
Publicly, the theory that COVID escaped from China’s controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), as opposed to evolving in nature, was widely mocked and dismissed since Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas floated it in February 2020, and for months any suggestion of it was condemned as misinformation. It was not until mid-2021, well after Democrats had retaken the White House, that mainstream media outlets began to acknowledge it as a possibility.
On January 13, the U.S. House Oversight & Accountability Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released chairman Republican Brad Wenstrup’s “key takeaways” from the committee’s seven-hour interview with Collins.
Among them, Collins admitted that the infamous six-foot “social distancing”’ threshold was not rooted in science or data, stood by his opposition to the Great Barrington Declaration by doctors dissenting from the establishment lockdown consensus, and “minced words” over the definition of gain-of-function (GOF) research, a controversial practice that entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects on coronaviruses, the government’s funding of which is suspected of potentially leading to COVID.
But arguably the most notable revelation was that “Dr. Collins agreed with Dr. Fauci’s concession that the COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory.”
“This testimony directly contradicts Dr. Fauci’s previous statements and raises further concerns about the U.S. government’s role in suppressing and vilifying the lab-leak hypothesis,” the subcommittee’s press release notes.
Previously leaked emails have revealed that Fauci, Collins, and other top researchers were aware of the lab-leak possibility as early as February 2020 but feared publicly acknowledging it would impair “science and international harmony.”
Last March, the Washington Examiner reported that in early 2020, Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute and Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University notified Fauci that they took seriously suspicions that COVID first escaped from WIV, with Andersen writing that “one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” and that COVID’s genome seemed “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
However, both signed onto a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (Proximal Origin), which concluded the lab-leak hypothesis was not “plausible.” LifeSiteNews has reported that Fauci and Collins had input into the final draft, which was not initially disclosed. The Examiner’s review found that, from 2020 to 2022, research projects led by Andersen and Garry received $25.2 million in NIH grants. Collins would go on to “express[ed] dismay” that “Proximal Origin” did not do enough to discredit the theory.
The Daily Mail added that a transcript of Collins’ full interview is expected to be released to the public, but it remains to be seen when.
U.S. citizens: Demand Congress investigate soaring excess death rates