It was almost like in Donald Trump's time when Joe Biden replied to a journalist's question on Friday evening: “Yes, I have very great faith in Dr.
Fauci. ”Under President Biden, nobody should be afraid of being fired immediately after such a sentence.
But the chief advisor in matters of coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, is now at the center of the debate about the origin of the Sars-CoV2 pathogen for Biden's opponents.
The Internet portal "Buzzfeed" had received several thousand pages of Fauci's correspondence, citing the Freedom of Information Act, and published parts of it. It also contains passages that the Republicans are now using to attack Fauci. Among other things, they claim that he covered up evidence that the coronavirus could have escaped from a laboratory in China.
Fox News moderators and individual politicians construct this from a handful of emails. In April, for example, a manager of the “EcoHealthAlliance” organization thanked Fauci for publicly saying that the virus did not come from a laboratory, but that it occurred naturally. “EcoHealthAlliance” co-financed the work of the Virological Institute in Wuhan. The institute also received funding from the American National Health Institute (NIH) until April 2020, which has not been extended since then.
Fauci protested against such allegations and pointed out in several interviews that his position corresponded to the then state of research on the origin of the coronavirus. The emails were taken out of context. Someone thanked him for making the knowledge clear. He himself still believes that the virus spread to humans naturally. He thinks the laboratory theory is unlikely, according to the infection specialist at CNN. At the end of May, Biden commissioned the secret services to provide him with everything they could learn about this theory within 90 days. This re-fueled speculation about a possible laboratory accident in Wuhan.
Because of his consistent stance on coronavirus protective measures, many Conservatives Fauci could not gain anything even under Donald Trump. Several protagonists of Trump's media cosmos are now using the information to declare him their enemy. They accuse him of deliberately hiding and covering up any evidence that could indicate that the virus came from a laboratory. Even more: Sars-CoV-2 could, at least according to the hypothesis of the Fauci critics, have escaped from the laboratory after so-called gain-of-function research had been carried out. Scientists modify viruses in order to increase their transferability. The process is used, for example, in vaccine research. It is risky and must be done under high security precautions.Some conservatives are now bringing the thesis into play that the Americans themselves could have funded such research in the laboratory in Wuhan and therefore covered up the accident. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, for example, told Fox News that the emails were "disturbing" and could indicate that Fauci was directly funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. In Senate hearings on this issue, Fauci likely lied.