Dr. Deborah Birx admits effort to ‘discredit’ lab leak theory to CNN: ‘I do think it happened’ (2024)

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s appearance Monday before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic brought renewed focus on whetherthe COVID-19 pandemic began as a result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

On the issue, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases now claimed he is open to the possibility and denied trying to suppress the theory or conceal any relevant information about a potential leak, calling such accusations “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”

“I don’t think the concept of there being a lab leak is inherently a conspiracy theory,” Fauci said. “What is conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject, like it was a lab leak and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak. That’s the conspiracy.”

Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as former President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, appeared Monday on CNN and admitted there was an effort to discredit the lab leak theory when asked if there was any veracity to the argument.

Dr. Deborah Birx reacts to the threats Dr. Anthony Fauci discussed at his contentious congressional hearing yesterday: “I’ve experienced much of the same. … They screened my mail.” pic.twitter.com/CQelr8KVWD

— CNN This Morning with Kasie Hunt (@CNNThisMorning) June 4, 2024

“I think early on, people did take very definitive sides, and it did divide along party lines, and we’re still suffering from that four years later,” Birx told CNN’s Kasie Hunt. “I do think it happened. If you look at what people said about Bob Redfield and how they disparaged him as a scientist because he wanted to bring forward the lab leak potential.”

Redfield, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was widely ridiculed and dismissed when he suggested early on that coronavirus started in a lab.

“When I said before that I didn’t think it was biologically plausible that COVID-19 went from a bat to some unknown animal into man and now had become one of the most infectious viruses,” Redfield said in June 2021. “That’s not consistent with how other coronaviruses have come into the human species. And, it does suggest that there’s an alternative hypothesis that it went from a bat virus, got into a laboratory, where in the laboratory, it was taught, educated, it evolved, so that it became a virus that could efficiently transmit human to human.”

Birx said lab leaks “definitely” happen and pointed out that “people got infected with HIV in the lab.”

“And so we have to put different rules and regulations and guidelines in place to protect the public. We can do that. We‘ve done that before,” she added.

As for the hearing, Birx spoke about one good thing, “It’s our opportunity to really decide as a global community how we’re going to control laboratory experiments in a way that protects the public.”

Fauci defiantly stood his ground on vaccines, citing a study to tell the committee,“People that refuse to get vaccinated for any variety of reasons [were] probably responsible for an additional 200,000 to 300,000 deaths in this country.”

“Vaccines save lives. It is very, very clear that vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions worldwide,” he claimed, before insisting, “In the beginning, it clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people.”

He also suggested business closures, church closures, school closures, and stay-at-home orders were justified.

“Again, this was when we were trying to stop the tsunami of deaths that were occurring early on—how long you kept them going is debatable,” he said.

The man who once declared that he is science admitted there were no studies justifying the masking of 5-year-old children

“There was no study that did masks on kids before,” Fauci said. “You couldn’t do the study. You had to respond to an epidemic that was killing 4-5,000 Americans a day.”

He also admitted there was no real science behind the six-foot social distancing rule, which he pushed off on the CDC.

“It actually came from the CDC,” Fauci said. “The CDC was responsible for those kinds of guidelines for schools, not me. So when I said that, it just appeared. It appeared. Was there any science behind it? What I meant by no science behind it is that there wasn’t a controlled trial.”

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