It’s by now the conventional wisdom that the Chinese government is covering up — and has consistently covered up — the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan.
But the always indomitable K.T. McFarland, President Trump’s first deputy national security adviser, has posed a blockbuster question over at Fox News. The headline:
Second COVID cover-up – China, we know about but was there another one in the US?
Scientists insisted that anyone promoting the lab leak theory was an anti-science conspiracy theorist
K.T. says, in part, this:
Did America bungle our initial handling of the pandemic because a handful of government scientists and bureaucrats, and their unwitting media enablers, deliberately sent us off in the wrong direction in order to cover up their own complicity in creating COVID-19?
Great question. And if this turns out to be the case this will turn out to be the mother of all Washington scandals, making Watergate look like a piker.
She points to the ferocity with which these “government scientists and bureaucrats” not only denied the idea that the source of the Wuhan virus was the Wuhan laboratory but also attacked absolutely anyone — beginning with President Trump — for even making the suggestion.
The question is: why? What explains the ferocity and vehemence of these attacks? K.T. suggests this:
Did they react with such velocity and venom because they were covering up for their own misguided actions? What did they not want the world to know? That they were funding risky gain-of-function research and genetically engineering fairly harmless viruses to make them more contagious, virulent and lethal in order to study them? That they were awarding grants to an adversarial nation’s research lab, where the Chinese military was also involved?
Did they do these things without the approval, or perhaps even knowledge of their bosses and therefore need to cover their tracks, lest the world demand answers for their role for inadvertently contributing to a global pandemic?
Good questions — very good questions.
Only days ago, the New York Post reported this:
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars more in federal grant money than chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci indicated to lawmakers last week, newly released emails show.
The messages, obtained by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, show that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) allocated $826,277 to the lab over a six-year period ending in 2019 via the New York City-based non-profit EcoHealth Alliance.
But Fauci, the longtime NIAID director, told a House Appropriations subcommittee on May 25 that the funding commitment “was about $600,000 over a period of five years, so it was a modest amount.”
Anyone who has spent a minute around government knows that if nothing else money is fungible. In this instance, no matter whether U.S. taxpayers were doling out $600,000 or $826,277, the fact is that in contributing those tax dollars the U.S. government was effectively freeing the Wuhan lab to use comparable funds obtained elsewhere for whatever they chose to fund.
Make no mistake: If in fact there were not only U.S. funds that helped pay, by extension, the research into what resulted in a virus leak from the Wuhan lab but the U.S. “government scientists and bureaucrats” who were responsible also knew they were responsible and covered it up …
Then K.T. McFarland is absolutely right. Trouble ahead for these people. Big trouble.
Right, Dr. Fauci?
