Pressure is mounting against Anthony Fauci as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri joins other Republican lawmakers to call for his resignation. In light of the release of thousands of pages of emails that have further damaged the credibility and reputation of the chief medical adviser, Hawley urged Fauci in a tweet to resign and called for a full congressional investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hawley’s tweet comes just one week after the Senate unanimously passed his proposed legislation that would require the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to potential links between COVID-19 origins and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Missouri Republican was the first member of Congress to call for an international investigation into China’s role in the pandemic.
“For over a year, anyone asking questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been branded as a conspiracy theorist,” Hawley said when he and Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., introduced the bill in April. “The world needs to know if this pandemic was the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab, but the CCP has done everything it can to block a credible investigation. That’s why the Biden administration must declassify what it knows about the Wuhan lab and Beijing’s attempts to cover up the origin of the pandemic.”
The release of Fauci’s email this week exposed when the doctor knew about the possibility of a COVID-19 lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was funneling U.S. taxpayer money for research into bat coronaviruses. Despite Fauci first insisting taxpayer money was not funding dangerous gain-of-function research, he later conceded there was “no way of guaranteeing” how those funds were used.
When Fox News’s Bret Baier said back in mid-April 2020 that COVID may have leaked from a lab — something Fauci knew at the time was possible, according to now-public emails — an email chain the doctor is on refers to Baier’s observation as a “conspiracy.” Despite this knowledge, Fauci also publicly threw cold water on the lab-leak theory, for which Peter Daszak, who was deeply entrenched in Wuhan COVID research, thanked him in an email.
“Anthony Fauci’s recently released emails and investigative reporting about COVID-19 origins are shocking,” Hawley wrote in a tweet. “The time has come for Fauci to resign and for a full congressional investigation into the origins of COVID-19 — and into any and all efforts to prevent a full accounting.”
