Health authorities and policymakers squandered public trust by lying to the American people.
In July 2020, Anthony Fauci got into a heated exchange with Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul during a Senate committee hearing. At the time, the question of whether the Covid-19 virus might have leaked from a Wuhan, China, laboratory was considered a conspiracy theory by most health officials and media outlets. But a few independent scientists and reporters kept investigating the possibility. A particularly troubling question was whether the U.S. government might have funded “gain-of-function” research that had made a naturally occurring virus more infectious. Fauci had supported such research in the past. And, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a key branch of the Bethesda, Maryland-based National Institutes of Health, he was involved in distributing millions of dollars in grants to virus researchers around the world. In a hearing several months earlier, Fauci had denied that the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
