Who among us hasn’t hidden evidence from World Health Organization officials?
Anthony Fauci — remember him? — was back on TV this Sunday, making a desperate bid for relevance on BBC’s Sunday Morning. You probably didn’t see it, given that the vast majority of the country has all but forgotten the Good Doctor. But Fauci isn’t going down without a fight: Citing the increase of Covid cases in Europe and the U.K. — which “has not yet hit the United States,” he said — Fauci told the BBC that Americans “need to be prepared” for the possibility of more Covid restrictions in the future.
“I don’t want to use the word lockdowns; that has a charged element to it,” said Fauci — ever the picture of rhetorical caution and prudence. “But I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections.”
While all’s quiet on the Covid front at the moment, he maintained, “we need to be prepared for the possibility that we would have another variant that would come along. And if things change and we do get a variant that gives us an uptick in cases of hospitalization, we should be prepared and flexible enough to pivot towards going back at least temporarily to a more rigid type of restrictions such as requiring masks indoors.”
That wasn’t all. When asked about the coronavirus lab-leak theory — which is supported by a growing body of evidence, in spite of Fauci’s continued denials — Fauci insisted that the “data . . . accumulating over the last few months” supports the proposition “that this was a natural occurrence from an animal species.” (Although “having said that,” he noted magnanimously, “we must keep an open mind as to all possibilities of how that might have emerged.”)
The interviewer pressed him on that point: “We spoke to one of the WHO investigators who’d been to Wuhan to investigate how the virus started, and they were prevented from seeing key details and from speaking to key people. Why do you think the Chinese government did that?”
To that, Fauci responded with this absolute whopper of a spin:
You know, I don’t want to create any, or mention any, disparaging remarks about that, but the Chinese are very closed, in a way of being very reluctant, particularly when you have a disease that evolves in their country. They become extremely secretive, even though there’s no reason to be secretive. I think they were very concerned and maybe embarrassed that the virus evolved from their country. But there’s nothing wrong with that. So when they see something evolving in their own country they tend to have a natural reflex of not necessarily covering things up but not being very open and transparent.
Ah! It’s just a cultural thing. (Not to be disparaging, of course.) The CCP’s secrecy — even though there was “no reason to be secretive” — was just because the Chinese were embarrassed. And there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s a natural reflex. Who among us hasn’t hidden evidence from World Health Organization officials?
Of course, if the lab-leak theory is false, which Fauci maintains that the evidence supports, then it’s not clear how allowing an investigation would add to China’s “embarrassment.” The CCP’s behavior would make a whole lot more sense if the theory were true. And if it is true, then there’s a whole lot more to the CCP cover-up than cultural norms.