A Government Accountability Office report uncovering U.S. taxpayer funds going to Chinese entities conducting coronavirus research before the pandemic started shows Dr. Anthony Fauci was "playing around with words" with his denials on gain of function research, former Health and Human Services assistant secretary Brett Giroir said Sunday on Newsmax.
"Even the Government Accountability Office said that $1.4 million went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and it funded work on that coronavirus and recombining, making Frankenstein viruses between these new bad coronaviruses and other pandemic viruses like SARS or MERS," Giroir said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."
And that means Fauci's denials, as the now-retired head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were "misleading and deceiving," said Giroir.
"Clearly this was gain of function research," Giroir, who was the COVID-19 testing czar under former President Donald Trump, said. "GAO also outlined that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) did not have proper controls. They did not get the right reporting, and despite the fact that they were told to fix this in January, they still don't even have a timeline and how to fix their issues."
Meanwhile, there are still arguments about whether the virus began in the Wuhan laboratory or in a nearby open food market, but Giroir pointed out the FBI has said, with high confidence, that the origin was the Wuhan Institute.
"Many physicians and scientists like myself, based on the virus characteristics, say it was out of the laboratory," said Giroir, adding that if new reports are true that coronavirus scientists from the Wuhan lab were the first to contract COVID, "that is the closest thing to a smoking gun as you are going to get."
Meanwhile, retired Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, also on Sunday's program, commented that the only correct answer for the response to the COVID pandemic is to "hold China accountable."
"Remember, this is also the weekend where we have Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, in China," said Shaffer. "The law requires that three things occur today. First off, any link between the People's Liberation Army and this laboratory has to be revealed by our intelligence community, as well as the declassification of anything that relates to the very thing of an outbreak at the lab and who was involved regarding this issue in the autumn of 2019."
Shaffer said he believes the intelligence community has the matter correct and that there is "overwhelming evidence" that the Wuhan leak came during the fall of 2019 and "people at the lab were 'patient zero.' They're the origin, not some wet market."
However, he said he doesn't think Blinken will hold the Chinese responsible during his trip, as he's "there to soft play everything and to be completely complacent because he wants to increase and repair the relationship with China that's damaged."
"I just don't think that we're going to see any progress on this regarding Blinken, bringing this up to the Chinese in any substantial way," he said.
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