U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., told Newsmax on Friday that an email from Dr. Anthony Fauci released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic shows Fauci knew that gain-of-function research was occurring in Wuhan, China, before the coronavirus became a global pandemic.
In a February 2020 email to other U.S. government officials, posted on the select subcommittee's Twitter account, Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wrote there are concerns "about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV [novel coronavirus], there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted."
"The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists at Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan," wrote Fauci, who retired at the end of last year.
Fauci has long denied COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak, even though the Energy Department and the FBI have said the pandemic was most likely unleashed through a lab leak and not naturally. Fauci has also denied the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
"He absolutely knew what was going on," McCormick, an emergency room physician who sits on the select subcommittee, told "Rob Schmitt Tonight." "As a matter fact, several scientists were discussing this and agreeing with each other that it made no sense that it came from a natural selection process."
McCormick said the more evidence that was uncovered, the less it appeared likely the virus originated from nature. China has maintained the virus originated from a Wuhan wet market.
On Wednesday, the select subcommittee held a hearing titled "Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up" to examine potential conflicts of interest and suppression of scientific discourse by the NIH.
Among the subcommittee's conclusions was that Fauci and former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins were directly involved in the drafting, publication, and public promotion of a paper written to suppress the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis.
"This is when [Fauci] started allowing grants to go out to scientists to change their mind and convince them to help them with the cover-up," McCormick said. "Once they go down that road, they can't turn back. And since then, we have captured no animals that this continues to propagate in. There are no antibodies in nature. China has put a major amount of pressure on themselves to find something. They've never found anything. All evidence leads to the Wuhan lab."
Newsmax reached out to Fauci for comment.
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