WATCH: WaPo Columnist Argues That Fauci, Other Scientists ‘Intentionally Steered’ Public Away from Lab Leak Theory to ‘Cover Their Own Asses’

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin delivered a scathing assessment of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pronouncements about the origins of Covid-19 as well as his motivations for making them during a recent interview, arguing that Fauci had “intentionally steered” the public away from the lab leak theory.

Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as the face of the United States’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic, has used his authoritative position to cast doubt on the theory.

In a May 2020 interview with National Geographic, Fauci said that that the scientific evidence “is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” and accused proponents of the lab leak theory of advancing a “circular argument.”

A year and a half later, in the face of growing evidence to support it, Fauci continued to insist in congressional testimony that “even though we leave open all possibilities, it’s much more likely that this was a natural occurrence.”

In recent days, Fauci has taken to declaring that “we may never know” the origins of the virus while claiming not to have seen “any data for a lab leak,” despite the Department of Energy’s recent determination that it is the most likely explanation for virus’s introduction to human populations.

Those comments did not sit right with Rogin, who took them on in an interview with Good Kid Productions:

You would never have — disaster of any kind — a plane crash,  you would never have a nuclear plant meltdown and say ‘Oh, we don’t need to know. Oh, forget about it.’ You would never do that, it’s crazy. But even the new line from Anthony Fauci, now retired, is ‘Well, anything’s possible. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the lab, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it so everybody just move on.’

Now, that is a retrenchment of the previous position of a group of scientists, of which he is one member, one influential member, who intentionally steered the media and the public — and the intelligence community by the way — in the wrong direction, on purpose, to cover their own asses.

Rogin has posited that Fauci may have pilloried the lab-leak theory out of concern that its promotion might result in scrutiny of his own record. Fauci has championed gain-of-function research on viruses, and the National Institutes of Health has funded such research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“On that issue [the lab leak theory], I do think he [Fauci] made some serious mistakes, and continues to withhold vital information from the American people about how we got into this mess and what we can do to prevent the next pandemic,” said Rogin.

Rogin also  suggested that the media’s dismissal of the lab leak theory as conspiratorial nonsense was the result of “source capture.”

“The problem with the mainstream journalists who cover this — a lot of them science writers actually — we didn’t understand. We always talk about political bias and factionality and source capture amongst political journalists, which is true. National security journalists all captured by their deep state sources, right? Some of that’s true,” began Rogin.

“We didn’t realize the science writers were totally captured. And who were their best sources? Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak, the head of the EcoHealth Alliance, who told them that it was a conspiracy theory  that it came from a lab. And they ran with it because they didn’t know any better because they were captured,” he continued.

Watch above via Good Kid Productions.

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