China, Not Fauci, Holds COVID Origin Answers
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- Senate committee held Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for invoking his Fifth Amendment defense, even though its chair had previously stated Fauci "should go to prison."
- China's government suppressed early COVID-19 outbreak information, delayed alerting the WHO, locked WHO representatives in their hotel rooms, denied access to Wuhan scientists and laboratory records, and threatened countries demanding an open investigation with economic retaliation.
- The 2002-2004 SARS outbreak followed the same pattern: China suppressed reporting for months, and 66% of the 29-country death toll occurred in China or Hong Kong, with 43 deaths in Canada and 33 in Singapore.
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology sat 8 miles from the "wet market" linked to early cases and was known to be experimenting on SARS-like viruses from bats 800 miles away in southern China.
- David Hunter, the Richard Doll professor of epidemiology and medicine at the University of Oxford, writes that future pandemics will likely emerge from the same country due to its animal husbandry practices, making China's continued opacity a recurring global health threat.
- Hunter contends that conflating COVID's origins with subsequent public health policies like mask mandates is "mixing apples and oranges," and that prosecuting Fauci for answering questions in 2020 under Chinese misinformation is a "sideshow."
Why it matters: A Senate committee chaired by someone who pre-declared Fauci "should go to prison" held him in contempt over pandemic-era testimony, while the Chinese government — the only party that can clarify what happened inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology and during the outbreak's first weeks — faces no comparable pressure and continues to deny international investigators access to lab records and early epidemic data.
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