During the online “Overtime” segment of Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” writer Andrew Sullivan said that former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to cover up the possibility that COVID leaked from a lab because “you don’t want to go down in history as the person who helped develop the virus that killed millions of people. You want to go down as the one who saved millions of people.”
Sullivan responded to a question on reports that British intelligence knew that the lab leak theory was correct by stating that German intelligence also knew.
He added, “[T]he core paper that killed off any idea that this was a lab leak in China, the Proximal Origin paper, which was produced with Fauci and Collins of the NIH and NIAID helping it along was a lie, a conscious lie. The people who looked at it, we now have their emails, are saying in the very first days of looking at the virus, this looks very man-made to us.”
Sullivan further said, “The question is why? Why would they lie to us about that? And they did.”
Sullivan further stated, “This lab was a gain-of-function lab…this gain-of-function research was always dangerous. Everyone knew it was dangerous, a long time ago. … Do you know who was the biggest supporter of gain-of-function research for the last 30 years? Anthony Fauci. … There’s a reason he was given a pardon back to 2014. There is something very wrong going on here.”
Sullivan added that he doesn’t think Fauci was trying to make himself rich, but “he knew, from the get-go, that the Wuhan lab had security levels that were the average of a dentist’s office. They should have been at the highest level imaginable. He knew that. Not only that, NIH and NIAID had helped fund it. So, you don’t want to go down in history as the person who helped develop the virus that killed millions of people. You want to go down as the one who saved millions of people. That was at stake, a reputational matter.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
