On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Ranking Member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA) responded to a question on the squelching of the lab leak theory for the origins of COVID-19 by acknowledging that the theory is still a possible explanation for the virus but said the theory was “bundled with” a narrative “about Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins creating the coronavirus pandemic and that it leaked” and this narrative “manufactures distrust and puts a lot of public health [officials’] lives in jeopardy through these violent death threats that they’ve been getting.”
Host Erin Burnett asked, “I remember when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) first came out with an article commentary about that, it was very hastily squelched. Do you feel comfortable at this point that you know why that happened? Do you feel comfortable that that really was just because they felt they had other things to focus on at the time, and it wasn’t worth talking about at that moment, or do you still have questions as to why that was really shunted aside and put as sort of, at the time, you’re really out there talking point?”
Ruiz answered, “I think that the whole notion of the lab leak was bundled with the complete narrative that I had just mentioned about Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins creating the coronavirus pandemic and that it leaked. Now, if you dissect the possibility that this could be a[n] actual lab leak [separate] from the whole extreme accusations, then one can say, and we still say this, based on the evidence that we have, that, indeed, it could be a lab leak or — and it could also be an animal transmission origin. But it was not the entire package of the narrative that they were trying to push that manufactures distrust and puts a lot of public health [officials’] lives in jeopardy through these violent death threats that they’ve been getting.”
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