INSANE: CBS Defends Fauci on Closing Schools, Need for Wuhan-Like Research Labs

Wednesday’s CBS Mornings spent seven minutes and 18 seconds previewing the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing by defending Dr. Tony Fauci on everything from closing schools to gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, to Fauci dwelling on his stardom in 2020.

All the while, accountability or admission of even a modicum of mistakes from the pandemic were nowhere to be found.

Fill-in co-host Natalie Morales set it all up this way:

Now to Capitol Hill where we could see an explosive hearing today when Dr. Anthony Fauci appears in front of a Senate committee. He will face questions about the origin and handling of the COVID pandemic. Senator Rand Paul released more an a thousand pages of revealing journal entries from Fauci. They detail Fauci’s relationship with President Trump and how he apparently reveled in his own fame.

Congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns colored the perception of the hearing by saying Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) “has long been a Fauci critic” and has “a history of contentious debate” with the former longtime NIH official.

Huey-Burns joined ABC and NBC in suggesting Fauci has always been open to the lab-leak theory (click “expand”):

HUEY-BURNS: Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic started, questions still swirl over where the virus actually came from. In the thousands of diary entries from his time leading the government’s response, Dr. Anthony Fauci recounted the debate over how it all started. In an entry in late January of 2020, Fauci referred to a wet market in Wuhan, China, writing, “now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” In May of 2021, Fauci addressed questions about the theory the virus leaked from a lab, writing, “the very highly likelihood is that the virus originated naturally, but adding, no one is 100% certain of the origin, including me, so I am calling for a thorough investigation.” Something Fauci echoed that same month publicly.

FAUCI [on 05/25/21]: Many of us feel that it is more likely that this is a natural occurrence, as has happened with SARS-CoV-1, where it goes from an animal reservoir to a human, but we don’t know 100 percent the answer to that.

HUEY-BURNS: Republican Senator Rand Paul says Fauci suppressed the lab-leak theory and alleges that money from the National Institutes of Health grant funded research to make viruses more transmissible at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same lab where he claims COVID-19 originated.

Only at the end did Huey-Burns deliver as a throwaway that “many, including President Trump...argued that his COVID policies were too strict, especially when it came to masking and school closures.”

Perhaps most insidious was the next block with CBS News medical contributor and Biden-Harris transition team member, Dr. Celine Gounder.

Prompted to explain gain-of-function research, Gounder had the gall to tout its necessity under the guise of needing to play god to ensure effective treatments:

When we have new vaccines every year, we’re trying to figure out: Is COVID itself becoming more infectious, more virulent, and how do you have a vaccine that addresses that? And so, gain-of-function research is you’re trying to anticipate what’s going to happen naturally — you’re anticipating in the lab — and you are developing vaccines, and anti-virals, and other countermeasures for what we anticipate may happen.

Thus, she declared, letting virologists around the world — including in communist China — “is an important tool in terms of keeping ahead of things.”

In other words, nothing went wrong here!

As for Fauci’s culpability in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Gounder was obtuse in lodging a logical fallacy.

“Dr. Fauci was the head of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases for about 40 years. Over that time, funded many, many different grants. We’re talking about $600,000 between 2014 and 2019, so about $100,000 a year we are talking about here. That’s — what? — a couple people you might have been able to fund with that. Does the CEO of this company know about three people paid $50,000 a year,” she scoffed.

After making that point, she threw a hand up in disgust.

Next, Gounder asserted Fauci had nothing to do with the massive, long-term school closures.

Specifically, she said that, even though “Fauci was the most recognizable face of the COVID pandemic in terms of expertise and providing guidance,” “he had no legal authority to act” like “school boards, governors, [and] teachers unions.”

Again, Gounder was deliberately obtuse. While the legal authority did rest with state and local officials, it’s preposterous to claim these officials were any more than lemmings going over the cliff because Fauci told them to.

And, for states that did reopen (ask Florida and Georgia), Fauci menacingly came down with the rest of the liberal press in shaming them as mass killers.

For example, here he was in September 2020 when Florida eased many of its already-lax restrictions:

The third topic for Gounder to spin and explain away was Fauci’s obsession with his fame.

Featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers set up well:

There is an awareness in reading the public diaries that he is very aware of his own public profile. So one of the risks, as you know, of celebrity in politics is people start making decisions with an eye towards the camera. Does that happen in medicine when a public health leader is being lauded on camera? Does that influence the way they make decisions or recommendations?

Instead of taking this opportunity to even lightly criticize Fauci, Gounder suggested the real conclusion from all his mentions of hobnobbing was illustrating “the pressure” he faced, along with “the harassment, and death threats, and what that led to in terms of security, so that’s actually most of his comments about the fame.”

To the approval of Morales, she and Burleson argued who wouldn’t have been swept up or been enamored by him (click “expand”):

GOUNDER: Who here has not taken a selfie with a celebrity who has been here in the studio?

MORALES: Right.

GOUNDER: I’m going to say it’s basically everybody.

MORALES: Everybody, right. Yes, right.

BURLESON: It’s human nature to lean into the limelight, and he had it.

GOUNDER: He had it. But if you look at the preponderance of his comments, most of them are actually concerns about this is making me really uncomfortable —

MORALES: Aww.

GOUNDER: — I’m really uneasy, this is leading to security issues. It’s — you know, the occasional comment about Barbra Streisand is not the headline here.

They concluded with one last act of unrepentance, masquerading as a pity party for the “public health” profession.

Morales put the ball on the tee for Gounder by fretting the COVID debate has “rage[d] on for six years now” and “become somewhat political theater” that’s had an “impact...on our public health system.”

“Oh, public health is devastated, and the massive budget cuts — we have multiple outbreaks right now, cyclospora, et cetera, this is very much a reflection, and it’s just the beginning,” Gounder declared, channeling her inner Mr. Burns. 

To see the relevant CBS transcript from July 29, click here.