‘How Many Times Were We Lied To?’ Fauci & Top Officials Under Fire Over COVID-19 Claims

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Jack Fowler: Okay, Victor, just to torture people further with the sound of my voice, here’s the headline: CIA whistleblower alleges cover-up of COVID-19 lab leak intelligence by scientists who repeatedly concluded that a lab accident caused the COVID-19 pandemic, but more senior bureaucrats watered down and suppressed their conclusions. 

A CIA senior operations officer testified to Congress on Wednesday. His name is James E. Erdman III. He described under oath, in a hearing called by Rand Paul on Wednesday, a pattern of obstruction that promoted the conclusions of a tight-knit group of virologists close to Anthony Fauci, while downplaying the conclusions of the intelligence community’s own biological experts. 

It goes on, Victor. I think most people probably have heard about this. So would you comment on this? And also we’ve talked about before. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who’s been your guest on the podcast, is also up for running this department. Go ahead, please. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, what basically was is that Donald Trump came into office in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The economy was booming by November. And then we had this mysterious virus in which all of the medical community, if you remember what Hillary [Clinton] said, she said it was a gift from God because it destroyed the momentum of Donald Trump.  

And then all of the agencies, all of the agencies, the Deep State administrative, whatever you want to call it. And that includes these middle- to high-level CIA people in the Donald Trump first administration. Remember, he said, “I had only been to Washington 10 or 15 times in my life,” and he didn’t really know that it was not just a—there was no really Democratic-Republican antithesis as far as the bureaucracy. It was all Left.  

And he got people in there. They’re fine people: Bill Barr, John Bolton, Jim Mattis I know, John Kelly, you name them. But they were not ideologically akin to what he wanted.  

And they felt that Donald Trump was a dangerous character, and their duty was not just to carry out his directives and use their expertise to expedite his agenda, but to stop it. 

And so it was that context. So when Donald Trump came out very early, he said it was a China virus, and he started saying things like, why did they stop travel outside of Wuhan in China, but not to our countries? Because they were spreading it. And we’re going to get out of the WHO. That was an anathema. That was a heresy. He was an apostate as far as the bureaucracy. 

So in that context, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and the hierarchy of the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci’s turf—and, by the way, by title, he wasn’t the important person, but by tenure and the money at his disposal, he was running them all. 

And so they had felt that it had been unwise to stop gain-of-function research, and it wasn’t that dangerous. And they wanted to keep going. So they greenlighted the sale of instrumentation to that Wuhan lab. They encouraged people to go over there, and they directed at least $600,000 to the archvillain Peter Daszak, who stealthily was funding it in a small but symbolic way. 

And they were not capable—they either were not capable of ensuring safety because they were amateurs. The French built the thing, and they didn’t understand how it worked. And people had gone over there and said, “This is a disaster waiting to happen.”  

Or the PLA came in and was running it very quickly, and they had military concerns, or it might have been a bioweapon tangential operation. We don’t know. 

And it leaked.  

And then Fauci thought, “Oh my gosh, this thing, it killed a million Americans and 50 million”—but that number was just artificially low. I got it twice. I had long COVID the first time, six months; second time, for a month. The mass that I had in my lung, the ground-glass opacity, one of the radiologists said, “This is from some type of infectious inflammation that you had and probably was what caused the mutation.” 

But all of us have those stories about how it affected their lives, and he was responsible for it. Fauci was, and Collins knew that. And so they got together right after that, and they tried to hide it.  

And part of that hiding is they needed an official imprimatur from an investigative agency. And so they called the CIA. And it was not really under a Trump person at the time. And they said, “We’ve got to stamp out this right-wing Donald Trump racist rant,” whatever language they needed to convince them.  

It wasn’t much because the people we know from the FBI and from John Brennan at the CIA and from Peter Strzok, director of national intelligence, CIA, they all hated him. 

So they tried to cover this up and tried to say, “We need an official investigation.” 

And there was a whistleblower who said, “You people are lying.” All of the people in the field that have gone over there and they’ve looked at this, if it looks like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it’s a duck.  

My gosh, there’s a level four virology lab right in Wuhan. It started in Wuhan. They’ve never found an animal that transmitted the disease to a human. There is no evidence that people got it in the—the people who got the virus came out of the lab. The people who tried to call attention to it are missing. 

And they kept at it. Peter Daszak got The Lancet, one of the most prestigious journals in the world on medicine, to make a phony investigation to say it was a pangolin. 

And that was it. Nicholas—I’m trying to remember his name. Nicholas. He was at The New Yorker. He was a scientific writer. He was in his 70s, and he was really good. And he wrote about it very courageously. And they hounded him, and they fired him. And Tom Cotton wrote, remember that op-ed that said— 

Yeah. They ended up with—you know why Biden pardoned them? Because he knew they were culpable. The only thing that’s a mystery now—the statute of limitations are over. They’re pardoned for their sins, but they’re not pardoned for their future sins. 

So I think it’ll be very hard for Fauci or Collins to come back into Congress and testify under oath because they will ask them point-blank, did you or did you not fund this? Did you or did you not write this email? Did you or did you not—and if they lie, they’re subject to prosecution. And this administration will prosecute them. And so that’ll be interesting to see what happens. 

As far as Fauci, he did so much damage, you know, you don’t need a mask. Who needs a mask? You need one mask. If you get two masks it’s better. We don’t know whether the vaccine—it’s such a new virus. We can’t—the vaccination will prevent you from getting infected, and it will prevent you from infecting others. 

And then when they had the breakout case, like seven months—I got COVID six months after I was vaccinated, and I got vaccinated in early March of 2021. 

Yeah, no, 2021. I got vaccinated in March, and I got my first—I had three COVID infections, but the first wasn’t as bad as the last two. But anyway, my point was it didn’t work and it didn’t stop people. Maybe it mitigated the effects, but it also had certain side effects we don’t need to get into. So that’s a disaster. 

We had Stephen Quay. He came on here. He was the PhD, MD researcher. He was very well known at Stanford Medical Center because he was the one that invented or found the dye contrast for magnetic resonance imaging, MRIs. I think it’s called gadolinium or something like that. And he had a company—I think he still does—that has immunotherapy for breast cancer, etc., etc. 

And he’s been mentioned as somebody who might take over the now-vacant National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and he’d be a wonderful choice. And he’s a conservative, as much as a medical person is political, but he’s not going to be some raving—he’s competent and he believes in the Trump agenda. So I think it would be a wonderful appointment. 

Jack Fowler: Also, his podcast with you—I think you did three interviews with him—were just some of the finest discussions I’ve ever heard on the topic. 

Victor Davis Hanson: I’m going to have him on next week, I think, to talk about the hantavirus. He wrote me about it. 

I mean, the way people were talking about it, they were talking about it as if it’s a COVID, like, you know what I mean? It’s going to take over the world. And I think he’s had a lot of experience with infectious diseases. And he’s very competent. So I think I’m looking forward to that when you get him on.

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