Reschenthaler: Fauci 'Either Grossly Incompetent or Lying' to Americans

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been “wrong over and over again” with his response and recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic and should either be fired or resign from his job as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler said Thursday. 

“He is either grossly incompetent or he has been lying to the American people the whole time,” the Pennsylvania Republican maintained on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.” “Look, I’m a lawyer; I’m not a scientist. But just look at the evidence.”

Reschenthaler said he was “skeptical” of Fauci, now President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, “from the very beginning of this,” including in January 2020, when “he said America has nothing to worry about regarding this virus.”

Fauci criticized then-President Donald Trump for ordering a travel ban from China, “and then he said that decision was why President Trump actually saved lives,” said Reschenthaler. “He blatantly lied to Congress about masks and the American people, saying they don’t help, and then he said that, ‘oh, no, I was lying so we could hoard PPE.’ He has been wrong this entire time.”

Fauci was also wrong with his early contentions about the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, Reschenthaler insisted. 

“If you were to believe Dr. Fauci, and the fact that this originated in nature or a wet market, you would have to believe that a bat, a thousand miles away from Wuhan, traveled to Wuhan, again, a thousand miles, infected no species, no human along the way, then started infecting people around Wuhan,” said Reschenthaler. 

However, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was studying coronavirus and bat-borne diseases, said Reschenthaler, “and once that virus leaked it became 20 times more contagious than it was in its state in nature. To me, that just defies logic.”

He also pointed out that in November 2019, researchers from the laboratory were getting COVID-like symptoms. 

“To me, the evidence is staggering,” said Reschenthaler. “Dr. Fauci should be fired or resign.”

He added that when he and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said the virus probably began in the Wuhan lab “where they were doing gain of function research” on diseases, Fauci “was the one saying that was a conspiracy theory. He was the one pushing the real conspiracy theory, pushing that this virus originated in nature.” 

Reschenthaler’s comments come while Republican outcry grows against Fauci, who is now saying that he is open to believing that COVID-19 may have started in a lab, not through nature. 

The doctor is also under fire because of payments that had been made to the Wuhan lab facility. He told a House Appropriations subcommittee Tuesday that the National Institutes of Health had earmarked $600,000 to the Chinese institute over a five-year period to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans, reports The New York Post. 

However, the money, sent to Wuhan through the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance was to be used as a “modest collaboration” with the Chinese experts, not to be used for gain of function research, Fauci told lawmakers. 

Such research takes a virus that can infect humans and makes it “either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans,” said the doctor, but he insisted “that categorically was not done.”

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