Exclusive — Sen. Marsha Blackburn: ‘I Am Just Livid’ with Dr. Fauci, Potential ‘Lab Leak’ of Coronavirus May Have Been ‘Intentional’ by China
Matthew Boyle 2 Jul 2021 Franklin, TN
FRANKLIN, Tennessee — Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Breitbart News that she is “livid” with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and reiterated her call for Fauci to resign his position over funding his office provided to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Blackburn also questioned if the Chinese Communist Party — whose talking points she said Fauci was echoing over the course of the pandemic — may have “intentionally” leaked the coronavirus from the lab, by far the furthest any U.S. senator has gone in questioning the CCP’s culpability and responsibility for the pandemic.
“Federal employees are supposed to give accurate information, and what we now know is that Dr. Fauci was fully aware that there were problems with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that it should have been investigated, and that he is fully aware that in 2014 President Obama started sending funds to the lab — or Dr. Fauci through the Obama administration started sending funds over there,” Blackburn said in an exclusive long-form video interview as part of Breitbart News’s On The Hill series here at Puckett’s, a supermarket, restaurant, and live music venue at which many of Nashville’s biggest country stars have performed.
Fauci’s office, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), over the course of several years provided hundreds-of-thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars through intermediaries to the WIV. Fauci’s office was set to provide what would have amounted to more than $1.5 million total to the lab through intermediaries, but in spring 2020, as the pandemic raged worldwide, pulled the plug — days after an email from NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak to Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins. Other grants uncovered by Congress show funding also came through intermediaries to the Wuhan lab from other parts of the federal government, like the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development.
On a bipartisan basis this week, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted language from Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA) to ban such funding in the future.
Blackburn noted in the interview that funding for the Wuhan lab came “right from the NIAID, which is [Fauci’s] agency.” Then she noted that Fauci’s emails, obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, show he was privately concerned about this funding and research being conducted at the lab with backing of U.S. taxpayer dollars, but that Fauci did not raise these concerns publicly or with then-President Donald Trump and and then-Vice President Mike Pence. Pence led the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force last year, heading up the U.S. response to the pandemic.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/07/02/exclusive-sen-marsha-blackburn-i-am-just-livid-with-dr-fauci-potential-lab-leak-of-coronavirus-may-have-been-intentional-by-china/
