As it is well anticipated that the Republican Party is going to gain majority in the Congress and Senate during the upcoming midterm elections in November, Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he will be departing his roles as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical officer to President Joe Biden at the end of this year.
“I am announcing today that I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career”, Fauci said.
Biden released a statement praising Fauci, saying he had an “unwavering” commitment to the work and an “unparalleled spirit, energy, and scientific integrity”.
“Because of Dr. Fauci’s many contributions to public health, lives here in the United States and around the world have been saved. As he leaves his position in the US Government, I know the American people and the entire world will continue to benefit from Dr. Fauci’s expertise in whatever he does next”, Biden said.
Biden added, “Whether you’ve met him personally or not, he has touched all Americans’ lives with his work. I extend my deepest thanks for his public service. The United States of America is stronger, more resilient, and healthier because of him”.
The timing is interesting given Republicans have said they plan to launch an investigation into Fauci if they win back control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul said he plans to subpoena Fauci’s records if Republicans retake the Senate and he becomes chairman of a committee.
“If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of [Fauci’s] records,” Paul said. “We’ll have an investigator go through this piece-by-piece because we don’t need this to happen again”.
Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan made similar comments, saying Republicans will “uncover” what Fauci knew about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, an ally to Jordan, released Fauci’s financial records. The records appear to show that Fauci and his wife have a combined net worth of around US$10 million.
Records also showed that Fauci and his wife were paid tens of thousands of dollars to attend four galas and ceremonies — three of them virtual — during the pandemic.
Jordan argued that these revelations and recently released emails prove there’s a “need to investigate Fauci”.
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this”, Jordan said, adding that his colleagues would push for a congressional investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.
“Because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab”, Jordan argued. “The top scientists in the country were saying it came from a lab. One scientist says we got the notes now from the conference call on February 1st. One scientist says, ‘I don’t see how this can happen in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab’”.
“And yet just in a matter of days, they changed their position, write the article that appears in Nature of Medicine Magazine, which then gets cited in the now-famous letter The Lancet, which became the gospel for the fact that Fauci can go out and tell people it didn’t come from a lab when in fact they knew it did”, Jordan continued.
“The interesting thing is. We point this out. We just learned this last week, that the two doctors who were most adamant that this thing came from a lab early on: one is Dr. Kristian Anderson. On Jan. 31, 2020, he says this to Dr. Fauci in an email: ‘Virus looks engineered. The virus not consistent with evolutionary theory.’ So, he knew it came from a lab”, he added.
“They changed their position”, Jordan argued. “And a few months later, guess what? They get an US$8.9 million, both him and Dr. [Robert] Garry – the guy who said it couldn’t happen naturally”.
