White House Press Corps Has Zero Questions About Dr. Fauci Emails
The White House Press Corps had zero questions for press secretary Jen Psaki during Wednesday’s press briefing on Dr. Anthony Fauci’s widely circulated emails from early on in the pandemic.
Psaki took questions from the White House Press Corps for about 45 minutes and reporters grilled her on issues such as Russian cyber attacks, Biden’s Tuesday comments, Israel’s new government, and student loan forgiveness.
Left out of the briefing were the inquiries into the revelations from Dr. Fauci’s emails that were obtained by the Washington Post. The emails contained several previously unknown details about Dr. Fauci, who is the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and was the point man for the federal government’s response to the novel coronavirus.
Spectator Washington editor and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Amber Athey, who was in the briefing room, said she was going to ask about the emails but was not called on.
Most notably, U.S. researcher Dr. Peter Daszak, the leader of a nonprofit group with close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, thanked Dr. Fauci in an April 2020 email for publicly throwing cold water on the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
The theory was originally brushed off as a conspiracy theory by news outlets and fact-checkers despite information in the public domain pointing to its possibility.
An infectious disease expert also told Fauci in a January 2020 email that a small part of COVID-19 “potentially” looked engineered, although he dramatically changed his opinion within a week of sending it.
Another explosive email showed that Dr. Fauci may have had some idea about the NIAID’s funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which he had previously denied to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul during congressional testimony.
The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported that Dr. Fauci’s agency funded the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance to study bat-based coronaviruses in China that included the transfer of $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (RELATED: US Grant To Wuhan Lab To Enhance Bat-Based Coronaviruses Was Never Scrutinized By HHS Review Board, NIH Says)
Other emails showed Dr. Fauci corresponding with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, an executive at the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as a Chinese health official whom Fauci told we will “get through this together.”