Politico: Republicans Are Seizing On COVID Origin Story

Or, is it pouncing? This is very silly from Politico, but, at least they’re touching on where COVID originated, while the NY Times, the so-called paper of record, has zero stories on it on their web front page this morning. Anyhow, why would investigating this be politically fraught

Republicans dive into politically fraught push for Covid’s origin story

Republicans finally found a commission they can get behind.

Feeling vindicated after Democrats, scientists and the media gave new oxygen to the theory that the coronavirus was borne out of a laboratory accident in China, Republicans are now ramping up efforts to prod President Joe Biden’s party into opening a thorough investigation into the origins of the virus — through an independent commission or at the congressional level.

But despite a growing chorus of bipartisan calls for such a probe, it’s unclear whether Democrats are actually willing to launch a wide-ranging review. The House’s select panel on Covid-19 has not committed to exploring how the deadly outbreak started, with its chair, Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), recently suggesting he’d rather look forward than backward.

That leaves Republicans with few options for uncovering the information they’re seeking from Beijing — but plenty of incentives to use the pandemic’s murky genesis as a political cudgel against their opponents.

“Everyone knows Biden and the Democrats will never stand up to China because they have too much invested there. That’s why we have little faith they’ll get to the bottom of this,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee. “If anything deserves a 9/11-style commission, it’s the pandemic that’s left half a million Americans dead.”

I’m betting that the vast majority of US citizens, regardless of politics, would like an investigation into the origins of COVID. Doesn’t mean they will get the full answers they want, as China will surely fail to cooperate, but, we keep getting new information all the time. And which made more sense, someone eating a bat or something or a bio-research center releasing it, whether intentionally or by accident? That there was a transmission from a wet market or the Wuhan center, which has been known to have released multiple diseases by accident (“by accident”?), when the Wuhan center was known to have doing research to screw around with diseases like COVID.

(Breitbart) On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that “Dr. Fauci certainly would have seen the same intelligence that I saw. We would certainly have known that the risk this came from the laboratory was real.” But he “let those of us who were out there talking about it carry the mantle, and we couldn’t get science. We got politics instead.” And that by May evidence “was piling up showing that the theory of the wet market didn’t hold water and that the much more likely scenario was that this had come from the virology lab in Wuhan.”

People were thinking it was not a bat or other animal not long after we found out about COVID, and we keep learning that the government did know more than they were saying.

Meanwhile

Report: Anthony Fauci Said in Released Emails ‘Drug Store’ Masks Are ‘Not Really Effective’

Dr. Anthony Fauci reportedly described mask wearing as “not really effective” in a February 5, 2020, email to Sylvia Burwell, President of American University and former U.S. Health and Human Services secretary.

Fauci replied in full to the email:

Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infections. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a vey [sic] low risk location. Your instincts are correct, money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines.

In a 60 Minutes interview from March 8, 2020, Fauci said, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.

“And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face,” he continued.

Gee, ya think? A thin piece of cloth does little to nothing. Those “medical” masks, the blue ones, are not for stopping viruses. It says so on the box. The part about unintended consequences is interesting, as my thought was that the masks kept you from touching your face directly. I guess not.

Anyhow, why would investigating the origins be politically fraught? Do Democrats not want to know?