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GOP lawmakers demand answers from Fauci
House Republicans want to know why the Covid-19 guru seemingly shut down
any debate about whether the virus came from a Wuhan lab
© Getty Images / Greg Nash
US Republican lawmakers have sent a letter pressing chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for answers about his alleged silencing of concerns that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a Chinese lab.
The letter, sent on Monday by three US House members, cited emails suggesting that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried in early 2020 to quash speculation among scientists that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of alerting national security officials to the pandemic’s potentially unnatural origin, Fauci and Collins sought to shut down the debate, the GOP lawmakers said.
The emails, which were obtained by media outlets under Freedom of Information Act requests, reportedly showed that some virology experts saw reason to believe that the virus was lab-created. Some of the messages made reference to a February 2020 conference call in which many scientists leaned toward the lab-leak theory. For instance, Tulane Medical School professor Robert Garry said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for some aspects of Covid-19 otherwise.
“However, those same email communications, particularly when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19,” the letter said.
Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Morgan Griffith (R-Virginia) signed the letter.
They demanded that Fauci provide details on how those conversations with scientists were initiated and who consulted him and Collins on Covid-19’s likely origins. The lawmakers also requested information on any communications by Fauci and Collins with Chinese scientists, as well as documents related to US funding of the research in Wuhan.
Even as scientists were speculating about Covid-19’s potentially manmade origins, Fauci told reporters in April 2020 that the sequencing of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Earlier that same day, Collins sent him a message of concern about the lab leak theory, asking how NIH might “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”
Republican lawmakers have accused Fauci of directing taxpayer funding to gain-of-function research that could potentially make organisms more transmissible or lethal. In Monday’s letter, the House members claimed the efforts to quell the lab-leak theory may have stemmed at least partly from fears of those grants being exposed. “It appears you and Dr. Collins may have done so to protect China and avoid criticism about incredibly risky research that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was funding at the Wuhan lab,” the legislators said.
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Covid vaccines during pregnancy impact newborns – study
Immunity can be passed from jabbed mothers to babies, according to new research
Babies born to mothers who took the Covid-19 vaccine during their pregnancy are likely to have some form of immunity against the virus, according to the latest research from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published on Tuesday.
Researchers analyzed data from 379 hospitalized infants – 176 suffered from Covid-19 and 203 were admitted for other reasons. The children were all under six months old between July 2021 and January 2022.
Their study found that hospitalization risks were reduced by 61% in children whose mothers were vaccinated during pregnancy.
Protection increased to 80% when the mothers got their jabs later in their pregnancy (21 weeks to 14 days before delivery). The effectiveness of the vaccinations dropped as low as 32% for babies whose mother was inoculated earlier during pregnancy.
The authors cautioned people not to read too much into the study, given the small sample size used.
“Right now we want to ensure that we are protecting both the mom and the infant,” CDC's Dana Meaney-Delman told reporters. “So, as soon as a pregnant woman is willing to be vaccinated, she should go ahead and do so.”
The CDC says that pregnant women are at greater risk of developing complications due to Covid-19, including risks to their own health, as well as preterm births and stillbirths. It is recommended that anyone expecting a baby or trying to get pregnant should keep up to date with their Covid shots.
Recommended by CDC - Big Pharma; the people who make money from you getting your shots.
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Is CDC protecting the government or Big Pharma, or both?
CDC withholds Covid-19 data that could be ‘misinterpreted’ – media
The US agency is declining to release troves of pandemic information it has gathered to date, according to the New York Times
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has kept reams of its Covid-19 data under wraps for more than a year, the New York Times reports, holding back figures at least partly because it doesn’t trust the public to interpret the information correctly.
The agency’s seemingly selective disclosure came to light in an article by the Times on Sunday. Among the data being withheld is a breakdown of Covid-19 hospitalizations by age, race, and vaccination status. The CDC also chose not to report on such findings as the efficacy of booster shots in 18- to 49-year-olds, even though it collected the information, the article added.
Although it’s the agency leading America’s Covid-19 response, the CDC has published only a “tiny fraction” of the data that it has collected, the Times said. In lieu of US data being made more widely available, experts were forced to look elsewhere for information – such as Israeli figures on booster shots – that would help them make informed recommendations.
CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told the newspaper that the agency’s data priority has been to collect “accurate and actionable” information. Some data has been withheld because “it’s not yet ready for prime time,” she said.
Do the data have to age, like a fine wine, or do they require some massaging before they are ready?
Such omissions have included figures on Covid-19 infections among fully vaccinated Americans. According to the media report, the CDC has been reluctant to publish those figures because “they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.” Nordlund confirmed that concern as one of the reasons.
Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, part of an independent Covid-19 data-tracking project, told the Times that her group had been begging for such information for two years. “We are at much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” she argued.
The CDC has been criticized for a lack of transparency and consistency throughout much of the pandemic. For example, when the agency reversed course on mask-wearing guidance for vaccinated people last summer, it attributed the decision to only “unpublished data.” The New York Time’s revelations about the agency withholding data triggered a fresh round of opprobrium.
“It’s political manipulation of scientific data like this that makes people not ‘trust the science,’” said J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Strategy, in a tweet. “It is unscientific to withhold data because people might disagree with your policies.”
Big Pharma's influence is obvious here! Hiding the truth is never for the benefit of the public, or science.
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