Political Quotes

“Mr. President, last week's conversations about our own government's role in the COVID coverup reflected over a year of refusal on the part of my Democratic colleagues to accept that the novel coronavirus may not have spread via natural transmission from a Chinese wildlife wet market. As the theories of the pandemic's origins evolved, one remained, until very recently, off limits. This is, of course, the lab leak hypothesis, or the theory that the virus somehow escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Now, this theory didn't come out of nowhere. In early January 2020, alarm bells were already ringing at the CDC, the State Department, and in the scientific community over problems with the natural origin theory of transmission. Virologists and other public health officials studying the disease were quickly coming to the conclusion that the way the virus was spreading suggested that this theory was flawed. Officials also knew that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting controversial and dangerous ``gain of function'' research with the help of repackaged U.S. Government grants. Yes, that is correct. In April of last year, I joined many of my colleagues in publicly demanding a thorough investigation into the lab leak theory. What followed was nothing less than moral panic. Activists, journalists, and even our own Democratic colleagues accused us of racism, xenophobia, and science denial.…”