A prominent “lifelong Democrat” scholar and economist who chaired a COVID-19 commission blasted Dr. Anthony Fauci and others for promoting “massive government lying” regarding the coronavirus, and accused Senate Democrats of refusing to investigate the virus’ origins.
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who chaired a COVID-19 commission set up by “The Lancet” medical journal, said he has since left the Democratic Party after seeing how government officials have behaved around the origins of the virus.
“The sad part of this, not with respect to the vaccine per se, but with respect to the origin of the virus, is that it’s yet another case of massive government lying,” Sachs said during an appearance on The Hill’s “Rising” show.
“We have since discovered from the start that what the government told us about ‘natural origins’ of this virus were hokey, and really amounting to scientific fraud.”
Sachs said that even the scientists who wrote “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in the spring of 2020 “didn’t even believe that as they were writing it because they knew that there were so many hints that this could well have come out of a U.S. lab, or out of Chinese lab, or out of a U.S.-China partnership in the research.”
Sachs admitted he, too, bought into the mainstream media’s COVID-19 reporting at the beginning of the pandemic, especially after a major scientific journal, “Nature,” said there was overwhelming evidence the origin was natural.
He then credited reporting by The Intercept, U.S. Right to Know, and whistleblowers for helping to change his thinking.
“[They] started letting us in on what was really said inside, was shocking,” said Sachs, who added that after requesting a certain document he had been refused by a fellow commission member.
“I said, ‘Well, you can’t be on the commission. We’re a transparent commission,” Sachs said. “And I began to really see close up that there was so much lying coming out of NIH [National Institutes of Health], coming out of Fauci, coming out of, unfortunately, the government protecting all of this and now it’s spilling out.”
Sachs insists his desire to investigate COVID-19’s origin has more to do with present-day and future research. He credited Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for focusing on gain-of-function research and for trying to persuade Democrat colleagues to probe the issue.
“It’s shocking to me that Democratic senators can’t understand this is not a partisan issue,” Sachs said. “This is a life and death issue. What kind of research is going on? What kind of laboratory manipulation’s going on? What is going on under what we euphemistically … call our biodefense research? Because who knows what it really is?
“I have gotten to understand well that there is a tremendous amount of dangerous research that is not supervised, and it would behoove our Democratic senators, as well as the Republicans, to find out what’s happening. This is not about getting Fauci, this is not about the past, this is about right now.”
Sachs ended his appearance with a plea to Senate Democrats.
“C’mon, we need to understand what’s going on, and we need to understand what kind of dangerous research is under way, and we need to understand where this virus came from,” he said.
“Open the books at University of North Carolina, open the books at Rocky Mountain Labs, understand the funding by the United States of the teams from University of North Carolina and other universities with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Let’s understand what really happened.”
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/dr-jeffrey-sachs-covid-19-democrats/2023/11/24/id/1143515/