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A prominent “lifelong Democrat”\u00a0scholar and economist who chaired a COVID-19 commission blasted Dr. Anthony Fauci and others for promoting “massive government lying”\u00a0regarding the\u00a0coronavirus, and accused Senate Democrats of refusing to investigate the virus’\u00a0origins.<\/p>\n
Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University professor who chaired a COVID-19 commission set up by “The Lancet”\u00a0medical journal, said he has since left the Democratic Party after seeing how government officials have behaved around the origins of the virus.<\/p>\n
“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\u2019s yet another case of massive government lying,”\u00a0Sachs said during an appearance on\u00a0The Hill\u2019s “Rising”\u00a0show<\/a>.<\/p>\n “We have since discovered from the start that what the government told us about \u2018natural origins\u2019 of this virus were hokey, and really amounting to scientific fraud.”<\/p>\n Sachs said that even the scientists who wrote “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2<\/a>”\u00a0in the spring of 2020\u00a0“didn\u2019t 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.”<\/p>\n Sachs admitted he, too, bought into the mainstream media\u2019s COVID-19 reporting at the beginning of the pandemic, especially after a major scientific journal, \u201cNature,\u201d said there was overwhelming evidence the origin was natural.<\/p>\n He then credited reporting by The Intercept, U.S. Right to Know, and whistleblowers for helping to change his thinking.<\/p>\n “[They] started letting us in on what was really said inside, was shocking,”\u00a0said Sachs, who added that after requesting a certain document he had been refused by a fellow commission member.<\/p>\n “I said, ‘Well, you can\u2019t be on the commission.\u00a0We\u2019re a transparent commission,”\u00a0Sachs said. \u201cAnd 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\u2019s spilling out.”<\/p>\n Sachs insists his desire to investigate COVID-19\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n “It’s shocking to me that Democratic senators can’t understand this is not a partisan issue,”\u00a0Sachs said. “This is a life and death issue. What kind of research is going on? What kind of laboratory manipulation\u2019s going on? What is going on under what we euphemistically \u2026 call our biodefense research? Because who knows what it really is?<\/p>\n “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\u2019s happening. This is not about getting Fauci, this is not about the past, this is about right now.”<\/p>\n Sachs ended his appearance with a plea to Senate Democrats.<\/p>\n “C’mon, we need to understand what\u2019s 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,”\u00a0he said.<\/p>\n “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\u2019s understand what really happened.”<\/p>\n