The following is an excerpt from Just The News.

The top Republican House investigator says his team has uncovered evidence suggesting federal health officials used grant dollars to keep private scientists on script and have them deny Covid-19 originated with a lab accident despite scientific evidence to the contrary. 

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the likely chairman of the House Oversight Committee if the GOP wins control of the House, told Just the News on Monday night that his investigators have evidence showing that even though Dr. Anthony Fauci was warned the virus likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, he constructed, with the aid of federally funded private scientists, a counter narrative that Covid-19 evolved naturally from animals.

“Everyone in the medical community backed up Dr. Fauci, and what we now know is they were receiving a lot of grant dollars,” Comer said Monday during a wide-ranging interview on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show.

Comer said his investigators have obtained documents showing that on Feb. 1, 2020 Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss Covid-19.

On that call, Fauci and Collins were first warned that Covid-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.

Four days earlier, Comer said, Fauci was alerted that his own National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had funded an American research firm known as EcoHealth Alliance, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China was a subgrantee of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth was not in compliance with its grant reporting, in particular a grant that NIAID knew had gain-of-function potential on novel bat coronaviruses.

“We uncovered the emails that showed Dr. Fauci’s earliest advisers said that this is obviously a lab leak, and this has to be man-made,” the Kentucky Republican added. “We also showed where Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins at the NIH were talking about trying to spin the lab leak theory, that they were really concerned about the optics of that. What we learned is how much slush money the NIH had to award in the form of grants to these advisers.”

Comer said he fears the complicity of the private scientists helped Fauci seize a narrative to justify massive health lockdowns and thwart an earlier investigation of what role a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan, China played in the pandemic.

NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night. 

Fauci long shut down the possibility of a lab leak, but U.S. intelligence has since said a lab accident is a likely source of the virus. And Fauci recently told Congress he’s keeping an open mind that he was wrong.

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