Donald Trump and his Republican allies have spent the past few weeks trying to rewrite or distort the history of the pandemic, attempting with renewed vigor to villainize Anthony S. Fauci while lionizing the former president for what they portray as heroic foresight and underappreciated efforts to combat the deadly virus.
They have focused on the early moments of
the coronavirus response and the
origins of the virus, downplaying any role they may have played and casting others in the wrong, at times taking comments out of context and at others drawing conclusions that are unproved.
And at a time when the number of vaccinated people continues to rise and deaths are at one of their lowest levels, it has placed the coronavirus back at the
center of the political debate. Trump, who is expected to discuss the pandemic at an event in North Carolina Saturday night, is planning to make it a chief argument in a reputation rehabilitation effort. And Republicans are also making it a centerpiece of their midterm election campaigns, pledging to hold congressional investigations if they win back the House majority.
The central argument from him and his allies is that the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan,
which remains a possibility, or was manufactured there, a claim for which there is no public evidence, as opposed to spreading from an animal to a human, was unfairly dismissed or covered up by scientists and media organizations bent on destroying the former president.
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But to believe some of the claims from Trump and Republicans one would have to imagine that President Barack Obama in 2014 helped seed money into bat research, which within several years would result in a global virus that escaped from a lab — either as a bioweapon or by accident — and spread around the globe.
One would have to come to the firm conclusion that not only was the virus developed in a lab — something experts have said is nearly impossible given the virus’s features — but that Americans helped cover that up, and that President Biden is now aiding in the effort.
But more significantly, the focus on from where the virus came appears to be an attempt to distract from the chief failure of the Trump administration — its uneven and chaotic response to the outbreak once it began spreading within the United States.
Trump frequently told the public it was
not a serious threat and would
go away soon, including when the weather changed. He resisted public health policies that medical experts said could save lives and sent conflicting signals to the public about whether to wear masks. He said you should, but he would not. Trump also sought to take little responsibility for the pandemic response, often saying it was the job of state governments, not his administration, to take action.
Now close to
600,000 Americans have died from the virus — a statistic that is impervious to the debate over whether the virus leaked from a Chinese lab or was spread from an animal to a human.
Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans
The focus on the virus’s origin story also fits a pattern of Trump and his supporters trying to absolve the former president of blame by obfuscating his past actions or words and blaming others despite his role as the country’s leader. Many Republicans are now playing down the severity of
the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and Trump spent
years trying to deny he equated the actions of white supremacists with racial justice demonstrators in the 2017 deadly clashes in Charlottesville.
Public health experts warn that the effort to rewrite or distort the history of the pandemic is more than a political issue and could impact the ability of public health officials to prevent or mitigate a future pandemic.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
on Friday called for Fauci’s resignation and for a “full congressional investigation” into the origins of covid. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a frequent Fauci critic, also renewed calls for his resignation while Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) declared, “In Florida, we choose freedom over Fauci-ism, and we’re much better off for doing that.”
Those lawmakers and commentators have focused on a specific type of research called gain-of-function, in which researchers make a pathogen more infectious, often to develop more effective treatments and vaccines. NIH Director Francis Collins has said the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not approved for such research under the terms of the grant.
There is also no evidence that the lab created the virus.
“Are you really saying that we are implicated because we gave a multibillion-dollar institution $120,000 a year for bat surveillance?” Fauci
said in a recent interview with the Financial Times.
But the question of how and where the virus originated has become a political focal point. Biden
recently ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts to determine the origins of the coronavirus, and issue a report by late August.
Anthony Fauci’s pandemic emails: ‘All is well despite some crazy people in this world’
In one of Fauci’s emails, Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that helped fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, thanked Fauci for that comment in the briefing room.
“I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote to Fauci.
“Many thanks for your kind note,” Fauci responded.
Fauci has defended the email exchange — and he still maintains that the most likely origin for the coronavirus is that it was transferred from an animal to a human.
“You can misconstrue it however you want — that email was from a person to me saying ‘thank you’ for whatever it is he thought I said, and I said that I think the most likely origin is a jumping of species,”
Fauci told CNN on Thursday. “I still do think it is, at the same time as I’m keeping an open mind that it might be a lab leak.”
