Tucker Carlson has accused Dr Anthony Fauci and other public health officials of lying about the severity of the COVID pandemic and ushering in 'medical martial law' to distract from their support of the Wuhan laboratory - where Carlson said the pandemic begun.
Fauci, the nation's top public health expert and Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, on Friday night shrugged off a week of attacks from Carlson and other conservative critics, who blame him both for excessive lockdowns and for funding the lab from where they believe the outbreak escaped, in Wuhan, China.
Fauci told Rachel Maddow on MSNBC that the attacks were 'a terrible, not-happy type of a distraction, but it's all nonsense.'
Carlson, however, continued with his onslaught, and accused Fauci on Friday night of orchestrating a cover-up to distract from his decision to fund the Wuhan lab.
'It's now clear in the earliest days of the pandemic public health officials in Washington were panicked,' Carlson said.
'Officials in Washington were terrified for themselves. They were afraid of being exposed.
Tucker Carlson on Friday night accused Fauci and other health professionals of imposing 'medical martial law' in a bid to cover up their own actions. Carlson said that Fauci's decision to fund 'reckless experiments in China' at the Wuhan lab 'likely' created COVID-19, and the virus escaping from the lab started the pandemic
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of only three sites in the world to perform 'gain of function' research, making viruses more transmissible and deadly, to explore how they react. The other two are in North Carolina and Texas. The China lab is now being investigated amid fears that the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from its facility
'They had used American tax dollars to fund reckless experiments in China that in the end likely created COVID-19.
'If that fact were to become public it would be over. They would be shamed, and ridiculed - possibly even indicted. Their professional lives would be done.
'So they immediately set to work hiding it on a cover-up.'
Carlson argued that Fauci's emails - released this week to BuzzFeed, The Washington Post and anti-vax advocates Informed Consent Action Network - showed that he was deliberately misleading the public.
'Last winter a group of well-known scientists publicly dismissed the lab leak theory in a letter to The Lancet as absurd and categorically untrue,' Carlson said.
'And yet at the same time they wrote emails to each other conceding the virus did look engineered by human hands in a lab. 'Meanwhile, Tony Fauci worked on censorship.'
He accused Fauci of dismissing any suggestion of the 'lab leak' theory in order to cover up the fact that he had authorized payment of $826,000, over six years, to support their research into coronaviruses.
'Fauci made certain that the self-appointed fact checkers who control the flow of information in this country shut down anyone who dared challenge the official story which again we now know was a lie,' said Carlson.
Carlson, who mockingly calls the veteran health expert 'Saint Fauci' or 'Lord Fauci' or 'Pope Fauci', questioned the mortality rate, and asked whether it was bad enough to warrant lockdowns.
Fauci on Friday night appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show and said that the criticism of him was 'nonsense' and an attack on science. He has found himself firmly in the spotlight for the past few weeks amid concern at his funding of the Wuhan lab. This week his emails were published, showing in some cases discrepancy between what he said in private and in public
He said Fauci himself, in one email at the start, said it may end up being like a bad flu season, or a mild pandemic.
Carlson also pointed out Fauci telling one woman in an email that some simple face masks, bought in drug stores, were ineffective - and the Fox News host then asked why Fauci was recommending them, if they did not work.
Fauci earlier this week said that his emails were easy to take out of context and misinterpret.
'Those drug store masks don't work but Fauci continued to demand that you wear those drugstore masks. He continued to demand that the lockdown continue,' said Carlson.
'Why did he do that when he knew - and we know for certain now because we can prove with it the emails - he knew those were not recommendations grounded in science.
'But he pushed them anyway. Why? We can't say for certain.
'We do know the effect of these recommendations was a kind of medical martial law.'
Carlson ridiculed White House press secretary Jen Psaki's defense of Fauci - who has known Biden for years, and who appears to have a much easier working relationship with the current president than with Trump.
Psaki said on Friday that she would not 'relitigate emails from 17 months ago,' and Fauci could speak for himself.
'He did speak for himself,' said Carlson.
'He's always got a place on Nicole Wallace's show where they will tell him what a great man he is. A great hero.
'He can speak for himself on MSNBC.'
Fauci did on Friday night appear on the liberal network, talking to Maddow about his difficult week.
She asked whether the 80-year-old was 'actually worried about this new sort of re-upping of attacks on you'.
Fauci replied: 'Well, I'm concerned about that more because it's really very much an attack on science.
'My job was to make a vaccine and use my instituted and the talented scientists we have there and that we fund in the various universities to get a vaccine that was highly safe and highly effective and we succeeded.
'That's what I do. All the other stuff is just a terrible, not-happy type of a distraction, but it's all nonsense.'
He went on to discuss the debate over the coronavirus pandemic's origin.
'You know, there's this concern, is it a natural evolution, or is it something that happen out of a lab, an accident, or what have you. It is important to understand that,' he said.
'But it is being approached now in a very vehement way, in a very distorted way, I believe, by attacking me.
'I think the question is extremely legitimate, you should want to know how this happened so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again.
'But what's happened in the middle of all of that, I've become the object of extraordinary, I believe, completely inappropriate, distorted, misleading and misrepresented attacks.
'It is what it is, but it's happening, and that's unfortunate,' Fauci said.
Scientists are seen working inside the Wuhan lab. The site is one of only three in the world - the others are in North Carolina and Texas - where 'gain of function' research is carried out on viruses, to make them more transmissible or deadly
Joe Biden has order an investigation into whether COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan laboratory (above), rather than evolved naturally and passed from animals to humans. He told the team at the end of May that they have 90 days to report back
The Wuhan lab is increasingly seen as a possible source for the COVID-19 outbreak. Initially scientists dismissed the idea as a wild conspiracy theory promoted by Donald Trump
At least four State Department employees said in separate interviews that they repeatedly were 'warned' that an investigation into a possible COVID-19 leak from the Wuhan lab would 'open Pandora's Box;' and reveal that the U.S. funded gain-of-function research there.
It 'smelled like a cover-up,' Thomas DiNanno told Vanity Fair.
DiNanno, the former acting assistant secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, was one of four State Department officials who told Vanity Fair they wanted to investigate the possibility that COVID-19 spread after it escaped from the Wuhan lab.
The others were David Asher, David Feith and Miles Yu.
But they were muzzled by other State Department officials as well as the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation and even 'ostracized,' Yu told Vanity Fair.
The lab leak was touted by then-President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders, but was deemed impossible by a 'scientific consensus' in a letter signed by 27 scientists, published on February 19, 2020 in the medical journal The Lancet.
After that, the Wuhan lab theory was considered to be at best a conspiracy - some even considered it racist - so it wasn't discussed as a realistic origin of COVID-19 until recently.
Yu, the State Department's principal China strategist, found the government's and scientists' silence 'maddening,' Vanity Fair reported.
He said, 'Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.'
Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who ran the State Department's day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry, told Vanity Fair it became clear that 'there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy' inside the federal government.
One of the people with an interest in hiding it was Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance who's been working with Shi Zhengli - the Wuhan virologist known in China as the 'bat lady' - for more than 15 years.
Daszak was spotted outside of his million-dollar home in upstate New York on Friday, just as DailyMail.com learned that he has 'ignored' a request from Congress to answer questions about his charity's funding of the Wuhan Insitute of Virology.
Daszak is accused of using 'thuggery and intimidation' to dismiss a theory that Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab his charity, EcoHealth Alliance, worked with and helped support with U.S. government dollars.
In April the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent him 34 questions about his involvement with the lab.
Despite a deadline of May 17, Daszak has failed to respond, a source close to the committee told DailyMail.com.
The questions were about his charity, its federal funding which went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China, and the work the U.S. nonprofit did with the Chinese lab.
Daszak - who last year earned more than $410,000 - lives with his immunologist wife Janet Cottingham in a five-bed, five-bath home in an affluent town in Rockland County, New York, 30 miles northwest of Manhattan. They bought the house, set on two acres of land, for a bargain $665,000 in 2015. It is now estimated to be worth around $1 million.
Rather than respond to the allegations that he 'bullied' other scientists into signing off on a letter to a prestigious medical journal that removed blame for Covid-19 on the Wuhan Institute of Virology - and that his ties to the lab led to such a conflict of interest that he should never have sat on two panels investigating the cause of Covid-19 - he told a DailyMail.com reporter: 'You need to remove your car from our drive right now, leave the area and never come back.
'Goodbye, I have no comment,' he added.
Minutes later, wearing a blue polo shirt, shorts and sandals, he went on to the porch of the house overlooking the Ramapo Mountains, sat down and started waving his arms around in apparent anger as he had an animated conversation on his phone.
Soon afterwards, three police cruisers turned up at his house.
The Republican minority group of the committee launched an investigation in March into the origins of Covid-19 after a growing number of prominent scientists began voicing their concerns that the deadly virus may have escaped from the lab – and could even have been created there.
EcoHealth and Daszak have come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that the charity funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grants to the lab for controversial coronavirus research.
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