George Washington University law professor and Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley reacts to allegations that Dr. Fauci tried to disprove the Wuhan lab leak theory on "America Reports."
JONATHAN TURLEY: I have not been a vocal critic of Dr. Fauci, but I do think that he's been less than forthcoming on this issue. You know, obviously, Dr. Fauci got a lot of things wrong. I mean, at the very beginning, he praised China for being extraordinarily transparent and cooperative for a change. We still don't even know what that was based on, and we know now that China basically destroyed evidence, arrested or threatened scientists and all but shut down any efforts to find the origins of COVID.
Now we're finding out that Dr. Fauci was pushing this study and funding it. That's really sort of disturbing when you put it in the context of what we know was going on. We now know because of litigation that the CDC had backchannels to social media to censor people, to target people who would be suspended. We also know, of course, that various scientists were effectively silenced or shunned and one of the criticisms that I have had with Dr. Fauci and his colleagues is they really said nothing during this period.
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You know, I look to these free speech issues particularly and as very qualified and respected scientists were being silenced and shunned, we didn't hear a peep of objection from people like Fauci to say, you shouldn't be suspending these people, you should allow this debate to occur on social media because these are some of the best known scientists during that period. But instead, the media worked with the CDC and they effectively shut down this debate.