Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a Fox News interview on Tuesday night, saying he should have told the press to “stick it up their fact checker” when asked questions about the origins of the pandemic.
“The evidence has finally caught up with the Chinese Communist Party, with Dr. Fauci, and with the other permanent Washington types, who for over a year have said that the idea that the coronavirus came from China lab leak was a conspiracy theory, and then anybody believed that was circus free crazy,” Kennedy said. “Well, it wasn’t a conspiracy theory. And people aren’t circus freak crazy. It was a reasonable question to ask from day one. Suspicious facts have existed from day one, if people cared to look pointing to that possibility.”
“The Chinese Communist Party and Dr. Fauci, and I’m going to be blunt here, have said for over a year look, ‘nothing to see here, the coronavirus came from an animal,'” Kennedy continued. “Except after a year, no one’s been able to prove that and as the Economist Magazine put it this week, no one has found anything close to a smoking bat.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but a year ago this month in May of 2020, my friend Dr. Fauci gave a number of interviews and in them he dismissed the lab leak theory. Now I want to be fair to him. I know the press was all over him and he did it under pressure from the press,” he added. “But Dr. Fauci should have told the press to stick it up their fact checker that I’m going to follow the science and he didn’t.”
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TRANSCRIPT:
SEAN HANNITY, FOX NEWS HOST: … One of the senators who’s been forcing Fauci to actually answer the tough questions, he’s from the great state of Louisiana, Senator John Kennedy. And by the way, senator, I strongly, unless you ask me not to, strongly support your reelection, you have done a phenomenal job as a senator from the great state of Louisiana, and you become a true leader in the Senate. And I have a great admiration for you, sir.
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): Well, thank you, Sean. My campaign people would beat me about the head and shoulders if I didn’t ask folks to go to my website, johnkennedy.com, johnkennedy.com. I put up some cool new pictures and some admonitions to folks, like pretty please with sugar on top, stand your ass up for the national anthem and that sort of stuff. … Let me say this about Dr. Fauci. I know Dr. Fauci. I like Dr. Fauci. I respect Dr. Fauci. But karma, as they say, is a witch. For the record, that’s witch. The evidence has finally caught up with the Chinese Communist Party, with Dr. Fauci, and with the other permanent Washington types, who for over a year have said that the idea that the coronavirus came from China lab leak was a conspiracy theory, and then anybody believed that was circus free crazy. Well, it wasn’t a conspiracy theory. And people aren’t circus freak crazy. It was a reasonable question to ask from day one. Suspicious facts have existed from day one, if people cared to look pointing to that possibility. The Chinese Communist Party and Dr. Fauci, and I’m going to be blunt here, have said for over a year look, nothing to see here. The coronavirus came from an animal. Except after a year, no one’s been able to prove that and as the Economist Magazine put it this week, no one has found anything close to a smoking bat, not to put too fine a point on it, but a year ago this month in May of 2020, my friend Dr. Fauci gave a number of interviews and in them he dismissed the lab leak theory. Now I want to be fair to him. I know the press was all over him and he did it under pressure from the press. But Dr. Fauci should have told the press to stick it up there fact checker that I’m going to follow the science and he didn’t. And we’ve lost a year here. And and I don’t know if we’ll ever find the origin of the virus now. It’s not a question, Sean, of keeping score or who was right or … you were wrong. We need to know this. So that we can keep it from happening again. And I don’t know now if we’ll ever find out and that’s that’s a bloody shame.
HANNITY: You know, he’s flipped and flopped and failed. Now the comments in 2012 about gain of function, this is significant. In other words, labs that actually, they manipulate and I’m using layman’s terms here, forgive me, Senator, I’m not a doctor and I’m not a medical researcher, but manipulate viruses, but it causes the, it can potentially and he acknowledged that it can potentially cause a pandemic that gets out of control. He said it was worth the effort. He was in charge of the NIH. He gave money to the Wuhan lab. He can’t say based on your questioning of him, whether or not any of that money was used that way. Is that correct, sir?
KENNEDY: Yes, and I don’t know that that’s Dr. Fauci’s call or the call of any other scientis or Washington, D.C., insider. Look, this is what we’ve discovered, scientists all over the world are creating Frankensteins, that’s what gain of function research is. And gain of function research, a scientist in a lab takes a harmless benign pathogen and turns it into a deadly contagious virus to learn from it. And this is happening all over the world and labs leak and we didn’t know about it. And Dr. Fauci and his colleagues, they’re going to have to step up and tell us what’s going on here and whether the American people are paying for it.