The House Oversight Committee is taking a deep dive into the events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and Rep. James Comer (R-KY) says they are starting from the bottom and working their way up.
In an appearance on Newsmax’s “National Report” on Thursday, Rep. Comer said the committee will begin by looking at “every government official from the bottom up” to determine what happened with the National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and its grant to the EcoHealth Alliance.
“We’re going to hear from everyone in the government that had anything to do with approving tax dollars to go to EcoHealth Alliance, which we know now went to the Wuhan lab to fund gain-of-function research,” Comer said. “We also want to hear from any government employee that had anything to do with grant dollars going to the scientists who backed up all of Fauci’s claims.”
The Kentucky representative added that lawmakers have learned from their research that tax dollars went through the NIH to “these scientists that were always getting Dr. Fauci’s back and giving him a green light to say or do whatever he wanted.” He said the committee will interview every government employee involved in the matter to understand their thought process.
“When you look at the EcoHealth grant, not only they should have never gotten a grant to do anything like gain-of-function research, they were out of compliance,” Comer said. “When the government awards money in the form of grants to these universities and to these companies that are doing research, they’re supposed to constantly update the government on the progress of their grant. But the government let them get away with everything.”
“We’re putting a case together to where we have substantial evidence on what we think are many areas of wrongdoing at the hands of Dr. Fauci and Dr. [Francis] Collins, but that starts at the very bottom and it’s going to take time,” Comer said. “We’re going to interview all these employees. You’re talking about hundreds of hours of testimony from employees just to understand the full picture of what happened, every decision that was made, and why it was made.”
The committee released a report Wednesday that conflicts with last year’s findings by the intelligence community that the virus may have been part of a Chinese biological weapons research program. Comer said this “confirms our worst fears” because “to think that American tax dollars were playing a role in that is the ultimate slap in the face of the American taxpayers and a slap in the face to everyone who lost a loved one.”
Comer also said that this points to another failure of the intelligence community because they “either didn’t know what was going on, and they should have, or they covered it up.”
