Media top headlines May 27
USA Today changing 'male' to 'transgender' in a female athlete's column on competing against transgender females and more round out today's top media headlines
Fox News contributor Miranda Devine declared Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci had "done enough damage" in his leadership roles throughout the coronavirus pandemic and it was time for him to resign.
In an op-ed for the New York Post, Devine slammed Fauci's "errors" across multiple areas concerning the U.S. response to the pandemic and blasted his most "consequential" shift: the origin of the coronavirus.
She outlined a recent confrontation at a hearing when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned Fauci on whether funding from the U.S. went towards "gain-of-function" research in China. He responded that it had not.
"He couldn’t have been more certain. Until he wasn’t certain a few hours later," Devine wrote, pointing out that later in the day, Fauci admitted U.S. scientists collaborated with Chinese scientists as part of a grant subcontract.
"It’s like being a little bit pregnant. The NIH either funded so-called gain-of-function research to juice up bat coronaviruses in China, or it didn’t. Turns out it did," she continued.
Devine wrote the National Institutes of Health (NIH) gave millions of dollars to a New York-based non-profit, that in turn gave hundreds of thousands of dollars, with NIH approval, to gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan, China lab. She added it isn't yet known if that particular research contributed to a possible lab leak of the virus.
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She noted that on the same day as the contentious hearing with Paul, Fauci attended the liberal Poynter Institute's fact-checking festival and admitted for the first time he wasn't convinced the coronavirus developed naturally, suggesting the lab leak theory was credible.
"Fauci was the most influential debunker of the theory since the start of the pandemic," Devine wrote. "He trashed the lab-leak theory about the origins of COVID-19 using all the authority of his office as the lead infectious-disease expert in the country, the director for 37 years of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, chief medical adviser to the president, and the founding expert on then-President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force."
She stated Fauci "has changed his mind about almost everything else," including on wearing masks, herd immunity, and the banning of flights from China at the onset of the pandemic.
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"But on this, potentially the most consequential of all of Fauci’s errors, he had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Paul to a final acknowledgment of the obvious," she said. "He’s done enough damage. Time to resign."
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