Fauci not honest about COVID origin, says Adm. Brett Giroir

Adm. Brett Giroir, former White House coronavirus testing czar, accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of being dishonest about the origin of the coronavirus, after he originally claimed in May of 2020 that the virus could not have been "artificially or deliberately manipulated" from the Wuhan lab the way the mutations have "naturally evolved."

"The statement from last year was completely false," Giroir told "America’s Newsroom" on Thursday. "There was no pattern of mutations that suggest that it went right from an animal in a natural situation to humans — and there's still no evidence to show that. So that statement was completely wrong."

Giroir claimed Fauci was being "obviously antagonistic" to the Trump administration, and that there was a considerable amount of CYA involved. 

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The former HHS assistant secretary's comments come after top scientists and Fauci himself downplayed the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a Wuhan lab. Fauci still believes it’s "likely" that the virus originated naturally. 

"The [former] president suggested that it could have been a lab leak," Giroir told co-host, Bill Hemmer. "So this was obviously in contradiction to a hypothesis that we know is still…the most likely one; it was an antagonistic to the [former] president's position and to many of the people's positions within the Trump administration. It was against it. It was contrary."

President Biden ordered the intelligence community last week to investigate the virus’s origins.

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Meanwhile, Fauci is receiving further backlash for an email that was released this week. The email revealed Fauci being thanked last year by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance for pouring cold water on the lab-leak theory. Daszak's organization funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronaviruses, partly through taxpayer grant money from Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fox News' David Rutz contributed to this report.