Extra: New Report Shows How Washington Fought The Lab Leak Theory
28:44 Share

The Yeti store has so many great gifts, we had to hire a cattle auctioneer to make the most of these next 30 seconds. All right, folks, let's get started with the Yeti French Press. Enjoy coffee that stays hot for hours in the French Press. 34 ounce for you, 6-4 for the crews of the Yeti French Press. Mixed waterproof bags, bags are waterproof. Submersible waterproof doubles, waterproof bag bags. For us, mostly water, so get a waterproof Yeti bag. Do I smell something cookin'?

All new cast iron skillets made to be passed down like mama's recipes. Take a steak, cornbread, cobblers, pot pie, and potatoes. Next level with three sizes of Yeti cast iron skillets. Gear, gifts, and product experts. Visit the Yeti store at Scottsdale Quarter today. This is the Fox News Rundown Extra.

I'm Jessica Rosenthal. This week we spoke with Ohio Congressman and physician Brad Wenstrip, the Republican chair of the House Select Subcommittee on COVID-19 over the last two years. He details with us their final report and what they found, also what they're not totally sure about still, given the cover-up. The report concludes the Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.

The report finds our National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The report also says the possibility of this virus leaked from a lab is not a conspiracy theory, that generations of children will be impacted for years over school lockdowns, and the pandemic resulted in rampant fraud, waste, and abuse. Wenstrup shared heartbreaking anecdotes and insights about the committee's work, given that he's a doctor. He also shared his hopes about what the Trump administration will do with the report and how he hopes the incoming administration might handle another pandemic.

We often have to cut interviews down for time during the week, but thought you might like to hear this full interview. Thank you for listening. Please follow the Weekday Rundown podcast if you don't already. Now, here is outgoing Ohio Republican Congressman and doctor Brad Wenstrip on the Fox News Rundown Extra.

Well, let's talk about this report because we've interviewed you, gosh, a few times throughout the past couple of years on this, keeping tabs on some of the hearings. Let's start with sort of your top line thoughts. It's a lengthy report and it's actually quite easy to read. Thank you for that because you guys put things in boxes and sort of highlight snippets of conversations and emails and whatnot. What are you most struck, though, by in this 520-page report? What do you find interesting?

I guess, or what did you find that you want us to know the most about? Well, I mean, I can start with like an overarching theme and of a couple of things. One is this virus was novel and called novel for a reason. And no one knew really what to do. And we were learning on the job. But once we started learning on the job.

we weren't necessarily being forthright. And that was a problem. And I thought the messaging was bad. I thought there was horrible bedside manner. I would say when it comes to, from the beginning especially, it would have been better if we heard from the doctors treating COVID patients first.

Walk out of your hospital, be on local news, be on national news, different places. But doctors that are treating COVID patients walk out, lower their masks, speak to the microphones to the country and say, here's what we saw today.

day. Here's what's working. Here's what's not. Here's who's dying and here's why. They have these comorbidities, etc. A lot more trust would have been there. And tell us every step of the way what we need. We need treatments. We need a possible antiviral. We need monoclonal antibodies. We need a virus. We need a vaccine. Those types of things would have gone a long way as opposed to how we did hear things. And I guess the other thing I want to add to that is this, that

I'm just so dismayed at the level of cover-up that was taking place in so many places. Let's just start with China. That I think America and the world knows. China was covering this up. They were destroying samples. They weren't letting people in, not even the WHO. They were saying everything was under control when it wasn't. They were conducting a huge cover-up. But we had cover-ups within our government.

And we certainly had cover-ups from international scientists who were quietly amongst themselves saying this thing looks engineered, but then came out and said, oh, it came from nature. And it was very clear they have a bias because they were doing the type of research, gain-of-function research, that's capable of creating deadly viruses. And they've known that for years.

And they don't want the blood on their hands, so they were going to skew things towards nature. And they teamed up. Dr. Fauci put this group together, and he goes on the White House lawn and said, oh, this just came to me. Like he never knew they were working on it, this just came to me. And these guys, these brilliant scientists, said it came from nature. And then you go into their emails, and even the day Dr. Fauci said that, they're saying, we still can't rule out that this looks engineered.

And in their emails, they're saying things like, well, our focus is to disprove the lab leak theory. Well, they never disproved the lab leak theory. They just ignored it. And then they just went into their creation of how it could have come from nature. But if you really understand the science...

It wasn't likely when you take a look at the virus itself and the components of it. And we know that the capability existed to take components of one virus, components of another, and then add something called a furin cleavage site and make it even more infectious. So, you know, for them to say they were going to disprove the lab leak theory, they certainly did not.

When you write in the report about the lack of cooperation from China, essentially the cover up really from China. Yeah. Do you when we look at other outbreaks and other and obviously there were lesser, right? The other outbreaks we've experienced in our lifetimes have been much lesser than what we saw with COVID-19. But so little cooperation from China is.

to the point where you use the word cover-up, was that unprecedented? And did your report sort of address any consequences? Because what if this does happen again? What if we are still doing research in labs around the world in countries that we don't have the best relations with? What did we learn from the cover-up here and the lack of consequence?

Well, yeah, the lack of consequences is tremendous. And that's the biggest problem. But that's the problem with the WHO. It's under the UN and it's a political organization. And that something like the WHO needs to be there for the benefit of all of humankind. And those that participate have to be transparent, open and accountable or it doesn't work. And so our recommendations are, hey, if the WHO has something that can help us out along the way in a

pandemic, then so be it. But we as Americans, we need to lead the way and we need to be prepared. We need to set up the infrastructure so that we can respond quickly like Operation Warp Speed, but also have manufacturing reserve and a domestic supply chain that we can count on. You know, we couldn't get things that we needed in our hospitals, et cetera, because China controls that.

And we don't do it domestically. And it's the same with drugs. This has got to change.

But we should be out doing surveillance around the world. We went to Cambodia and Laos as part of our investigations, and USAID is helping there to go into the wet markets and to swab and get viral samples from the animals. And when we were there, a young girl died of avian flu. And the idea was with USAID help,

We're going to quarantine this. We're going to nip it in the bud, if you will. And let's not let this spread to other areas. Unfortunately, that girl died. But it was in a rural area where there usually isn't a response team like that. And we can help in those areas. But we've got to increase surveillance. We've got to be on top of things.

um but gain of function research which their theory was if we can uh continue to try and see what a existing virus might become and become more infectious uh you know that's that's the idea and i guess so you could create a vaccine quicker but you're taking a risk and dr fauci in 2012 said well i think the risk outweighs the benefit when he was

asked about it creating a pandemic. That was in 2012. Well, I hope he thinks differently now because you can do this through AI, by the way. And I've had several things through the Intel Committee where we sat down with experts and you can take

parts of viruses, run it through AI and see what might happen and have some level of certainty as to whether it could happen. So there's other ways around it. We should get rid of gain-of-function research and make that worldwide if we can.

That's Odyssey, A-D-O-Y.

U-D-A-C-Y. I'm spelling it out in case you're a little slow like me.

Speaking – well, you just said a lot there. That's terrifying about the thought of what AI could add on to gain-of-function research. That probably is a national security issue. But we heard, like, what was it, partway through the pandemic, an argument between Dr. Fauci and I think it was Senator Rand Paul. They had plenty of arguments, but one of them was about the definition of gain-of-function, right? And Dr. Fauci was saying that it wasn't quite what he was making it out to be. What –

Gain of function, we're told now, is really any tinkering with a virus, not necessarily to always make it, you know, more lethal. Right. It's it's sort of any change to the genotype of of of a virus. Right. What did we, I guess, learn about this third party group, EcoHealth Alliance? And how much did did we know this whole time? How much did you how much when you guys started?

do your report or did you report, what did you find about what NIH knew the entire time about what we had done, what the U.S. had funded in terms of researching viruses in Wuhan? Yeah, so let's just take a look at that process, the grant process. First of all, in essence, what this group was trying to do, EcoHealth Alliance, was trying to get the grant through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

And they went there and they were denied because they said it's too dangerous. What was interesting is in their emails, but this is with Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, along with Ralph Baric in North Carolina and Zhengli Shi in China. And he says, well, when we present it, we're not going to say that we're going to do this in China. We'll say that we're going to do it in North Carolina once we get the money back.

Then we'll just move everything over to the BSL-2 in China, which is a lesser restrictive lab, if you will. It's more dangerous. But they didn't do that because Ralph Baric said, no, I wouldn't say that. But they submitted what they wanted to do. And DARPA said no. Then they go over to NIH. And NIH goes ahead and grants it. And everything in their proposal is exactly how you can make COVID.

You take parts of one virus and parts of another virus from another animal. And in this case, they wanted to add a furin cleavage site, which was definitely what made it more infectious. None of the coronaviruses like this historically have ever had a furin cleavage site, but this one did. And that's what they were doing in the lab. But they go over there and Dr. Fauci said, well, I don't.

I don't read the grants. I just sign them because there's an advisory board. And once they look at it, I just sign it because we get billions of dollars in grants. And so you can imagine that that's probably true, right? That he doesn't go through every single one. Yeah. But who's accountable then? I mean, is the entity that told Dr. Fauci it's OK? And EcoHealth Alliance wasn't complying with the grant. They weren't it.

they weren't submitting their required reports. And I said, does the flag go up at NIH or NIAID to say, where's your report? He goes, oh, that's in compliance. I have nothing to do with it. So obviously a lot of changes need to be made there. And not only that, I asked him about oversight of doing dangerous research, potentially able to create a bioweapon in the lab of an adversary. And he said, I wouldn't even know how to do that kind of oversight. This is a problem. The intelligence community needs to be involved. You

You know, you can't, there's no way should we be in any foreign lab without the intelligence community coming in saying, yay or nay, there's too big of a risk. You know, you should not be doing that. So we basically have given them the technology to,

to be able to create bioweapons, and they've been talking about it. Our State Department in 2005 said that China's looking at bioweapons. And then 2015, China actually put out a book about coronaviruses as bioweapons. And so EcoHealth Alliance was doing that type of work over there, and the Chinese were doing it on their own as well.

Gosh, I don't know how much more time you have. I could talk to you for a while. Do you have some more time? Do you have like maybe 10 more minutes? Okay. Because I think my bosses are going to want me to broaden things out here too.

Even though I'm fascinated by all of this. You also in the report, you find Operation Warp Speed was a great success. And you guys write that while vaccines may be better characterized as therapeutics rather than vaccines, they did save millions of lives. What do you say to people who are still and I know you know them. I know you see them on social media because I do, too. What do you say to those who are insistent that the vaccines actually caused harm and are continuing to harm people now?

Yeah, I might say those things are somewhat unknowns, but I respect what they're saying because I feel the same way. I have the same concerns that they do. So I was all for emergency use because, as we talked about earlier in this conversation, people were dying. COVID was very lethal, but it was lethal to a certain group.

And so the emergency use was specifically more for seniors, people with comorbidities, because we were seeing that they were the ones that were dying. And the trials had shown that they were less likely to be hospitalized and less likely to die. But they still were getting hospitalized and some were dying. And that's a fact. And we didn't make that clear. And you had Dr. Fauci saying things like,

If you get the vaccine, it's a dead end for the virus. No, it isn't. It never was.

But it was making a lot of people better. And we should have been prioritizing the most vulnerable. And, you know, I'm not for, you know, putting this in kids. I mean, I can tell you our pediatrician said she doesn't see with a healthy child the benefit of a COVID vaccine, which, by the way, they're now calling it the COVID shot, which is really more the way it should be because the

The public perceived vaccines as like for polio. So if you get this vaccine, you're not going to get polio. Well, you know, we knew from the very beginning that people could get this. And we also know from historically that even –

Viruses produce variants. And so, you know, that can be different as well. And we need to be prepared for that. I remember seeing that as a headline. Oh, there's a variant. I was like, that's no surprise. We know this is coming. But we just, the bedside manner was not there. And again, we weren't here for the right people.

Speaking of bedside manner, you know, one of your, I guess this is actually a few of your findings, not just the fraud and the abuse, the money mismanaged and misspent, but

that schools, children are still not recovered. Our nation's test scores reflect this. You guys write in the executive part of the report, the Constitution cannot be suspended in times of crisis and restrictions on freedoms so distressed in public health. The prescription can't be worse than the disease. The Constitution cannot be suspended in times of crisis. What did your report find to sort of the

I guess how public health trickled into all aspects of our lives.

Oh, it totally did. And not well explained. And that's what was so frustrating to people. And it was a one size fits all. I mean, I had a sheriff call me and said, Brad, I just had a 71 year old guy here. He was scheduled for a painful hernia surgery and they canceled it because of lockdown. And he was in so much pain, he took his life.

In that hospital, there were no COVID patients in that hospital that day. Why is Washington coming out saying, we've got to shut all this down? I have to admit, I was in favor of the two-week lockdown, by and large, but I wasn't in favor of just ignoring all other medical care.

And and putting everything out. And you have to you have to look at the battlefield that's in front of you. And so in that particular county, they didn't have any cases at that time. These were these were terrible decisions that were being made. And obviously, the most egregious was the mandates. And, you know, you have a situation, you're mandating something. And not only that, you're telling people you have to get vaccinated and they may have had more immunity because they already had covid.

I mean, I'll give you an example. I was going to Germany and they said, well, you got to get a booster before you go. I said, well, I'll tell you what, I had two doses of Pfizer and I later got COVID. And the only reason I knew is because I couldn't smell garlic salt. So I want to check my antibodies and T cells. They said, well, we can't do the T cells. We'll do antibodies. A strong number was 40. Mine was 821.

821. And you're telling me I need a booster. And who are you? Who is telling me I need a booster? We broke the doctor-patient relationship. You had politicians telling you what your health care had to be. And there wasn't a scientific approach to it where you sit with a doctor and say, well, in your situation, I would recommend this.

In your situation, I don't think you're at great risk. I don't think you need to do it. And here's why. I don't know what this vaccine is going to do over five to 10 or 15 years. I still have the question. I know that COVID created blood clots, but I'm not so sure that the vaccine didn't too, right? And there's confusion over that. These are things we have to learn over time, but we have to be honest about what we don't know. But the government coming in

just with the strong hand, the social distancing, the six feet. Fauci said it just sort of appeared. Well, they were taking influence from the teachers union. The Biden administration reached out to the teachers union during the transition and said, "What do you want?"

this should be coming from a scientific body who's giving you some reason why you hypothesize three feet, six feet, whatever. But as Fauci said, now there was no science behind the masks, no science behind the social distancing of six feet, you know, all sorts of things. You know, here's where he could have stepped up. He said, we said, were you for the restriction on travel from China? Especially, he goes,

Well, yes, I was. I supported the president on that move. And I'm like, well, when politicians came out and said, oh, he's a racist, he's a xenophobe, everyone come to Chinatown, everything's fine. Why didn't you say something? Why didn't you say, no, I support this decision? Instead, they let the politics go on and do all these things. And

And not only that, when it came to the vaccine for full approval, FDA was rushed and two people from the FDA quit because they said, we are being pressured to move this up so that they can put a mandate out. So they moved it up by months.

This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at viking.com.

I mean, this just goes on and on and on. It does. It really, really does go on. Like, I could talk to you about mask effectiveness, too. Mayo Clinic still says masks are effective when combined with other things. But I don't know if your report really goes into mask effectiveness or what you guys found on that really, really briefly, if you recall.

Yeah, well, it's still not determined. I mean, I always had the concern if I have this viral load in my pulmonary system in my lungs and I'm putting a mask on and every time I breathe out, I breathe it right back in. You know, when you sneeze, you don't want to take your sneeze back, do you?

So, you know, there's that component of it, too. But I do think that, you know, there's arguments to be made either way. And I know that there's people trying to produce more effective masks that may contain things like silver, which would fight infection, things like that. So I don't know the effectiveness of it, but I have read some things where those types of things are in the works. And let's continue that. That's great.

OK, well, just two more for you. One of the criticisms from Democrats who were on the committee with you guys is that you were only focused on the politics of COVID, not really forward looking, not preventing the next pandemic. What do you say to that?

Well, I don't know that they made recommendations like we did. We have our pages of recommendations of changes that can be made and what a construct could look like from the government standpoint, and it has to be a public-private partnership.

when it comes to supply chain, et cetera. We put that out. We put that into the report today. And so you're welcome to read through it. So I would say that's disingenuous because we did what we said we would do, and that's make recommendations for a better path forward. And also, I want to say one other thing, too. I think someone told me that in their report today, they mentioned Republicans like 70 times or something.

Throughout this entire process, we've never mentioned political party. And in one other interview, somebody said, like, well, did you ever go after Republicans? I said, I don't know what party these people are in. They're government officials. I don't know what party they're in. So we're just presenting facts, things that people said, et cetera. And never did we mention political party. And I'm proud of that.

Congressman, you've got a new president. What's old is new again. He was the president during the beginning of the pandemic. What do you hope the Trump administration and this particular president-elect does, if anything, moving forward, maybe even regarding this report, Lessons Learned? Is it...

Is it marrying his desire to have companies come home and out of China with certain aspects of our supply chain, medicines, protective gear, that sort of thing being manufactured solely in this country? Yeah, pharmaceuticals is a huge one. There was a CEO of a generic manufacturing drug company in the EU that said if China cuts us off, we're –

We have our shelves are empty in two months. I just left the reserves about a year and a half ago. And on the policy side, besides clinical on the policy side, I was working with the Defense Logistics Medical Supply Chain Council where we're looking at everything that we use and where we get it and who owns the company and all the way down to the active pharmaceutical ingredients. And China controls that. If we don't take that back, you know, we regulate our way out of these businesses, unfortunately.

You know, that's the same with energy, et cetera. But we regulate our way out of these things if we can't do mining and various things. We've got to bring all that back and work with our allies if we can't provide something. You know, there may be things that are...

Australia has a lot of that we can use. But we've got to bring these things back home. And not only that, not only have a domestic supply chain, don't put it all in one place where an earthquake could take out our whole supply chain of certain valuable things. And looking at our national stockpile, that's all in there. We went to our strategic national stockpile and visited there.

We can do better. And so all of this is in there. You can tell we did a lot of work in the last two years and trying to come up with solutions. And those things are included there. And I think this president will take it up.

And there are a lot of lessons learned for him. Boy, you know, we were all caught flat footed and, you know, we just assume the world's OK. But, you know, China's controlling the WHO and and the conversation and covering up and we're not prepared to take care of things ourselves than we need to be. And that's our recommendations and how to do it.

Congressman and physician Brad Wenstrup, outgoing congressman and continuing physician Brad Wenstrup. Thank you so much for your time.

Yeah, thank you. God bless. You've been listening to the Fox News Rundown. And now, stay up to date by subscribing to this podcast at foxnewspodcasts.com. Listen ad-free on Fox News Podcasts Plus on Apple Podcasts. And Prime members can listen to the show ad-free on Amazon Music. And for up-to-the-minute news, go to foxnews.com.

Jason in the House, the Jason Chaffetz podcast. Dive deeper than the headlines and the party lines as I take on American life, politics and entertainment. Subscribe now on Fox News podcast dot com or wherever you download podcasts.

Cudlow on Fox Business is now on the go for podcast fans. Get key interviews with the biggest business newsmakers of the day. The Cudlow podcast will be available on the go after the show every weekday at foxbusinesspodcasts.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts.