WASHINGTON — Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) is gearing up another investigation of the origins of COVID-19 — and wants to bring Dr. Anthony Fauci and a US-based coronavirus researcher credited with working on the “blueprint” for SARS-CoV-2 back before Congress.
Jackson, 57, spoke to The Post about his plans to investigate both COVID and reported cases of Havana syndrome among US diplomats days before the leak of a bombshell Defense Department report revealing that seven US military service members contracted COVID-19-like symptoms after participating in the World Military Games in October 2019 in Wuhan, China.
The brief report, which should have been released to Congress in December 2022 but was suppressed by the Biden administration and obtained this week by the Washington Free Beacon, could reset the timeline of the outbreak after the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that the virus was likely spreading around the Chinese city in November 2019 before going on to kill more than 1 million Americans.
Jackson, 57, a former White House physician, said he plans on calling back Fauci — after the former chief White House medical adviser sat last year for a transcribed interview and hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — and “absolutely” wants to speak with Dr. Ralph Baric, who also had a transcribed interview with the COVID panel.
Baric, a leading US epidemiology specialist at the University of North Carolina, had a working relationship with Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and was listed as a collaborator on a grant proposal from the since-debarred federal grantee EcoHealth Alliance that aimed to increase the infectiousness of bat coronaviruses.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) last year asked the intelligence community’s watchdog to investigate whether “conflicted individuals” misled federal investigators, noting that Baric previously admitted to being a part of the Biological Sciences Experts Group, which advised intelligence officials on countering biological weapons and other threats.
Fauci, who also served as the Biden White House’s COVID czar, has been grilled in the past about NIH funding that was granted to EcoHealth for experiments at the WIV, but has maintained, along with EcoHealth, that it was not considered gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
“We need to look at what’s going on in the IC with regards to how information is being processed and passed,” said Jackson, who added that he believed Fauci was “complicit” in a government-wide cover-up early in the pandemic.
“I guess the biggest issue here is, you know, having been a member of the COVID committee, we were looking at the origins of COVID, and, you know, not really getting all the answers that we needed in my mind by any shape, form or fashion,” he explained.
“They tried typical ways to just stonewall us,” he added. “You know, they would drag things out and take months and months to get stuff to us, and we’d have to ask repeatedly for it — and then when we did get stuff, everything was heavily redacted, and we would get just hundreds and hundreds of pages of just open source information that had really nothing to do with the question they were asking.”
Jackson is hopeful that is going to change during the second Trump administration with the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and John Ratcliffe as CIA director.
On Wednesday, Gabbard announced a new accountability task force will be drilling down on COVID origins, Havana syndrome, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe of Trump-Russia collusion during the 2016 election and “the Biden Administration’s domestic surveillance and censorship actions against Americans, and more.”
Ratcliffe — who has previously called the lab-leak hypothesis the “only” explanation for the pandemic — also released an intelligence assessment completed under his predecessor, CIA Director William Burns, that assessed with “with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,” per an agency spokesperson.
“I’ve already talked to everyone that’s kind of leading these different elements of the Intelligence Community, and I’ve stressed to them that, you know, we expect things to be different and they’ve reassured me that things are going to be vastly different,” Jackson said.
Many of the key players in the COVID origins saga have endured repeated questioning from Senate and House lawmakers — and troves of Fauci’s emails have already been produced from his time as the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Those hearings, interviews and government records have fueled Republican lawmakers’ criticisms of early intelligence reports that downplayed the lab-leak hypothesis and sided with the theory that SARS-CoV-2 spread naturally to humans from animals.
Federal scientists at the FBI and Defense Department have also charged that Biden appointees “silenced” them from sharing findings pointing toward an accidental lab leak during a key August 2021 briefing with the then-president.
“You had people like Anthony Fauci who were basically saying that ‘This was natural, this was not of lab origin. This did not come from the lab in Wuhan,’” Jackson recalled. “And when you really pressed them on the issues, one of the reasons they always stated [was] ‘Because the intelligence community across the board has looked at this and has has made that assessment.’”
By 2023, however, the FBI and Energy Department had both come out with assessments indicating a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the new coronavirus.
Sen. Joni Ernst, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told The Post Wednesday that the delayed Pentagon report on the October 2019 illnesses was further proof that COVID information had been “hidden by Washington insiders.”
“The American people deserve the truth. This report is the latest nail in the coffin for the Chinese wet market theory and further confirms that the public was misled on the origin of the pandemic for years. I won’t stop investigating to uncover the truth,” Ernst (R-Iowa) said.
Jackson is hoping that more whistleblowers will come forward to finish the probe into COVID origins and restore “trust and confidence in the public health sector.”
“We still have a lot of unanswered questions,” Jackson said. “Those that were responsible for this, including China, for crying out loud, should be held responsible.”
“As a doctor and as a member of Congress,” he added, “as an American who saw family and friends suffer from this, we need answers on where did this come from … and how do we stop it from happening again?”
Reps for Baric and Fauci did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
