Despite the audacity former President Joe Biden displayed by preemptively pardoning family members who had allegedly engaged in an international influence-peddling scheme, there was one pardon that smelled even more than the rest.
That honor belongs to Biden’s 11-plus-year pardon of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former 38-year director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who also served as chief medical adviser to President Biden.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has been a Fauci foe since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the United States.
He said that Biden’s pardon only reinforced his argument that Fauci is in large part to blame for the medical crisis.
"If there was ever any doubt as to who bears responsibility for the COVID pandemic, Biden’s pardon of Fauci forever seals the deal," Paul said.
"Fauci’s pardon will only serve as an accelerant to pierce the veil of deception."
In his new post as chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Sen. Paul vowed to continue his investigation.
At issue from the beginning was Paul’s contention that the NIAID had financed, more than likely through an intermediary, "gain-of-function" research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, in order to make viruses deadlier and more infectious.
Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province in central China, is ground-zero of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lab leak from the institute is the most plausible theory for how the outbreak originated.
Assuming Sen. Paul, who is also a licensed physician, is correct, Fauci may have used U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund research to make this strain of coronavirus more deadly and more transmissible, which went on to create a global panic.
Even if not used to fund research on this particular pathogen, the United States has no business funding gain-of-function research anywhere — either here or abroad.
Why would we want to make viruses more deadly? More infectious?
The coronavirus pandemic broke out in China in late 2019, and reached the United States in early 2020. If that was what Biden’s pardon of Fauci was meant to cover, why did it go all the way back to Jan. 1, 2014?
A Twitter/X user who goes by the handle RightGlockMom thought she may have come across the answer: "For anyone wondering why it goes back to 2014 - that's when Fauci defied Obama's 'pause' on Gain-of Function," she said, and attached a document from the Obama administration.
Dated Oct. 17, 2014, it said in pertinent part, "the funding pause will apply to gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route."
COVID-19 is a SARS virus.
Newsweek reported yesterday that "Dr. Ralph Baric, a U.S. scientist who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute on a 2015 study of bat viruses, issued a detailed statement to The Washington Post affirming that none of the viruses involved in the study were related to SARS-CoV-2, the virus better known as Covid-19."
That was in 2015. What about four years later?
But even if U.S.-funded gain-of-function research had nothing to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci’s extreme recommendations made the pandemic worse than necessary.
It shuttered businesses, ended the careers of U.S. military service members, and generally made our lives miserable.
Substack and Twitchy writer Amy Curtis described how U.S. response to the pandemic affected her personally.
"I've shared this before, but my Dad died in April 2020. Vietnam-era Navy veteran," she tweeted. Couldn't have a funeral. Because of Fauci."
She added this capper, "That same summer, George Floyd had three funerals."
This suggests far-left politics trumped public health, which further suggests that it had nothing to do with health — it was about power and control.
When the former president pardoned members of the so-called "Biden crime family," he absolved them of any responsibility for accepting money from foreign governments in exchange for political favors. Although disgusting, no Americans were personally affected by that scheme.
When Biden pardoned Fauci, he absolved him from any responsibility for adversely affecting, and sometimes even destroying, the lives of millions of Americans, and that’s an act for which there should be no pardon, no excuse.
Even those not directly affected by the virus lost something in the process — a trust in the medical profession.
"Ignominious! Anthony Fauci will go down in history as the first government scientist to be preemptively pardoned for a crime," Sen. Paul observed.
And thus Biden’s pardon of Fauci was his most despicable, outrageous pardon of all.
Michael Dorstewitz is a retired lawyer and has been a frequent contributor to Newsmax. He is also a former U.S. Merchant Marine officer and a Second Amendment supporter. Read Michael Dorstewitz's Reports — More Here.