Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., told Newsmax on Tuesday that people who believed in the COVID-19 lab leak theory "should feel vindicated," with the Energy Department's recent judgment that the virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
"As one who was censored and labeled a conspiracy theorist, I can tell you that I feel being vindicating," Biggs said on Newsmax's "National Report." "I think these people should feel vindicated in the sense that they were putting forth an actual legitimate policy theory of how this happened.
"It looks like what so many of us said at the time — that this was directly linked to the Wuhan lab, and it was a leak. It was not some pangolin at some wet market. There was never any evidence that really substantiated that theory. But the theory of a Wuhan lab leak was real, and now they're finally coming clean that — Yeah, it looks like that was a legitimate theory."
Biggs said the federal government "censored people and put pressure on social media outfits to label this stuff misinformation, censor it completely, or misdirect people. And why were they misdirecting people? I suspect it's because they wanted compliance."
Biggs also speculated on why the pangolin wet-market theory was relentlessly pushed by government officials.
"Why in the world was Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and others so insistent on this pangolin theory at the wet market?" Biggs asked. "Is it because our government was actually laundering money … for gain of function research?"
Biggs said Congress needs to "find out why our own government was going after these individuals," and censoring speech, adding that he believes there is an appetite to do so on Capitol Hill.
"We have multiple committees set up that I think can get at the bottom of that, because that has got to stop and we have got to get back to this notion of free speech," Biggs said. "There is no reason in the world why I couldn't say legitimately that it looked to me like a Wuhan lab leak as opposed to a wet-market theory.
"We should be allowed, as Americans, to express our opinions and to debate those and discuss them without them being censored or without you being mislabeled as some kind of nut conspiracy just because you disagree with whatever the government orthodoxy is."
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