Rep. Morgan Griffith
speaker
171 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Rep. Morgan Griffith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Great to be with you.
Well, it's bewildering to all of us. And, you know, there's just so many different things. And so we put in a number of bills. But when you look at all the things that the NIH was supposed to do through NIAID, that would be Dr. Fauci's agency, National... infectious disease, allergies and infectious disease department under Francis Collins at the time at the NIH.
They were doing all this research, spending millions of dollars with EcoHealth Alliance, 800,000 of that, according to their own data, went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And we didn't get the documents we paid for. It's that simple. We didn't get the information we paid for. And isn't it interesting that one of the reports we didn't get was from September of 2019.
And eventually, EcoHealth would provide us with some of the data, or their report at least. They didn't have the Chinese data, but they gave us their report. But they had doctored some of it, as it turned out. Now, that was the evidence that I believe came out in committee. We had two different transcribed interviews with them. We had transcribed interviews with Dr. Fauci.
But EcoHealth Alliance was not... straightforward with the NIH. But NIH knew they weren't getting the documents they were supposed to get, knew or should have known, which is where some of these bills come from. I mean, Chip Roy and I are carrying a bill to break up NIAID into three component parts, infectious diseases, allergies, and immunological diseases, because they're different. And
Sometimes they overlap. I'm not going to say they don't occasionally overlap, but there's also a lot of differences.
Infectious diseases and allergies are totally different.
First off, I think that both Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Fauci were pushing the envelope on gain of function. Now, I will tell you that my good friend, Senator Paul and Fauci got into a lot of fights. And sometimes I thought they were talking past each other because you can have your standard gain of function, which is breeding a Labrador retriever with a poodle and coming up with a Labradoodle.
That's technically gain of function. And yet what we really are concerned about is gain of function where there's a risk to human health. And I don't think they pay close enough attention to the grants they gave to EcoHealth Alliance, both in the beginning.
The mindset is that they fear that there will be a natural mutation. They fear that desperately. And so they want to be in advance of the natural mutation. So they start studying these infectious diseases. And then somewhere along the way- It's not biowarfare.
They're worried about Ebola. They're worried about Mpox. They're worried about all these other things. And I think what happened, being generous, is they were worried about that. So they kind of looked the other way when they knew that they were doing research in a level two lab. It clearly should have been a level three lab.
And they kind of looked the other way thinking, well, we got to get this research done. So we'll give it to this third party group, EcoHealth Alliance, and they'll go to a foreign country. And we can march our hands of it. And that's what they tried to do.
And when they realized it might blow back on them, I think there was some feeling that if it was a lab leak even, which is what I believe happened, they were afraid it would come back on them. Well, I think it has. I think most rational people today would admit that it is the odds-on favorite. that it was a lab leak.
What I was going to say is I believe that I could get a jury to find on circumstantial evidence that all we have today that there was evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, or at least two, eliminating all reasonable doubt that it came out of the lab. I don't think it was intentional. I think it was just sloppy work. Their filtration system was horrible.
Even with a level two lab, I'm not sure they really met level two, but the Chinese claim they did. But one of their own doctors was advocating in 2019 that they might want to get a better filtration system because basically all they had was your basic charcoal filters. They didn't have filters.
In my opinion, they closed the barn door after the horses were out. And I think that's what happened. That's exactly right. But they were doing dangerous research. And we've seen signs they might be continuing to try to do some of that. And we've been trying to put a stop to that.
And some of the legislation that we have, one of the bills that Dr. Paul and I have together, is a bill that would say you got to have an independent group, independent of NIH. They have an internal group that's supposed to be looking at risky research. Nope, nope.
You didn't do a good job on COVID, whether it came out of the lab or it was somehow natural, which there's no evidence that it was natural. But even if you wanted to buy that, you shouldn't be doing that risky research without an independent review process because it raises all kinds of questions about whether or not you made the right call.
And mistakes can happen, but we need to have an extra safety net to try to stop as many as we can and as many mistakes as we can at various labs. If the taxpayers are paying for it, we better have some security around it.
Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think you can make an argument, and look, Congress is equally guilty on this. You can make an argument maybe for the first two or three months with shutting down some stuff. After the first two to three months, there's no argument for having our society shut down. I mean, my favorite one was, I'm a swimmer, I've been a swimmer my whole life.
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