© Alex Wong//Getty ImagesFormer Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro speaks to members of the press outside the West Wing of the White House June 18, 2020 in Washington, DC. Navarro spoke on former National Security Adviser John Bolton's new book "The Room Where It Happened." Navarro has called Dr. Anthony Fauci the "father" of COVID-19.
Former White House trade adviser Peter Navarro accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of being the "father" of COVID-19 on Tuesday and made unsubstantiated claims that the virus had been engineered in a lab.
Navarro was speaking to Fox News' Rachel Campos-Duffy when he made the claims about the pandemic and Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Campos-Duffy showed Navarro a clip of Fauci talking about the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Fauci called the decision to "go all out" on a vaccine "the best decision that I've ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the institute."
Navarro was invited to respond to the footage and attacked Fauci, blaming him for COVID-19.
"Fauci is a sociopath and a liar. He had nothing to do with the vaccine. The father of the vaccine is Donald J. Trump," Navarro said.
Navarro cited Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who recently said he believed COVID had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Redfield is a virologist who was appointed to head the CDC by former President Donald Trump.
A Timeline Of The COVID-19 Pandemic
![UP NEXT]()
UP NEXT
"What is Fauci the father of? Fauci is the father of the actual virus," Navarro said. "Fauci is the guy-this virus, according to Redfield at the Centers for Disease Control, came from the Wuhan lab and basically we had Fauci not only funding that lab with American taxpayer dollars, he authorized this thing called gain of function research."
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said it is "extremely unlikely" that the disease was leaked from a lab. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided some grant funding for a lab in Wuhan, according to the Daily Beast, but there's no evidence the money was used for genetic engineering or to develop COVID.
"He [Fauci] allowed the Chinese Communist Party, the People's Liberation Army to genetically engineer a virus using gain of function," Navarro went on.
"I call it the Fauci virus now. If he wants to be the father of something, he is the father of the virus that's killed over half a million Americans," he said.
"Well, Peter, we are still trying to get to the bottom of that and we are definitely going to bring you back when we get more information on it," Campos-Duffy replied.
There is no evidence that agents of the Chinese state were responsible for the development of COVID-19. Instead, the WHO is focusing on so-called wet markets where live and dead animals are sold, potentially creating the conditions for animal to human transmission.
Related Articles
Start your unlimited Newsweek trial