Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Cotton said that Fauci could be involved in a "genuine scandal".
"It is imperative that the NIH come clean and tell us exactly what happened. Well, I think that a lot of these so-called experts and scientific bureaucrats are trying to cover their tracks."Speaking of the 'gain of function' research at the Wuhan lab, which was in part funded by the NIH, Cotton said:
"This could be public health bureaucrats violating explicit direction from the Obama White House to continue research that is highly, highly dangerous and particularly susceptible to escape from a laboratory. Especially a laboratory in China."
On the notion of the virus having escaped from the lab, Cotton noted:
"Dr. Fauci has been to Congress, and he said this absolutely did not happen. But Dr. Fauci is playing word games.Cotton has been outlining the evidence pointing to a lab leak for more than a year, and has been calling for a deeper investigation since the pandemic took hold.
"The money that the NIH gave went to an American organization, which turned around and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to these Wuhan labs to investigate coronaviruses and, yes, to find ways to make them more contagious and more dangerous,"
Cotton has repeatedly been called a conspiracy theorist and worse, while the likes of Fauci have been venerated, even though he has now admitted there is evidence for the lab leak and called for the same thing.
Comment: Here's Fauci covering his bases for plausible wiggle room:
Why are we still listening to this guy? See some of Fauci's best: