Sen. Josh Hawley on Tuesday accused one of the scientists behind the assertion that the COVID-19 virus was not grown in a lab of “shameful propaganda” at an “Origins of COVID-19″ hearing.
“You should have done better, and because you didn’t, people have suffered,” the Missouri Republican said to Robert Garry.
Hawley said people have lost their jobs and social standing because of the “propaganda article” of Garry, one of the five authors of the March 2020 opinion paper on “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.
“It is wrong to censor and lie to the American public,” the Missouri lawmaker said. “It is wrong to withhold critical information from them.”
Garry is a professor of microbiology and immunology, and associate dean for biomedical sciences at Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans.
“As a scientist who is supposed to follow facts, do you regret that your work was used to censor your fellow scientists and ordinary Americans who asked questions about the virus?” Hawley asked Garry.
Garry responded that scientists are not responsible for their articles after they are published.
“All we did was write a paper,” he said.
“It’s been one of the most scrutinized papers in history,” he said. “It’s held up very well. It wasn’t an attempt to distort things and to mislead the American public. It was just a paper.”
The Missouri senator accused Garry of lying about the intelligence community coming to the conclusion that the virus did not originate from a lab.
“That is a lie,” Hawley said. “The intelligence community did not come to that conclusion. Multiple intelligence community agencies and components have concluded it was likely a lab leak, and they concluded at the same time you and your people were propagandizing the American public.”
“I am not going to sit here and allow you to lie any further,” he continued. “You have disgracefully participated in shameful propaganda that has been one of the worst chapters in American history with the country propagandizing its own people.”
Garry agreed that there is more to learn from the intelligence community.
“All agencies should come forth with more information,” he said.
The hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee aimed to identify the truth about where the coronavirus came from, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said.
Agencies and officials withheld information about the COVID-19 virus from the American public, Paul said in his opening remarks.
“Privately, they were saying one thing,” Paul said. “Publicly, they were saying another. Media pundits parroted the narrative, while social media platforms censored discussion about the lab leak, labeling it as misinformation and stifling open discourse about the virus’s origins.”
Molecular biologist Richard Ebright called the paper “fraudulent.”
“I would tell a younger scientist that you do not state a conclusion without evidence, even in an opinion piece in a scientific journal,” Ebright said. “And you never, under any circumstances in a scientific journal, state conclusions that you know to be unsound. That represents scientific misconduct.”
