Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In January 2017, on the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated, Anthony Fauci made the following statement in a speech at Georgetown University:

… if there's one message that I want to leave with you today based on my experience … it's that there is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases, both chronic infectious diseases, in the sense of already ongoing disease … Also, there will be a surprise outbreak …

That would have to be one of the most incredible statements of this century: a scientist predicting a surprise outbreak in the term of an elected president. I don't know about you, but I didn't know that viruses were political. Yet here we have a scientist, the head of the infectious disease department in the United States, predicting three years in advance of COVID that there would be a surprise infectious disease outbreak.

When you google this, you'll come up with a Reuters fact check that says: 'It's all true. He said that, but he didn't say it was coronavirus; he didn't say it was COVID.' It doesn't really matter. The fact of the matter is that there need to be serious questions asked about what Anthony Fauci knew about the origins of coronavirus.

I well remember at the start of the outbreak, when Australia and most of the world—certainly the Western world—were locked down incessantly for two years amongst that barrage of fearmongering, that our then foreign minister, Senator Marise Payne, called for an investigation into the origins of coronavirus. Yet here we are, four years removed to the month from the outbreak of that disease, from the time when these lockdowns occurred, and there are crickets about the origins of coronavirus. That is not fair to the Australian people or to people in other parts of the world who had to endure government overreach in the name of keeping people safe.

Australian people have a right to know if that virus was an actual lab leak as a result of gain-of-function research. They have a right to know that our intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies are monitoring this type of gain-of-function research, both in our universities—it is occurring—and in other universities across the world. We do not want to see another outbreak of the government fearmongering that we saw four years ago. I just want to call this out.

We often hear the narrative today that there's another pandemic around the corner. When I grew up, I never heard any sort of language like that. There are comparisons back to the Spanish flu—how that was a really bad outbreak and that another outbreak like the Spanish flu can occur again. It is highly unlikely that another outbreak like the Spanish flu will occur again, for the very simple reason of the discovery of penicillin. What killed most people in the Spanish flu wasn't the virus; it was the secondary bacterial infection that occurs when you get a virus infection in the first instance. It was probably what killed most people in those Victorian aged-care centres in August 2020, but, yet again, do we investigate this? No. We don't want to look at it. This fearmongering and this narrative that somehow we've got to be prepared for the next pandemic outbreak is overblown. We have this wonderful invention—probably the most important invention of the 20th century—called antibiotics and, in particular, penicillin. This fearmongering needs to stop.

I fear that, for those people on the other side of the chamber and those people who seem to think that the world should be governed from the top down rather than from the bottom up, it suits them all too well to do with our health what they've done to the weather, saying that only big government can save you, only big corporations can save you. That rubbish needs to stop. People need to be responsible for their own actions. They do not need the paternalism of big government stepping and overstepping into the daily lives of everyday people. That is not what liberal democracy is about. But I digress.

I actually want to go back and talk about the origins of the coronavirus. You see, the strange thing is that, just after the outbreak of coronavirus, there was a series of leaked emails amongst a number of key professors who somehow knew Anthony Fauci. Anthony Fauci was in contact with the professors. If you actually look at the early leaks from before Anthony Fauci started talking to the intelligence agencies, you see they were all convinced that this outbreak was a gain-of-function outbreak because there was a furin cleavage site. Furin is an enzyme that attaches the spike protein of the virus to the ACE receptor of your cells. It was designed to speed up infection. This was completely novel, and the chance of this happening in nature is like a big bang. I've had a number of microbiologists tell me the chance of this happening is extremely low.

That was the viewpoint of a number of scientists. I will name them: Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, Ian Lipkin, Andrew Rambaut and Robert Garry. These five scientists just happened to get into an email trail with Anthony Fauci. They went from going, 'This is an actual lab leak—gain of function' to, 'It can't possibly be gain of function; it's natural evolution, and anyone that suggests it's possibly gain of function is a conspiracy theorist.'

It turns out that Anthony Fauci actually funded an organisation called EcoHealth. EcoHealth was run by a man by the name of Peter Daszak. He was the lead author of a paper, published by the Lancet not long after coronavirus was used to lock everyone down, that completely ridiculed the notion that coronavirus was actually gain-of-function research. I should read some of the comments that were made, in particular by Edward Holmes. The reason I want to concentrate on Edward Holmes is that he's an Australian scientist who works at the University of Sydney. He has received over $4 million in research for viruses.

One of the comments he made very early on in this e-mail trail was:

… Ian Lipkin just called, very worried about the furin cleavage site and says the high ups are as well, including Intel. Also saw the restriction site.

Ian Lipkin's comments about Edward Holmes were:

Dr. Holmes became very unhappy with me after I refused to sign on and say that, you know, there was proof that this is where this began, in the wet market.

There is clear evidence of an email trail suggesting that there was a cover-up as to the origins of the coronavirus. This cover-up was actually led by people who were working in gain-of-function research and who were actually funded by the US government, albeit working in China. The other thing worth noting is that this Professor Holmes was actually an honorary professor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevent When I raised this issue at estimates with ASIO and other intelligence organisations, they had absolutely no interest in investigating Professor Edward Holmes from Sydney University, despite the fact that he has received millions of dollars in funding from Australian taxpayers, despite the fact that he was one of only six scientists that Anthony Fauci decided to talk about the origins of coronavirus with, and despite the fact that he was an honorary professor at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. Now, I don't know about you, but I would have thought this needs to be investigated.

The question I want to leave with my constituents and my fellow Australians out there today is: why aren't Australian intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence agencies in other countries, interested in investigating the origins of coronavirus, the gain of research that was involved with the origins of coronavirus, who funded it and why there was a cover-up? We owe it to the Australian people that this sort of government overreach can never happen again.