Source: United States Senator for South Carolina Lindsey Graham
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today visited Premier Medical Laboratory Services in Greenville to discuss recent media reports and speculation that the COVID-19 virus originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
- GRAHAM: “Early on when this possibility was raised, it was shot down. It was shot down heavily. Anybody who suggested [COVID-19] came out of the lab was a right-wing nut. Now that’s not science, that’s politics. Is there politics in science? It appears there may be. Is there a component in the scientific community that’s trying to hide the relationship between the United States and the lab? Maybe, I don’t know, but I do know this: the voices that raised concern about the lab leak were silenced. And we’re going to have hearings, I hope, in the Senate to find out why those voices were silenced. Why did the scientific community come out so hard against a lab leak when they really didn’t know? What was the motivation behind that? I think it’s important for the American people to understand that and make sure that this never happens again here at home.”
- GRAHAM: “I want to know, how did our government, potentially, get it so wrong? There was a group of scientists early on who wrote a letter saying that the idea of a lab leak was conspiratorial, right-wing talking points. How did they know? Is there a Deep State science department? In the NIH and the State Department – were there people in those two organizations trying to tamp down the idea that it may have come from the lab because they support the lab? It seems to me from emails we received that there were people in the State Department raising the alarm that this came not from a bat in China but from a lab in China, and they were silenced. It seems to me that people at NIH had curiosity, and their curiosity was stopped. I want to find out – who were the people involved in stopping asking the questions about could it come from a lab? Those people did this country a great disservice.”
- GRAHAM: “[Premier Medical] broke the backlog with DHEC. This is where the private sector came in to help the public sector provide capability and capacity that wasn’t available. What have we learned? We have got to have a private-sector component to deal with pandemics. The government footprint and infrastructure are not enough to deal with a pandemic. So what we were able to prove here in South Carolina is that the private sector pretty quickly could ramp up and do things that government couldn’t do.”
Watch Livestream of Graham’s Visit
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