The fact is, Dr. Fauci is one of the most effective, and indeed brilliant, medical researchers of the last century. However, he is now so absorbed in defending the indefensible that he can best serve the country by stepping down.

Dr. Fauci forecast his current problems in an Oct. 9, 2012, article for the American Society for Microbiology. Written in true scientific fashion, Fauci’s “Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward” is unlikely to be read by the average citizen.

This article from nearly nine years ago predicted the kind of risk accompanying scientific research on a dangerous, highly contagious virus that could potentially spread rapidly as a pandemic with devastating consequences.

The scientific community had already recognized that researching potential pandemic-creating viruses was a dangerous process. In fact, Dr. Fauci wrote his short study during a moratorium on this “gain of function” research imposed by researchers themselves.

Fauci’s comments add up to a tragic forecast of what was not done, and a condemnation of the path possibly taken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—even though Fauci and his team were allegedly monitoring and funding the Chinese lab.

In his 2012 paper, Fauci warned:

Back then, Dr. Fauci recognized that when dealing with the potential for a pandemic that might kill millions worldwide, incur enormous economic dislocations and impose extraordinary restrictions on citizens, the “potential benefits and risks of these experiments must be discussed and understood by multiple stakeholders, including the general public, and all decisions regarding such research must be made in a transparent manner.”

Fauci knew that decisions affecting billions of people cannot be made by scientists on their own. As he warned his fellow scientists in 2012:

Nine years ago, Dr. Fauci knew that gain-of-function research required a new standard of transparency and candor. As he wrote:

The principles Dr. Fauci had outlined were right. The practice which followed failed to meet those principles.

It is impossible to have the transparency Dr. Fauci described with the Chinese Communist Party’s dictatorship. As recently as this week, Beijing announced it would block any effort to investigate potential gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is almost two years after COVID-19 likely emerged and began infecting people in China.

The more than $826,000 the National Institutes of Health funneled to the Wuhan laboratory through the EcoHealth Alliance was apparently not accompanied by any serious controls. When the crisis broke out, none of the research the American taxpayer paid for had been copied and placed in American hands.

Just for trusting the Chinese dictatorship, Dr. Fauci should retire.

The failure to be honest from day one about American government involvement in the Wuhan laboratory provides a second reason for Dr. Fauci to resign. He should have briefed the president and vice president, Congress and then the country on what we had funded in Wuhan. Even today, we really don’t know what happened to the money or what research it funded.

Instead of the transparency Fauci called for in his 2012 article, we got a cover up, obfuscation and argument.

By his own standards, Dr. Fauci has failed.

To read, hear, and watch more of Newt’s commentary, visit Gingrich360.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.