Four years after the COVID-19 outbreak, and a year after a deadline for the federal government to come clean on what it knows, we still know precious little about where the virus that killed millions originated.

A fiery Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley earlier this year took a flamethrower to the Biden administration’s failure to release COVID origin records as required by a bipartisan law – and in a Senate hearing Tuesday torched a leading virologist who still maintains the virus came from nature, not a virology lab in Wuhan, China.

That virologist, Hawley noted, opined in a March 2020 article that it was definitively not a lab leak – but curiously had written in an email just a month prior that “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario … I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.”

Hawley reminded the virologist, Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University, that the government relied on opinions such as his to mercilessly censor dissenting views.

And at the hearing Tuesday, one scientist said there was “zero” evidence the mutated killer virus sprung from nature alone.

The COVID Origins Act, written by Hawley and passed last year with near-unanimity by Congress, required the government to declassify and release all information on the suspected lab leak of COVID-19. The deadline for the Biden administration to comply was, not incidentally, a year ago Tuesday.

All the administration released, however – after the deadline, notably – was a perfunctory five-page summary of the information, not the information itself. Nor has the administration complied with Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests made by nonprofit public health research group U.S. Right to Know. The organization is suing to get it.

“Such a great case study in the failure of the federal government, the Executive Branch, to even comply with the law,” Hawley protested at the hearing Tuesday morning. “I mean, forget being responsive to FOIA requests.”

The Biden administration is in flagrant violation of the law, Hawley argued.

“Have I got that right?” he asked Gary Ruskin, founder of U.S. Right to Know.

“You got that right,” Ruskin replied.

“I can’t [over-]emphasize,” Hawley added, “how absurd this is, and what a mockery this makes of federal law – what a mockery it makes of oversight – and frankly, what disrespect it is for the American people. … The American people want to know what their government knows about the origins of COVID. And they have a right to know.”

Many Americans might hear of a hearing such as Tuesday’s and wonder: Hasn’t the COVID question been asked and answered?

Asked, yes. Answered, not so much.

“Here’s the deal. It should have been asked and answered [by now],” Hawley told The Heartlander in an exclusive interview after the hearing. “I think most Americans believe it came from a lab because that’s the most likely scenario.

“What’s amazing is the lack of accountability. People like Fauci, people like this scientist today who worked for Fauci, they won’t take any responsibility. Fauci, I still think is the highest-paid government official or government retiree. I mean, unbelievable. He’s a multi-millionaire – after going out and lying to the public for years, lying to Congress. 

“This is a guy who gave money to the Wuhan Institute to do gain-of-function research, and when the result of that was COVID, he lied about it and tried to cover it up and tried to evade the Sunshine laws and anything else that would expose him. And he and his minions are still lying about it today. That’s the takeaway.”

As for the Biden administration’s refusal to comply with a law requiring release of government documents on the origin of COVID, does that sound like a constitutional crisis?

“Yeah, it absolutely is a crisis,” Hawley told The Heartlander. “And what we ought to do is, anybody who is involved with this, people like Fauci, people like the scientist today, these people ought to lose their pensions. These people ought to get off the government payroll and the government dole. There ought to be real consequences here. 

“And the Biden administration officials who are refusing to release the intelligence – my bill, which Congress passed both houses, requires the president to declassify what we know about COVID, and they just won’t do it. They’re just defying it. 

“There ought to be consequences for those people who are doing it: contempt of Congress, jail time. You know, this is why we have laws, and they are flagrantly ignoring them.”

What did Hawley think of the testimony Tuesday of the Tulane professor, who shrugged that his article was just a “paper,” and falsely stated the intelligence community agrees with him that COVID came from nature?

“What a bunch of lies. What a pack of lies,” Hawley said. “Here’s a guy who was right at the center of the propaganda effort by this government where they said, ‘Ohh, COVID didn’t originate in a lab, couldn’t have originated in a lab, and if you think it did or just have questions, you’re crazy. You need to be silenced – kicked off social media, shouted down in public and maybe lose your job.’ 

“That’s what these people did. We all know it. We all lived through it. And now, as it turns out, our own government has concluded that it probably did originate in the lab. And we know that multiple intelligence agencies have said for years they thought it originated in the lab. 

“These people lied to us and tried to censor us, which is just as bad or worse. And this guy today was part of that effort. I don’t know how he can show his face in public, to be honest with you. And he, of course, would take no responsibility. None. All he said was, ‘Oh, well, I just wrote a paper.’ He wrote a piece of propaganda that he knew was false – he knew was false.

“And he got caught lying today. He told me under oath today that the intelligence community all agrees with him. That is flatly false. I’ve read the reports. It’s been reported on in the media. It is false. Multiple intelligence agencies say it came from a lab. I mean, these guys, they just never stop lying.”