On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also served as Chief Medical Adviser to President Joe Biden and on the President’s Coronavirus Task Force under President Donald Trump, was “caught in actual lies” on the origins of the COVID virus and he thinks we shouldn’t do gain of function research.

Maher said, “[H]e was caught in actual lies. He was telling people — and the big issue to me is the origin of this, which is very important, how did it start? — And he was telling people up front, when it first began, it was from the wet markets, it could not — that’s a conspiracy theory if you say it escaped from the lab. And he knew better, because we have him in his diary telling us what he was saying to other scientists, who were saying, no, absolutely.”

Maher continued, “And the real issue here is the gain of function research, and again, if we weren’t so partisan, we could just say gain of function research, Obama told them not to do it. I would only have said don’t do it. But it’s a viable debate, it’s a reasonable debate. Should we soup up something that’s bad, this bacteria, to study it? Maybe if it got out, it would be even worse. I think that’s what did happen. We could have had that debate in a rational way. We didn’t want to do that, because why? Because we make everything about race. And this is one of the repercussions of this. You couldn’t say it escaped from the lab, because that was the racist point of view, somehow, that the entire Asian continent would have been, somehow, complicit in this, because it escaped from the — it was ridiculous. But that is where they went, you were racist if you said this escaped from a lab.”

Maher also said that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric did make the issue of anti-Asian racism worse.

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