Driving the news: Bill Maher used Friday's episode of HBO's 'Real Time' to unload on Dr. Anthony Fauci, accusing him of telling 'actual lies' about COVID-19's origins — days after Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times during a Senate hearing on his handling of the pandemic.
'He was caught in actual lies,' Maher said. 'The big issue to me is the origin of this, which is very important. How did it start?'
What he said: Maher pointed to Fauci's early and repeated insistence that the virus emerged through animal-to-human contact at a Wuhan wet market — and that calling it a lab leak was a 'conspiracy theory.'
'He was telling people up front when it first began it was from the wet markets... if you say it escaped from the lab, that's a conspiracy theory,' Maher said. 'And he knew better. Because we have him in his diary telling us what he was saying to other scientists.'
By the numbers: COVID-19 has caused over 7 million confirmed deaths worldwide, per the source.
Between the lines: Maher has previously signaled his 'vote is in play,' warning that the Democratic Party is being 'colonized' by socialists. His willingness to hammer Fauci — a figure the institutional left treated as untouchable — marks another break from progressive orthodoxy.
The bottom line: When a liberal comedian is citing a senator's released Slack messages and invoking Fifth Amendment stonewalling to question the public health establishment, the credibility damage to that establishment is real — and bipartisan.