Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University and chair of an international commission on COVID-19, charged in a wide-ranging interview last week that the National Institutes of Health and allied scientists were impeding an investigation into how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Since the pandemic’s beginning, virologists have been attacking anyone who asks hard questions about what might have started this outbreak.

Predictably, Baylor School of Medicine’s Peter Hotez went on the assault, tweeting that Sachs, as leader of the Lancet Commission, did not represent the views of science. Much like a Pentagon general wrapping himself in freedom and the flag to demand more federal monies for another foreign war—no questions, you anti-war hippie!—Hotez has been shrouding himself in the mantle of science to denigrate anyone who questions taxpayer funding for dangerous virus research by the National Institutes of Health.

Unfortunately for Sachs, he is just Hotez’s latest target.