Fauci no longer confident COVID-19 emerged naturally
by Jerry Dunleavy, Justice Department Reporter | | May 22, 2021 09:55 PM
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Dr. Anthony Fauci is now calling for further investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in a departure from his dismissal of the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis last year.
President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, who has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said he was unsure when asked by Politifact's Katie Sanders about whether he was still confident that COVID-19 emerged naturally.
"No, actually. … No, I’m not convinced about that. I think that we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we find out to the best of our ability exactly what happened," Fauci said during the May 11 interview. "Certainly, the people who’ve investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could’ve been something else, and we need to find that out. So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus."
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Over a year ago, during a May 4, 2020, National Geographic interview, Fauci laughed off the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab when science editor Nsikan Akpan asked, "Do you believe or is there evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was made in the lab in China or accidentally released from a lab in China?"
Fauci argued that "if you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what's out there now is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated — the way the mutations have naturally evolved." He said that "a number of very qualified evolutionary biologists have said that everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that it evolved in nature and then jumped species."
"If you accept the premise, which is very strongly supported by scientific evidence, that it was not deliberately mutated and deliberately changed, and you say, if it was in the wild and evolving, the likelihood it jumped species naturally, someone will say, 'Well, maybe somebody took it from the wild, put it in the lab, and then it escaped from the lab.' But that means it was in the wild to begin with!" he continued.
Fauci then laughed as he claimed not to understand why the possibility that COVID-19 had escaped from a lab was being raised.
"So that’s why I don’t get what they’re talking about. If it isn’t manipulated in the lab and you’re trying to say it escaped from the lab, then how did it get in the lab? It got in the lab because somebody isolated it from the environment. So that’s why I don’t spend a lot of time going in that circular argument," he said.
Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said that the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, which has killed 3.45 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University, and both administrations have cast doubt on the manner in which the study from China and the World Health Organization was conducted in early 2021. Though the WHO-China report said a jump from animals to humans was most likely, Trump officials have pointed to an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a highly plausible origin for the pandemic.
A State Department fact sheet released in mid-January contended Wuhan lab researchers "conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)" and that the lab "has a published record of conducting 'gain-of-function' research to engineer chimeric viruses." The fact sheet added the lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military."
In March, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, said the joint team had not fully investigated the potential of COVID-19 originating through an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab, a hypothesis that he insisted needed further study despite it being deemed "extremely unlikely" by the team, which claimed the most likely origin was a jump from animal to animal to human.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fauci-no-longer-confident-covid-19-emerged-naturally