One Year After Openly Defying Trump on COVID Lab Leak Theory, Fauci Admits He's Now Doubting the 'Natural Origin' Narrative
The tangled trail of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s views on the coronavirus took another twist this month as he took a position he denounced a year ago, when it was held by then-President Donald Trump.
During an interview with Politifact, which was posted on Twitter, Fauci was asked whether he still held to his views that the coronavirus had a natural origin.
“No, actually. … No, I’m not convinced about that,” Fauci said (about 13 minutes into the interview below). “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.”
United Facts of America Day 2: Join PolitiFact in conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci after a year of dangerous misinformation and a public health crisis. WATCH NOW >> https://t.co/yPVkEBVXng
— Poynter (@Poynter) May 11, 2021
“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,” he said.
However, a year ago, when Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were saying that they believed the virus could have been man-made, Fauci ridiculed them, according to the Washington Examiner.
“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,” Fauci told National Geographic.
Fauci:
15 days to slow the spread
Another 30 days
Masks don’t work
6’ social distancing
Masks until the vaccine
2 masks until the vaccine
Masks after the vaccineWhy did Trump, or anyone else, ever listen to this fraud?
100s of years of epidemiological knowledge out the window.
— Dr. Gene Lingerfelt ??? (@GeneLingerfelt) May 18, 2021
Fauci claimed 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 said, according to the Examiner.
Dr Anthony Fauci admits that the #COVID19 pandemic could have been the result of #GainOfFunction research going awry in the Wuhan virology lab, within a project that was possibly funded by the US as well. https://t.co/pqi96ZR5Pl
— Satish Babu (@satish_babu) May 20, 2021
Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee last week issued a report that strongly condemned China’s resistance to allowing a full investigation into the origins of the virus, and said that a research lab in Wuhan remains suspect, according to Fox News.
“International efforts to discover the true source of the virus, however, have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the People’s Republic of China,” the report stated, according to Fox. “Nevertheless, significant circumstantial evidence raises serious concerns that the COVID-19 outbreak may have been a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The report noted that China has a “history of research lab leaks resulting in infections,” according to Fox, and noted that four years ago, warnings were issued that “dangerous research” was being conducted on coronaviruses without following “necessary safety protocols, risking the accidental outbreak of a pandemic.”
The report also noted “several researchers in the Wuhan lab were sickened with COVID-19-like symptoms” in 2019, and stressed the Chinese military’s “involvement in the Wuhan Lab,” Fox reported.
“By contrast, little circumstantial evidence has emerged to support the PRC’s claim that COVID-19 was a natural occurrence, having jumped from some other species to human,” the report stated, according to Fox. It added that Chinese authorities “have failed to identify the original species that allegedly spread the virus to humans, which is critical to their zoonotic transfer theory.”
“To protect American citizens from future pandemics, the U.S. Government must place more pressure on China to allow full, credible investigations of the source of the COVID-19 pandemic and to allow probes of the likelihood that it resulted from a lab leak,” the report stated, according to Fox.
“The U.S. Government must also provide a full accounting of any American cooperation with the Wuhan lab’s coronavirus research, including the support of these projects through U.S. Government funds.”
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