Fauci 'not convinced' COVID-19 developed naturally
Dr. Anthony Fauci says he is "not convinced" COVID-19 developed naturally, and called for an open investigation into the virus' origins.
"There’s a lot of cloudiness around the origins of COVID-19 still, so I wanted to ask, are you still confident that it developed naturally?" PolitiFact’s Katie Sanders asked the nation’s top infectious disease expert in an event, United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking event.
"No actually," Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said, around 12 minutes into footage of the event, which was held earlier this month but overlooked by most media outlets. "I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened."
"Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have 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 continued.
"Will you in front of this group categorically say that the COVID-19 virus could not have occurred by serial passage in a laboratory?" Sen. Rand Paul had asked Fauci during a Senate hearing last Tuesday.
Fauci did not explicitly rule out such a possibility: "I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I'm fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China," he said. "However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
Paul had claimed that funding through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been funneled to controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology -- the Chinese lab that is believed to have played a role in the initial outbreak of COVID-19. Paul specifically zeroed in on gain of function research -- which works on making pathogens deadlier or more easily transmissible. He alleged that a U.S. virologist had been working with the Chinese institute on such research and said it was funded by the NIH.
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Recommended by Mark Levin on his most recent TV show:
The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade (May 5, 2021).
A few brief excerpts from the above long essay:
If the case that SARS2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? As may now be obvious, there are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.
[...]
The common sense perception that a pandemic breaking out in Wuhan might have something to do with a Wuhan lab cooking up novel viruses of maximal danger in unsafe conditions could eventually displace the ideological insistence that whatever Trump said can’t be true.
And then let the reckoning begin.
The entire essay is worth reading but will require an investment of time.
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