Fauci denied that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory

According to the House subcommittee investigating the origin of the pandemic, the former White House medical advisor pushed a paper to disprove that theory.

Anthony Fauci, exasesor médico de la Casa Blanca, en una declaración. Imagen de archivo. — (Wikimedia Commons)

Published by

Alejandro Baños

6 de marzo, 2023

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The House accused Anthony Fauci of prompting to reject the theory that the coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The former White House medical advisor took it upon himself to try to disprove this, according to the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic:

New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement.

The subcommittee, chaired by Republican Congressman Brad Wenstrup, will hold its first hearing on March 8. In a memo submitted Sunday, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic reflected how Fauci prompted Dr. Kristian Andersen to write the paper titled The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 to show that "the coronavirus is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."

"The article did not squash the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis"

The subcommittee's investigations point to a telephone conversation between Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins (director of the National Institute of Health), and at least eleven other scientists that occurred on Feb. 1, 2020. In it, they were alerted, for the first time, that the virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan and could have been intentionally manipulated. Three days later, the article refuting the theory was written. It was Fauci who, before it was publishe in Nature Medicine, edited and approved it.

According to the subcommittee, Collins sent Fauci an email a little more than two months later in which he noted that "the article did not squash the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis."

Fauci assured that the virus had a "natural" origin

In an interview with CBS in November 2022, Fauci said, "It has been proven without a doubt that SARS-CoV-1 went from a bat to an intermediate animal host to a human. Didn't come out of any lab, nothing." According to Fauci, the pandemic "was a natural occurrence." The accusations to China are because "they were so secretive about it that you might want to suspect about what they're hiding. So right now, what we would really like to know is all of the details of what went on with the original people who were infected."