Anthony Fauci admitted during an interview with CNN that COVID could have come from a laboratory in China. Since 2020, Fauci had claimed that COVID came from an animal, a position which he had held firmly until now. He even pushed for scientific papers to back up his statements.
Now, according to the infectious disease expert, there is a possibility that someone infected by an animal went through a laboratory in China and subsequently came out of the same laboratory carrying the virus.
"A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab, and was being studied in a lab, and then came out of the lab," Fauci said during the interview.
The former head of the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) assured that he remains open-minded about the different possibilities to explain the origin of the coronavirus.
"The other possibility is someone takes a virus from the environment that doesn’t actually spread very well in humans, and manipulates it a bit, and accidentally it escapes or accidentally infects someone and then you get an outbreak." Fauci added, speaking of COVID's passage through a laboratory.
Wuhan, the origin of COVID, is home to a large number of medical laboratories. Some of them were funded by the agency Fauci headed, according to a report in the Epoch Times . The Wuhan labs themselves stopped receiving U.S. government funding when they decided to stop sharing information with Washington.
Fauci's interview came just days after Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, pointed out in front of the Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that COVID has an entirely artificial origin caused by gain-of-function research based on the alteration of natural organisms. Redfield maintained in his appearance that research into the origin of the COVID pandemic should be a priority.
Redfield was also sidelined for supporting the theory of synthetic origin in the laboratory. According to Redfield, Fauci and former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins "marginalized" him for disagreeing about how the coronavirus emerged and spread around the world.
Prosecuting Fauci
During the interview, Fauci also referred to those who called for his prosecution for his statements to Congress about the origins of COVID and his agency's relationship with the Wuhan labs. Several GOP figures called for Fauci to be prosecuted, voices joined by Elon Musk.
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
Fauci dismissed the allegations as "craziness" and said he has no answers to them. "I mean, prosecute me for what? What are they talking about? I'd like to know what the hell they're talking about. I think they're losing it," the infectious disease expert said. "It makes no sense to say something like that and, in fact, it's irresponsible," Fauci concluded.
