Mr. I Am The Science would have been blocked on Twitter, Facebook and other not that long ago
Fauci on Covid lab leak theory: ‘I have a completely open mind’
Anthony Fauci, the retiring top official in the United States response to the Covid-19 pandemic, said Sunday he has “a completely open mind” about the origins of the respiratory virus.
“I have a completely open mind about that, despite people saying that I don’t,” Fauci said, when asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the theory that the virus may have leaked from a lab in China in 2019.
Fauci acknowledged that a group of international, respected virologists has written that strong evidence shows the virus jumped from animals to humans, but said it “hasn’t been definitively proven.”
“Even when there’s nothing to hide, they act in a suspicious, non-transparent way,” Fauci said of the Chinese government.
Weirdly, neither Politico nor any of the other Credentialed Media outlets discussing this mention that Fauci was essentially funding gain of function research at a facility in Wuhan, China, that was already shown to have shoddy security and protection methods. Oh, and
Fauci shut down lab leak theory despite scientists lending it credence, emails show
Scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan, China, was possible or even likely, but Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins worked to shut the hypothesis down, according to several emails.
The emails were revealed Tuesday in a letter from Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, the ranking member on House Judiciary Committee, and GOP Rep. James Comer, the ranking member on House Oversight Committee. Some of the emails included notes from a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call in which at least 11 scientists theorized about the virus’s origin, with many leaning toward the lab leak theory.
“[The emails] reveal that Dr. Fauci was warned of two things: (1) the potential that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute Virology (WIV) and (2) the possibility that the virus was intentionally genetically manipulated,” the lawmakers said.
And in May of 2020
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory—that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.
There are many, many, many more instances of Fauci saying that it didn’t come from a lab. But, now that he’s leaving, and we’re almost 3 years from when it started, that he has an open mind?
Read: Herr Fauci Totally Has An Open Mind On COVID Lab Leak »