The former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, has said Dr. Anthony Fauci told world leaders in the spring of 202...
The former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb, has said Dr. Anthony Fauci told world leaders in the spring of 2020 that the coronavirus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
U.S. researchers around that time still were considering whether the virus came from a lab break, and Fauci told the health leaders gathered that the newly identified strain of the coronavirus 'looked unusual,' according to Gottlieb.
The disclosure from the former FDA chief comes as an increasing number of mainstream scientists and media figures no longer are parroting the line from the Chinese Communist Party that the virus came from a bat.
Even President Joe Biden has ordered government agencies to investigate the possibility that it might have come from a lab.
Now, Gottlieb says Fauci last year at least considered that COVID-19 could have come from a lab - before closing ranks around the idea that it occurred naturally.
Gottlieb, who served under President Donald Trump, said a former senior member of the Trump administration told him at the time of Fauci's 2020 talk. Gottlieb said he'd recently reconfirmed with that person that Fauci had given the talk.
'I think early on, when they looked at the strain, they had suspicions,' Gottlieb recalled Sunday on CBS Face the Nation, speaking of U.S. scientists. 'And it takes time to do that analysis, and that dispelled some of those suspicions,' he added.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb said it was a mistake to only look at the virus from a scientific perspective: It also needs to be examined from a national security lens, he said.
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said he was told Dr. Fauci had briefed world leaders on the possibility that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab
U.S. First Lady Jill Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci visited a vaccination clinic at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem
'A scientific mindset looks at the virus and the virus' behavior and draws a conclusion,' he said.
'A national security assessment looks at that and then looks at the behavior of the Chinese government, the behavior of the lab, other evidence around the lab - including the infections we now know took place - and that changes the overall assessment,' he said.
Although some experts still believe the virus was transmitted from a bat to some other species of animal, then to humans, its origins remain unproven.
The Wuhan lab was famed for conducting tests on bat coronaviruses, with experts who support the leak theory saying the same city being ground zero for the outbreak is too great a coincidence to ignore.
Fauci is now facing accusations that he mishandled and downplayed the theory the virus leaked from the lab in Wuhan.
While China has tried to insist the virus originated elsewhere, academics, politicians and the media have begun to contemplate the possibility it escaped from the WIV - raising suspicions that Chinese officials simply hid evidence of the early spread
The idea the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab was at best a 'fringe theory' until recently, when the Biden administration ordered a review
The Wuhan lab was famed for conducting tests on bat coronaviruses, with experts who support the leak theory saying the same city being ground zero for the outbreak is too great a coincidence to ignore. (file photo from inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology)
Last week, a trove of Fauci's emails were released which span the early days of the pandemic.
In one email, from Feb. 1 of last year, Kristian Andersen, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute, wrote to Fauci, the longtime director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about ongoing efforts to decipher the origin of the novel coronavirus.
At the time, the lab leak hypothesis was largely dismissed by many experts. It has recently gained traction.
'The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,' Andersen wrote.
He said he and his colleagues 'all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.
But,' he added, 'we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.'
By the next month, it turned out, they had.
He and his colleagues published an article in Nature Medicine in which they concluded that it was 'improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.'
In another email, Fauci was thanked by the head of a nonprofit that helped fund research at China´s Wuhan Institute of Virology, 'for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin,' which he said 'will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus´ origins.'
Andersen, the scientist who wrote the 'engineered' email, has tried to offer further explanation.
'As I have said many times, we seriously considered a lab leak a possibility.
'However, significant new data, extensive analyses, and many discussions led to the conclusions in our paper. What the email shows, is a clear example of the scientific process,' he tweeted amid the backlash.
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