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Updated November 28th, 2022 at 07:38 IST

Fauci says he has 'completely open mind' about COVID-19 Wuhan lab leak theory

Fauci said "we keep a completely open mind as to what the origin is," when asked if the novel coronavirus that caused millions of deaths originated in a lab.

Reported by: Zaini Majeed
Covid-19
IMAGE: AP/Unsplash | Image:self
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Director of US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday, Nov 27 said that he has a "completely open mind" about the origin of coronavirus that caused millions of deaths worldwide, but added that the scientific evidence "strongly" indicates that it did not leak from the Wuhan lab accidentally. Speaking on CBS's "Face the Nation," America's most trusted infectious diseases expert, who helped the country wade through the pandemic, said: "We keep a completely open mind as to what the origin is," when asked if the virus, known as SARS-CoV-2 originally, had leaked from the lab in China. 

'Evidence quite strong that SARS-CoV-2 a natural occurrence:' Fauci

The television host questioned Fauci if China has been transparent about the origins of COVID-19, and whether the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP)'s ignorance of calls for an independent investigation was justifiable. Fauci did not reject the lab leak theory, but said that "evidence is quite strong that this is a natural occurrence." He continued, "If you look at the examination by highly qualified international scientists with no political agendas — they've published in peer-reviewed journals — that all accumulated evidence, particularly relating to the Chinese bringing into the Wuhan market animals from the wild that should not have been there." 

Furthermore, the Director of NIAID asked, "does that mean we've ruled out that there was something funny going on and it leaked? Absolutely [not]." Fauci hinted that the novel coronavirus may have originated in the Wuhan Insitute of Virology, as he added, "I and all of my colleagues keep an absolutely open mind. We've got to investigate every possibility because this is too important not to do that. That's not incompatible with saying the scientific evidence still weighs much more strongly that this is a natural occurrence."

The scientific community in the US released a report in June last year claiming that there's “damning” science that strongly indicates that COVID-19 was man-made and was optimized in a lab for maximum infectivity before leading to a pandemic. Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller published two crucial pieces of evidence to back the claim that SARS-CoV-2 was manufactured in a laboratory. Firstly, they said, SARS-CoV-2 was found to have the nature of gain-of-function research which includes scientists tweaking the genome of the virus to make it more infectious or lethal. This, they speculated was being experimented with in China’s Wuhan Insitute of Virology.

Secondly, they said that the coronavirus pathogen that caused the pandemic among the world population had a genetic footprint that was never before observed in a natural coronavirus occurring in animals. Quay is the founder of US-based biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics and Muller is a Physics professor at the University of California Berkeley.

The novel SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID-19 worldwide was an accidental release “out of US lab biotechnology”, the chief of the COVID-19 commission at the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, Jeffrey Sachs also later claimed at a conference hosted by the think tank GATE, in Spain. The coronavirus did not originate in nature or animal, he purported, negating the results from the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease conducted in 2020. 

In March 2021, the World Health Organisation released its first report that nullified that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, Beijing, the then epicenter of the disease. However, the global health agency acknowledged that the coronavirus probably emerged in bats and then jumped off to humans via an intermediary animal. Sachs told the GATE conference, “It’s a blunder in my view of biotech, not an accident of a natural spillover."

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Published November 28th, 2022 at 07:38 IST

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