Dr. Anthony Fauci denied that health officials “deliberately suppressed” theories that COVID-19 came from a laboratory — insisting he always encouraged scientists to have an “open mind” while investigating its origins.
“If you go back then, even though you lean towards feeling this is more likely a natural occurrence, we always felt that you gotta keep an open mind — all of us,” Fauci said Wednesday on “CBS This Morning.”
“We didn’t get up and start announcing it, but what we said, ‘Keep an open mind and continue to look.’ So I think it’s a bit of a distortion to say that we deliberately suppressed that,” he said.
The White House chief medical adviser, however, publicly rejected the lab-leak theory in the early months of the pandemic, insisting last year that “everything” points to the virus coming from nature.
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images“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,” Fauci told National Geographic in May 2020.
“Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said.
He said at the time that he didn’t believe an “an alternate theory — that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.”
Researchers work in the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization on Feb. 3, 2021. REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File PhotoThe lab leak theory gained traction last month following revelations that three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became ill in November 2019 and sought hospital treatment. Their symptoms were consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.
Though it’s still not clear whether they were infected with coronavirus, their illnesses came at a time most experts believe the virus was spreading through Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic.
President Biden has since ordered US intelligence agencies to launch a 90-day investigation of the origin of the virus.
