Dr. Anthony Fauci is slated to resign his role as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser by the end of the year and is giving pre-retirement interviews arguing COVID-19 likely emerged from nature as he offers up some defenses of China.
Fauci, who has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has long cast doubt on the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even as he insists he is open-minded about the virus’s origins, and he has repeatedly insisted that the National Institutes of Health did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab despite evidence showing U.S. tax dollars flowed to the Chinese institute for bat coronavirus experiments.
House Republicans plan to force Fauci to testify next year, and he says he will appear. The Chinese government continues to block independent outside investigations into COVID-19’s origins and refuses to hand over data on the initial outbreak in Wuhan in 2019.
EDITORIAL: FAUCI HAS DESTROYED THE CREDIBILITY OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH ESTABLISHMENT
Says natural origin way more likely
Fauci repeatedly argued that “we keep a completely open mind as to what the origin is” but contended that a natural origin was much more likely than a lab leak during a weekend interview with Face the Nation on CBS.
“If you look at the examination by highly qualified international scientists with no political agendas, they’ve published in peer-reviewed journals — the best of the peer-reviewed journals — that all the accumulated evidence, particularly related to the Chinese bringing into the Wuhan market animals from the wild that should not have been there that clearly could have brought in from a bat to them to a human, that the evidence is quite strong that this is a natural occurrence,” the scientist argued.
Some scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan was possible or even likely, but emails show Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins worked to shut the hypothesis down.
Fauci also wrongly claimed earlier this year that a February 2020 letter in the Lancet did not dismiss the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis despite the letter being signed by dozens of scientists clearly condemning the idea that it emerged from a Chinese government lab as a conspiracy theory.
Speaking of his insistence that COVID-19 likely emerged in nature, Fauci said this weekend: “Does that mean we’ve ruled out that there was something funny going on at leak? Absolutely [not]. And I, and all of my colleagues, keep an absolutely open mind. … That’s not incompatible with saying the scientific evidence still weighs much more strongly that this is a natural occurrence.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment last year stating that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
Won’t call what China is doing a cover-up
Fauci asserted that “what we would really like to know is all of the details of what went on with the original people who were infected” while he repeatedly declined to call China’s multiyear actions refusing to hand over data a “cover-up.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Fauci claimed. “It isn’t that I agree or disagree. … I mean, if ‘cover-up’ is not allowing people to come in and look at all the data, that’s not a cover-up, that’s not being transparent. … ‘Cover-up’ means you know something and you’re hiding it.”
Fauci suggested that COVID-19 had emerged from a wet market after China falsely said it had shut down the exotic wildlife markets: “If you want to call that a cover-up, or you want to call that lack of transparency, I don’t know what it is. But when you say you’re not going to bring animals into a market, and you do, that’s bad.”
Blames China’s lack of transparency on China’s history of secrecy
Fauci argued that China’s refusal to hand over important information about COVID-19’s emergence in Wuhan was not evidence of its guilt but rather part of a historic pattern of China always being opaque related to disease outbreaks.
“One of the problems is that — and this is historic. It goes way back to bird flu, the H5N1, the H7N9, the original SARS-CoV-1,” Fauci said, adding, “Even when there’s nothing at all to hide, they act secretive, which absolutely triggers an appropriate suspicion of, like, ‘What the heck is going on over there?’ When you had SARS-CoV-1, back in 2002, they were not transparent at all about what the heck was going on in China.”
“It’s the idea of they don’t want to be embarrassed,” Fauci said of China. “And by not wanting to be embarrassed, it’s like shooting yourself in the foot of nobody believing anything you say.”
Blames China’s lack of transparency on Trump
Fauci further argued that COVID-19’s origins needed to be raised in a “nonaccusatory way” and claimed that “what happens is that if you look at the anti-China approach, that clearly the Trump administration had right from the very beginning, and the accusatory nature, the Chinese are going to flinch back” and not provide information.
The claim that former President Donald Trump immediately took an anti-China stance related to the COVID-19 outbreak is false, as the former president commended China for its coronavirus response more than a dozen times in January and February 2020, including saying the United States appreciated Beijing’s “transparency” on Jan. 24 and that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was “working very hard” and “doing it very professionally” on Feb. 18.
The Trump administration did begin raising the possibility, or likelihood, of COVID-19 originating in the Wuhan lab, while the Chinese government conducted a now-yearslong disinformation campaign beginning in early 2020 baselessly alleging SARS-CoV-2 started with the U.S. military.
When it was pointed out to Fauci that China has continued to stonewall the Biden administration too, he claimed, “Exactly. I think that horse is out of the barn, and they’re very suspicious of anybody trying to accuse them.”
An anonymous White House official told the New York Post that Biden raised the need for China to be transparent on COVID-19’s origins when the president met with Xi in November.
Praises Chinese scientists the US worked with
Fauci also repeatedly praised Chinese scientists with whom the U.S. had worked for decades. These scientists would include those at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to whom the NIH funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars through the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance for studying bat coronaviruses.
The doctor argued that “the Chinese, not necessarily the scientists that we know and we have dealt with and collaborated with productively for decades but the whole establishment, a political and other establishment in China, even when there’s nothing at all to hide, they act secretive.” He added, “We need to have an open dialogue with their scientists and our scientists … because these are scientists that we’ve known for decades, and we’ve collaborated with them.”
But the Wuhan lab scientists have joined the Chinese government in its opacity, even refusing to hand over key records of the coronavirus experiments they conducted with U.S. funding.
Says NIH funding didn’t lead to COVID-19
Fauci told CNN this week that “maybe there’s a lab leak,” but “it’s not with the viruses that the NIH was funding.”
He said it was “almost certain” that NIH funding for bat coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan lab had not contributed to the emergence of COVID-19, claiming that “it would be essentially molecularly impossible for those viruses to turn into SARS-CoV-2” and that “these viruses could not possibly turn into SARS-CoV-2.”
Fauci described the NIH funding as a “very small grant” and repeatedly claimed it was given “to study bat viruses in a surveillance way to see what’s out there.”
The NIH grants actually went to more than just looking at viruses and also included funding for Wuhan lab experiments on the viruses — which Republicans and some virology critics of Fauci have said were gain of function.
EcoHealth leader Peter Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its “bat lady” leader, Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in NIH funding to the Chinese institute and was also an integral World Health Organization-China joint study team member in early 2021 when it visited Wuhan.
Daszak dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March 2021 when he admitted he took Wuhan lab workers at their word. Meeting minutes from discussions between lab scientists in Wuhan and the WHO-China team reveal lab leak concerns were referred to as “myths” and “conspiracy theories.”
The NIH announced in August it was finally cutting off a subaward through EcoHealth to the Wuhan institute after the lab continued to refuse to hand over lab notebooks and electronic files about the coronavirus research it conducted with U.S. funds, but the NIH nevertheless gave EcoHealth further bat coronavirus funding the next month.
