In his final days as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to the president, Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed the COVID-19 lab leak theory, saying it was all but certain that it wasn’t the case.
Appearing on CBS News’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, Fauci addressed a variety of topics regarding national health and COVID-19. Fauci went into depth on the Wuhan lab leak theory, which speculates that COVID-19 was created by the Chinese and was accidentally or purposefully leaked to the public. In his lengthy comments, Fauci wholly rejected the theory, saying there was no possibility whatsoever while adding that the United States should not act accusatory toward the Chinese Communist Party.
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“It has been proven without a doubt that SARS-CoV-1 went from a bat to an intermediate animal host to a human. Didn’t come out of any lab, nothing. It was a natural occurrence, yet they were so secretive about it that you might want to suspect about what they’re hiding. So, right now, what we would really like to know is all of the details of what went on with the original people who were infected,” Fauci said.
“We keep a completely open mind as to what the origin is. Having said that, 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 [been] brought in from a bat to them to a human, that the evidence is quite strong that this is a natural occurrence,” he said, though he added that he and his colleagues are keeping an open mind as to any possibility.
Fauci went on to criticize the Trump administration’s approach to investigating the origins of the virus.
“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 say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. We’re not going to talk to you about it,’ which is not correct. They should be,” he said.
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Fauci also said in the interview that he would be willing to testify before House Republicans, if called, because he supports legitimate oversight.
Fauci announced in August he would be retiring from the government in December.
