Fox News host Tucker Carlson rebuked Dr. Anthony Fauci for what he described as the health official’s dodging of a question about reports the coronavirus was created in a lab.
Earlier this week, it was announced the U.S. military and intelligence community are investigating the possibility the coronavirus was unintentionally released from a Wuhan laboratory, instead of originating in a wet market, as has been widely speculated.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked about the theories during Friday’s coronavirus task force briefing at the White House. He explained a group of virologists studied the virus and concluded the sequences of its evolution determined it was “totally consistent” with “a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Carlson, unhappy with Fauci’s response to the question, called it “kind of an amazing exchange.”
“The first thing you notice is, it doesn’t answer the question that was asked,” Carlson added. “The question is not, ‘Was it genetically engineered?’ The question is, ‘Did it come somehow from the lab?’ And he didn’t answer that. Instead, he effectively misled. Not clear why he did that.”
The World Health Organization concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan at the end of 2019, and an investigative report in February found “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source” in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. But there have since been questions about the accuracy on the report and claims that it could have been created in a laboratory.
