Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was a “mistake” to nix the idea that the coronavirus could have come from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Rice, on Sunday, said she felt more questions should have been asked about the idea of a lab leak, largely dismissed by officials and media outlets as a conspiracy theory, when the possibility was first raised in early 2020, when the virus made its outbreak in the United States.
“The first thing is to recognize that there was too much of a tendency early on to dismiss this possibility of a laboratory leak,” Rice said on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I think the press bears some responsibility for this. Well, ‘it had to be animal-to-human transmission,’ these were conspiracy theories about a laboratory leak.”
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Rice’s comments come amid enhanced scrutiny on the idea that COVID-19 could have been man-made.
More than 3,200 pages of emails belonging to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, released last week revealed a key figure in coronavirus research at a Wuhan laboratory personally thanked Fauci for downplaying the idea that the virus could have come from a lab.
Fauci recently walked back his assertions that COVID-19 was caused naturally but has still expressed doubt in the lab leak theory.
Last month, President Joe Biden requested the intelligence community to increase its efforts to investigate the origins of COVID-19, giving officials 90 days to examine the possible origins of the virus, which has killed more than 3 million people worldwide.
Rice called on the U.S. to increase pressure on China, citing her experience serving as the national security adviser under former President George W. Bush during the SARS outbreak in 2003.
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“It was the same problem. We knew something was happening. We couldn’t get answers from the Chinese,” Rice said. “And so, if we’re not going to keep repeating this problem … we’re going to have to be a little bit more aggressive with the Chinese about the need to cooperate. But I think we made a mistake earlier on in many, many people, many officials dismissed this possibility.”
