The White House steered clear of the controversy surrounding Dr. Anthony Fauci’s newly unearthed emails, which show the nation’s top virologist’s behind-the-scenes communications did not always match his public statements on COVID-19.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to comment on the substance of the emails during the briefing on Thursday, though they showed he worked behind the scenes to cast doubt on the theory that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan, China, laboratory, a hypothesis that he is still unsure of.
“Let me just say on Dr. Fauci and his emails, he’s also spoken to this many, many times over the course of the last few days, and we’ll let him speak for himself, and he’s been an undeniable asset in our country’s pandemic response,” Psaki said. “But it’s obviously not that advantageous for me to relitigate the substance of emails from 17 months ago.”
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“We launched, based on the president’s direction, an entire internal review process to use all of the resources across government to get to the bottom of the origins,” she added.
Fauci’s emails, which were obtained by both Buzzfeed and the Washington Post through Freedom of Information Act requests and published on Tuesday, brought on immediate criticism.
In some of the most scrutinized communications, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, whose organization has been involved in research at the Wuhan laboratory at the center of inquiries into the coronavirus’s origins, thanked Fauci after he publicly dismissed the idea that the coronavirus may have been created in the lab. In another, the doctor dismissed the efficacy of wearing masks in an email sent to Sylvia Burwell, a Health and Human Services secretary under former President Barack Obama.
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In response to the criticism on Wednesday, Fauci acknowledged that his emails in the early months of the pandemic could easily be “taken out of context.”
