- Dr. Anthony Fauci made his comments in an interview with NewsNation Now anchor Leland Vittert on The Donlon Report
- He double downed during a Thursday morning CNN interview
- But he admitted he ‘can’t guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab’
- Fauci said Trump supporters ‘resent’ him because they don’t understand science
- Emails show he was warned at the start COVID was possibly ‘engineered’ in a lab
- He took the theory seriously behind closed doors but downplayed it in public
- NIH Director Dr Francis Collins appeared to dismiss the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab as a ‘conspiracy’ in an email to Fauci
- The subject line of Collins’ email to Fauci, which was sent on April 16 last year, was titled ‘conspiracy gains momentum’
- It included a link to a Mediaite news article referencing comments made a day earlier about the Wuhan lab leak theory by Fox News anchor Bret Baier
- The contents of Collins’ email was redacted. Fauci replied on April 17 at 2.45am but his response was also blacked out
Dr. Anthony Fauci doubled down on claims that the coronavirus likely originated from an animal then was transmitted to humans in a Thursday morning interview on CNN, despite increasing speculation that it leaked from a China lab.
Fauci, who served under former President Trump and President Joe Biden, continues to fight the idea that he downplayed theories that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a trove of emails exchange at the beginning of the pandemic revealed he was warned about a potential lab leak.
‘I have always said and will say today to you … that I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human,’ Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday on CNN.
Although he said he’s keeping an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak, Fauci said it was ‘far-fetched’ to think the Chinese would kill their own people.
‘The idea, I think, is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves, as well as other people. I think that’s a bit far out.’