Dr. Anthony Fauci spent over a year publicly dismissing the theory that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but more than a year ago he briefed world leaders that the virus may have leaked from the lab.
“I was told at that time, back in the spring [of 2020], that Dr. Fauci had gone over to a meeting of world health leaders in Europe around the World Health Assembly, and actually briefed them on the information that they were looking at — that this could have been a potential lab leak, that this strain looked unusual,” former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday. “So those discussions were going on. And I was told that by a very senior official in the Trump administration. I’ve reconfirmed that conversation. That happened, you know, at the time contemporaneously with—with that meeting over a year ago. So I think early on when they looked at the strain, they had suspicions.”
Gottlieb said that further analysis “dispelled some of those suspicions,” but Fauci publicly refuted the man-made virus theory for a year even though he was told in the early days of the pandemic that COVID-19 had “unusual features” that “potentially look engineered.”
“On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” NIH scientist Kristian Andersen told Fauci on February 1, 2020.
Some believe that Fauci publicly dismissed the lab-leak theory to protect his own connections to funding “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
AMERICANS: NOT AS DUMB AS POLITICIANS HOPE. Only 40% of Voters Think Dr. Fauci Told the Truth About Virus Research. “As investigators pursue evidence that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a Chinese research laboratory, many voters doubt that Dr. Anthony Fauci has told the truth about American funding of such research.”