“A lab leak may simply be that someone in the wild, perhaps looking for other types of viruses in bats, got infected, entered a lab and studied in a lab, and then left the lab. But if that’s the definition of a lab leak, then it’s still an herbal phenomenon,” Fauci said.
He said the other option is that a virus “accidentally” escaped from a lab after being extracted from an environment.
Dr. Anthony Fauci joined CNN’s Jim Acosta for an interview on Saturday, March 11, 2023. (Screenshot/CNN/CNNNewsroom)
FAUCI REJECTS CLAIMS IT FROZE LAB LEAK PROMOTERS COMMITTED TO NIH FUNDING
“The other option is for someone to take a virus from the environment that doesn’t spread very well in humans, and manipulate it a little bit, and escape or infect someone, and then an outbreak arises,” he said.
Fauci said there were no lab leaks leading to a pandemic.
“There are no lab leaks that have led to pandemics, so there have been injuries in the lab. This happens intermittently. We’ve had reports about this in fashionable times, recently, but there’s never been a scenario where a virus has escaped a lab, which is a new logo virus that no one had noticed before and that has led to a pandemic. That didn’t happen,” he said.
Acosta also asked Fauci if his thinking about a possible coronavirus lab leak had evolved.
WASHINGTON, D. C. – DECEMBER 1: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy, provides an update on the Omicron COVID-19 variant at the daily White House press briefing on December 1, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images))
“You know, Jim, I kept an open brain in the process. What has replaced over the months, or even a year or more, is what I discussed a while ago, namely, that as evolutionary virologists deepened this consultation and analyzed it from a number of points of view, epidemiological, virological, geospatial; wrote two very important, well-written, peer-reviewed papers in the journal Science that strongly suggested that it was, in fact, an animal-to-human herbal phenomenon. Jim, he doesn’t fix it definitively. And that’s why to this day I say I will keep an absolutely open brain as to the origin,” he replied.
Fauci has been saying for months that while he kept a “completely open mind,” he believed the evidence was moving away from a lab leak.
Some conservatives and others reacted to Fauci’s on Sunday.
“The absolute knots you will have to join in to maintain past approved reviews on the origins of Covid and the effectiveness of the mask mandate and school closures,” Mary Katharine Ham tweeted.
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The president’s former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci speaks at a briefing on the Omicron Covid-19 variant, observed by U. S. Vice President Anthony Fauci. U. S. Kamala Harris (L) and President Joe Biden (C), in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC on November 29, 2021. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
House Democrats and Republicans unanimously voted on a bill that would require the director of national intelligence to declassify all data similar to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and imaginable links to the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
The bill comes after the Department of Energy and FBI concluded that the coronavirus most likely originated in a lab.
Hanna Panreck is editor of Fox News.