Former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci emerged from his home Monday, one day after a bombshell report revealed that the Energy Department has concluded that COVID-19 likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Fauci, who retired after more than five decades as a federal employee at the end of 2022, didn’t make any comments about the revised assessment, which reportedly was included in a recent intelligence report sent to the White House and top-ranking members of Congress.
The report reaffirmed what is a consensus in the intelligence community, that COVID-19 wasn’t the result of a Chinese biological weapons program, but most likely leaked out of a lab researching coronaviruses by accident.
The DOE’s findings also match what Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee wrote last year in an interim report that doubted the so-called “natural zoonotic origin” theory.
The 82-year-old Fauci has repeatedly dismissed the so-called “lab leak” theory — insisting that evidence shows that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans.
At the onset of the pandemic, Fauci called the lab leak theory a “shiny object that will go away” in an internal email from April 2020.
Two months earlier, Fauci reportedly took part in a conference call with other scientists in which they were warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it is unclear if he ever passed the warning along to other government officials.
Republicans have argued that Fauci has rejected the theory to cover up his former agency’s involvement in funding so-called “gain-of-function” research, in which scientists make viruses more transmissible and harmful.
In October 2021, the National Institutes of Health admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab — despite Fauci’s denials.
The NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — a New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), one of Fauci’s most merciless critics, has repeatedly accused the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of lying to Congress about the origin of COVID-19.
On Sunday, Paul retweeted a reporter who wrote: “@RandPaul asked Fauci about a lab leak. He denied it. Repeatedly.”
“Classified documents leaked (they should be declassified!) showing scientists at DOE believe COVID leaked from Wuhan Lab,” Paul tweeted Monday.
The Biden administration defended Fauci Monday, with press secretary Karine-Jean-Pierre saying the attacks by Republicans “have been counterproductive, they have not been helpful.”
White House national security spokesman John Kirby added that President Biden has made “trying to find the origins of COVID a priority” and claimed that “there is not a consensus in the US government about how COVID started.”
In an interview with the Boston Globe on Monday, Fauci urged the public to “keep an open mind” on the origins of COVID-19 despite the revised assessment.
“We must all keep an open mind to all possibilities” about the origins of the coronavirus, Fauci told the outlet, adding, “we may never know.”
“I don’t see any data for a lab leak,’ Fauci continued. “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened.”
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