Dr. Anthony Fauci is still pretty sure COVID-19 did not come from a lab.
“Well, we always have to keep an open mind on this,” Fauci told Dr. Marc Siegel on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio on Tuesday. “But if you talk to the real card-carrying molecular virologists — they feel that the evidence and the circumstances weigh very very strongly that this is a natural occurrence.”
“In the sense jumping from an animal species, a bat, maybe to a intermediate host, to a human,” the White House’s chief medical advisor said. “Very similar to what was proven to be the case with SARS-CoV-1 as well as with MERS. With the bat to the camel to the human.”
Fauci added that while it is still possible the virus could have escaped from a lab, the experts on the subject say the pathogen simply occurred naturally and jumped from an animal to a human.
“You always have to keep an open mind that it could have been something that had been put into a lab to be studied and perhaps leaked out. But most, if not all, of the real card-carrying virologists feel that it was a naturally occurring, out of the environment from an animal to a human.”
The idea that the virus could have escaped from a lab was largely dismissed in 2020 as a conspiracy as the pandemic tightened its grip on the U.S., but the theory was revived last year after a U.S. intelligence report found that several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms that resembled COVID-19 symptoms. China previously told the World Health Organization that the first person with symptoms similar to COVID appeared in Wuhan the next month on December 8, 2019.
China is ranked substantially less prepared than the U.S. on biosecurity by the Global Health Security Index.
Some Republican lawmakers accused China early on of covering up the origins of the virus, some demanding that China pay financially for unleashing the virus on the rest of the world.
Fauci has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and currently serves as White House chief medical adviser to President Biden on COVID-19. Previously, he advised President Trump on the pandemic and has also served as an advisor to five other former presidents on infectious diseases, including HIV and AIDS.
Over the course of the pandemic, Fauci has been criticized for his inconsistency on various pandemic measures including face masks, which he initially discouraged the public from wearing but later encouraged.
On Wednesday, Fauci announced that children younger than 4 years old will likely have a three-dose COVID-19 vaccine regimen when the Food and Drug Administration approves the vaccine for kids that young.
“It looks like it will be a three-dose regimen. I don’t think we can predict when we will see it,” Fauci said at a White House press conference.