Fauci Demands Investigation Into COVID-19 Origins Arguing That China Is Still Hiding The Truth

Dr. Anthony Fauci commented that he doesn’t believe that COVID-19 could have developed naturally after he demanded an open investigation into the virus’s origins.

“There’s a lot of cloudiness around the origins of COVID-19 still, so I wanted to ask, are you still confident that it developed naturally?” Katie Sanders asked Dr. Fauci, whom many consider the nation’s top infectious disease expert, at the United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking event.

“No actually,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) answered. “I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened.”

“Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out. So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus,” he continued.

“Will you in front of this group categorically say that the COVID-19 virus could not have occurred by serial passage in a laboratory?” Sen. Rand Paul had asked Fauci during a Senate hearing last Tuesday.

Fauci did not explicitly rule out such a possibility: “I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China,” he said. “However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically have not funded the gain of functional research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Paul had claimed that funding through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been funneled to the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology — the Chinese lab that is believed to have played a role in the initial outbreak of COVID-19. Paul specifically zeroed in on a gain of function research — which works on making pathogens deadlier or more easily transmissible. He alleged that a U.S. virologist had been working with the Chinese institute on such research and said it was funded by the NIH.