During the “United Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking” event, Dr. Anthony Fauci, top COVID-19 advisor for both former President Trump and current President Joe Biden, said he’s “not convinced” the spread of the virus was natural.
PolitiFact reporter, Katie Sanders, asked Fauci, “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?”
Fauci responded, “No actually. 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.
In a Senate hearing on May 18, Republican Senator Rand Paul asked Fauci, “Will you in front of this group categorically say that the COVID-19 virus could not have occurred by serial passage in a laboratory?”
Fauci’s answer, “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. However, I will repeat again, the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded gain of function research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
On May 20, Republicans within the House Intelligence Committee released a report where they claimed there’s “significance evidence” pointing to the theory that the virus might’ve been created and “leaked” from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They also claim the U.S. government “may have funded or collaborated.”