In his role as the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, Dr. Fauci has a lot of responsibilities, and one of those is managing the press as well. In that capacity, Dr. Fauci admitted this week that there was a meeting between prominent scientists last February to discuss just the COVID-19 outbreak that originated in China.
It was just days after the meeting that one scientist who had previously raised some concerns about the COVID-19 genome being of the “unnatural” variety completely reversed their opinion and said that the suggestion that the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak were nothing more than a “conspiracy theory.”
News of this meeting is particularly noteworthy because the theory that COVID-19 had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has gained a lot of significant traction in the past few weeks. It’s no longer being viewed as a conspiracy theory, folks. Scientists have repeatedly dismissed this possibility as nothing more than a conspiracy theory even though there is not very much evidence to totally discount the possibility either.
USA Today
According to USA Today that meeting took place on February 1, 2020, and it “played a crucial role in shaping these early views of several of the keys scientists involved in the combating of COVID-19. These individuals had published papers and they had made public statements that contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether the laboratory in Wuhan, China might have been the primary catalyst for the COVID-19 pandemic.” Obviously, Dr. Fauci was one of them.
This particular call was convened after Scripps Research Translational Institute infectious disease expert Kristian Anderson voiced concerns to Fauci that COVID-19 may have been engineered in the Wuhan lab.
“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences and then you simply have no choice but to consider that they do look engineered,” Andersen wrote in an email prior to the teleconference, adding that he and other scientists “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Andersen’s email was just one of over 3,000 Fauci emails that BuzzFeed news had obtained in early June.
Several individuals came together on the call, including Fauci, Andersen, Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, National Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, and “many other international experts devoted to the emerging virology and infectious diseases,” USA Today reported.
“I remember it quite well,” Fauci recounted in his interview with USA Today. “We determined on that call that we wanted to really look into this situation very carefully.”
“It was a very productive back-and-forth discussion where there were a few on the call who thought that it could indeed have been an engineered virus,” Fauci continued.
The Aftermath of the Meeting
Just three days after these experts met, Andersen told the scientists that “the data conclusively shows” that COVID-19 did not emerge naturally.
Andersen’s remarks came on the heels of other scientists working diligently to inform the government on their version of COVID-19.
“I think that it’s great when I read through the letter,” Andersen announced. “But I do wonder if we need to be more firm on the question of engineering. There are quite a few crackpot theories going around at the moment where they think this virus was somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case. Of course, engineering could be done for nefarious reasons, or it could be done for basic research. Either way, the data does not show conclusively that either of these things were done.”
A weeks later, Andersen and other scientists released a report on the origins of COVID-19, explaining their work, “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
USA Today showed that this report was “hugely influential and is among the key reasons that any kind of lab-related hypothesis — involving either a natural or man-made virus — was dismissed by so many for so long.”
Either way, these are some interesting revelations. What are your thoughts on this?
