Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that he is now “not convinced” that COVID-19 developed naturally and called for a deeper probe into the origins of the virus.
“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.”
On the same day, when asked by a doctor during a Senate hearing about whether it’s possible that COVID-19 arose from a lab accident in Wuhan, Fauci responded: “That possibility certainly exists.
“I am totally in favor of a full investigation of whether that could have happened.”
“The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous,” the now-archived fact check previously stated. “We rate it Pants on Fire!”
In an updated editor’s note published May 17, PolitiFact explained why it had removed the label.
“When this fact-check was first published in September 2020, PolitiFact’s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed,” the note states. “For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review. Currently, we consider the claim to be unsupported by evidence and in dispute.”
The original fact check from PolitiFact cited a Sept. 15, 2020, Fox News interview with Hong Kong virologist Li-Meng Yan, in which she said that she has “solid scientific evidence” that COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus, is “not from nature.”
“It is a man-made virus created in the lab,” the virologist and former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hong Kong told the news network at the time.
She also claimed in the interview that the virus was intentionally released by the Chinese regime, without elaborating. Yan said the virus’s genome indicates that it was modified.
PolitiFact’s editor-in-chief Angie Drobnic Holan told The Epoch Times that she has no further comment on the matter.
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated. ... Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci told the publication.
A laboratory leak could involve either a naturally occurring virus being kept at the facility or a virus that has undergone lab manipulation.
The department also stated that it had reason to believe that “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The Chinese regime has denied that the virus’s origin was linked to the WIV and has pushed a natural zoonotic hypothesis—that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal host. However, Beijing has so far failed to identify the original animal species that allegedly passed the virus on to humans.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week that the Biden administration has asserted both publicly and privately that the Chinese regime was “not transparent from the beginning.”
