Fauci responded on Wednesday (March 15) to a newly released Feb. 2020 email from scientist Kristian Andersen that said Fauci was among those who “prompted” work on analyzing how C19 came about, which resulted in a paper that claimed the lab origin theory was not credible.
“There has been a lot of speculation, fear mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space and we thought that bringing some clarity to this discussion might be of interest to Nature,” Andersen wrote.
“Prompted by Jeremy Farra[r], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus,” Andersen said.
In another message, Andersen said the work was “focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.”
Anderson was one of the co-authors of a paper published by Nature that said “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct nor a purposefully manipulated virus.”
“Absolutely not,” Fauci said when asked whether the paper was drafted to disprove the lab theory.
“During the phone call on Feb. 1, where very competent evolutionary biologists were going back and forth, and they decided on the phone call, listen, let’s take a little time and go back and really carefully examine those sequences and see if, in fact, there’s anything to that,” Fauci said.
“They did that and they came to the conclusion that, in fact, it is more likely that it was not something that was engineered, but something that actually escaped from a wet market.
And in order to get it peer reviewed, they wrote a paper to let the peer review system evaluate whether it was valid, and it did and that’s how the paper came about,” he added.
“So this idea of saying, write the paper to definitively disprove something is conspiracy at its height. It’s really ridiculous.”
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