Fuaci knew 'lab leak' story was not a conspiracy theory

 American Greatness:

Newly unredacted emails reveal that former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci was aware that risky gain-of-function research was occurring in Wuhan, China, prior to the emergence of COVID-19, even though he referred to this fact in public as a “conspiracy theory.”

Earlier this week, House Republicans on the subcommittee investigating the origin of the Covid-19 virus released a trove of new documents related to their investigation. Some of the documents exposed the conversations of the scientists behind an influential paper claiming that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.”

The highly controversial paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, and was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

In a February 1, 2020 email to colleagues, Fauci acknowledged that scientists were working on gain-of-function experiments at Wuhan University. Fauci sent the email following a task force phone call with British biomedical scientist Jeremy Farrar, then-NIH Director Francis Collins and “several highly credible doctors,” like Dr. Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, who believed the virus sprung from a lab.

“They were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted,” Fauci wrote.

“The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”
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Dishonesty is not science.  I think the scientist involved in this experiment knew it was dangerous and did not want to take responsibly for the mistakes that unleashed the pandemic.