On Monday, just one day after a federal agency released a bombshell report admitting that the Chinese Coronavirus most likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Anthony Fauci was seen leaving his home, but refused to comment on the new report.
The New York Post reports that the 82-year-old Fauci was spotted by reporters outside his home, but did not offer any comment after the United States Department of Energy (DOE) released its report on Sunday confirming that the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19 was not by natural formation, but instead the result of experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that subsequently escaped containment.
Fauci, who finally retired from the federal government last year after over 50 years, has long been one of the biggest skeptics of the “lab leak” theory, repeatedly insisting that the virus most likely formed naturally in an open-air “wet market” near Wuhan. The DOE report now aligns with similar assessments by the FBI and the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
But Fauci, despite overwhelming evidence pointing to the lab leak as the most likely origin story, continued to argue that the coronavirus strain that became a global pandemic somehow passed naturally from animals to humans. He described the lab leak hypothesis as “a shiny object that will go away” in an email he wrote back in April of 2020.
In February of 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning, Fauci was part of a conference call with other scientists discussing COVID-19. Several participants of the call warned that the virus most likely came from the WIV, but Fauci apparently never passed this information along to other government agencies.
Fauci has subsequently come under heavy scrutiny from Republicans, particularly Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who have noted that Fauci’s refusal to accept the lab leak theory may be due to his own agency having repeatedly funded “gain-of-function” research at the WIV and elsewhere around the world, thus making Fauci and NIAID indirectly responsible for the coronavirus pandemic.