Emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci was warned in January 2020 that COVID-19 had “unusual features” and that it “looks engineered,” before vehemently denying that possibility on numerous occasions.
On January 31st, 2020, Kristian G. Andersen, a top scientist who was researching COVID-19, said in an email to Fauci, “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 to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.”
Andresen added, “We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Scientist Kristian Anderson told Fauci SARS-CoV-2 has “unusual features” that “potentially look engineered”.
Not long after this email, the scientists authored a piece insisting the virus was natural and Fauci said the same publicly. This is a massive cover-up.
(Buzzfeed FOIA) pic.twitter.com/BD3OUzgDzR
— Sharri Markson (@SharriMarkson) June 2, 2021
Soon after this warning to Fauci, he said in a press conference that COVID-19 was “totally consistent” with expected natural evolution, and he denied the possibility that the virus could have unnatural origins.
“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human,” Fauci said during a press conference.
The next day, Peter Daszak, a zoologist who had previously pushed the United States to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology, sent an email to Fauci thanking him for denying the possibility of the outbreak originating from a lab leak.
“I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote to Fauci on April 18, 2020.
In an interview with PolitiFact’s Katie Sanders a year later, Fauci finally admitted that he is “not convinced” that COVID-19 developed naturally.
“There’s a lot of cloudiness around the origins of COVID-19 still, so I wanted to ask, are you still confident that it developed naturally?” Sanders asked Fauci.
“No actually,” Fauci responded. “I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened.”
