Dr. Anthony Fauci told world leaders in the spring of 2020 that the coronavirus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, According to the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, Scott Gottlieb.
U.S. researchers around that time still were considering whether the virus came from a lab break, and Fauci told the health leaders gathered that the newly identified strain of the coronavirus ‘looked unusual,’ according to Gottlieb.
The disclosure from the former FDA chief comes as an increasing number of mainstream scientists and media figures no longer are parroting the line from the Chinese Communist Party that the virus came from a bat.
Gottlieb says Fauci last year at least considered that COVID-19 could have come from a lab – but publicly stated that it occurred naturally.
Gottlieb, who served under President Donald Trump, said a former senior member of the Trump administration told him at the time of Fauci’s 2020 talk. Gottlieb said he’d recently reconfirmed with that person that Fauci had given the talk.
‘I think early on, when they looked at the strain, they had suspicions,’ Gottlieb recalled Sunday on CBS Face the Nation, speaking of U.S. scientists. ‘And it takes time to do that analysis, and that dispelled some of those suspicions,’ he added.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb said it was a mistake to only look at the virus from a scientific perspective: It also needs to be examined from a national security lens, he said.
‘A scientific mindset looks at the virus and the virus’ behavior and draws a conclusion,’ he said.
‘A national security assessment looks at that and then looks at the behavior of the Chinese government, the behavior of the lab, other evidence around the lab – including the infections we now know took place – and that changes the overall assessment,’ he said.
Fauci is now coming under fire for downplaying the theory the virus leaked from the lab in Wuhan in public while taking the opposite position behind closed door.
