(TheRedAlertNews.com) – Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former White House Chief Medical Advisor, still maintains that a “natural occurrence” may have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the end of December, Fauci officially retired from his White House post and his job as the Director of the National Institute on Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
He led the NIAID, a National Institutes of Health body, for 38 years and retired as the highest-paid federal government employee.
Fauci, who had the most significant say over the US government’s pandemic policies, has been attacked by Republican critics for his alleged role in funding gain of function research with bat coronavirus in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Recently, the US Energy Department became the second federal agency after the FBI to conclude that COVID-19 was likely leaked from the Chinese lab in Wuhan.
In a new CNN interview, a retired Fauci insisted he still had a “completely open mind” about the pandemic virus’s origin but claimed that even a lab leak could be deemed a “natural occurrence.”
“A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild, maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab and was being studied in the lab, and then came out of the lab,” Fauci told anchor Jim Acosta.
“But if that’s the definition of a lab leak, Jim, then that’s still a natural occurrence,” the former NIAID chief said, as cited by The New York Post.
He added a lab leak might have happened after the manipulated natural virus accidentally infected someone in the research facility.
Fauci also pointed out that no US government agency tasked with investigating COVID-19’s origins by President Joe Biden in 2021 had found evidence of nefarious activity in China’s Wuhan.
“All of the intelligence agencies agree unanimously that this was not engineered. Namely, they didn’t deliberately do this to make a bioweapon,” the former White House advisor argued.
The report notes Fauci has rejected claims his former organization funded the gain of function research on coronaviruses in China’s Wuhan, thus making them deadlier or more contagious.
He also “angrily fired back” when asked about billionaire Elon Musk’s declaration in December that he should face criminal charges.
“I mean, prosecute me for what? What are, what are they talking about? I mean, I wish I could figure out what the heck they were talking about. I think they’re just going off the deep end,” Fauci said.
“It doesn’t make any sense to say something like that, and it actually is irresponsible,” he added.
The former top government official complained his family still received death threats because of “misinformation, disinformation and outright lies” about how he handled the coronavirus pandemic.
“That’s the part of it that is really unfortunate. The rest of it is just insanity, the things they’re saying. But it does have a negative effect when people take it seriously and take it out on you and your family,” Fauci said.
He vowed to cooperate with a GOP-led House Oversight Committee probe into COVID-19 origins and the US government’s pandemic response.
Fauci maintains COVID outbreak could be ‘natural occurrence,’ says critics suffer from ‘insanity’ https://t.co/pM1sheICHO pic.twitter.com/kroTO7Jy8y
— New York Post (@nypost) March 12, 2023
