Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

COVID-19 'not engineered as bio weapon', says Dr Anthony Fauci, as he hits back at his Republican critics

"The repeated claim that Fauci lied to Congress about ‘gain-of-function’ research
"The Wuhan Lab and the Gain-of-Function Disagreement" "

By Jason Dasey
Posted 12h ago


Dr Anthony Fauci says he believes that COVID-19 was "a natural occurrence" from animal to human.
(AP: Graeme Jennings)

Anthony Fauci, former chief medical adviser to the US president, says he has "an open mind" about the origins of COVID-19, but insists it was "not engineered as a bio weapon" by China or anybody else.

Key points:

* Dr Fauci was speaking on the third anniversary of coronavirus being declared a pandemic

* He says it's possible that COVID-19 leaked from a lab after an animal-to-human virus was being clinically studied

* He rejected claims from Republican politicians that he pushed a single narrative during the pandemic as part of a cover-up

Speaking on the third anniversary of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring coronavirus a pandemic, Dr Fauci said he agreed with many leading epidemiologists that COVID-19 was likely a "natural occurrence from animal to human".

"Evolutionary virologists … wrote two very important, well-written peer-reviewed pieces in Science magazine strongly suggesting that in fact it was a natural occurrence from an animal to a human," Dr Fauci told Jim Acosta on CNN.

"But [while they] strongly suggest it, it doesn't nail it down definitively and that's the reason I say to do this day I will keep a completely open mind as to what the original [cause] is."

[Insert: Of course unless the origin is of anything is known beyond dispute...
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171425978]

COVID-19 has caused almost 7 million deaths globally since was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019.

Dr Fauci, a key advisor on the US Coronavirus Task Force under then-president Donald Trump when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in March 2020, said any sinister origins of COVID-19 had effectively been ruled out after numerous investigations.

"One of the things that people maybe don't really appreciate is that all of the intelligence agencies agree unanimously that this was not engineered, namely they didn't deliberately do this to make a bio weapon," Dr Fauci said.

"Everybody agrees with that no matter what your prior thoughts were."


Former CDC director Robert Redfield says Dr Fauci sidelined him for an important phone call to discuss coronavirus
in 2020. (AP: Andrew Harnik)

[-----Insert: New Revelations Emerge on How Donald Trump Killed 400,000 (or More) Americans
‘Treat Me Nicely’: Trump’s Pandemic Response Was Somehow Worse Than We Thought
[...]It came after Nancy Messonnier, then the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, issued an early warning about the severity of the looming pandemic—something the White House was desperately trying to downplay. She was sidelined and later resigned.
[...] And worse: Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the White House COVID-19 task force coordinator, told the committee that Dr. Scott Atlas,
---
[Insert: H.H.S. backs Trump reelection, blocks C.D.C. science expertise - C.D.C. Testing Guidance Was Published Against Scientists’ Objections
[...] “The idea that someone at H.H.S. would write guidelines and have it posted under the C.D.C. banner is absolutely chilling,”
said Dr. Richard Besser, who served as acting director at the Centers for Disease Control in 2009.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=158371281
The staggering cost of the Scott Atlas debacle
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=159958570]
---
a radiologist (not an infectious disease specialist) who was advising Trump on COVID, leaned on the CDC to alter its guidelines on testing to recommend that only symptomatic people be tested.
[...] It’s also puzzling that the nation is not more focused on learning what went wrong during this horrific crisis. The work of the coronavirus subcommittee is not breathlessly monitored by the media. The material it just released did not make the front pages, as far as I can tell. And a search indicates the New York Times did not cover it. There is still much to learn about how Trump and his accomplices screwed up the government’s response to this once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) catastrophe. (Paging Jared Kushner.) It just doesn’t seem too high on the national to-do list.
P - Still, Clyburn pushes on. He has been trying to obtain testimony from Dr. Robert Redfield, the former CDC director. Redfield’s appearance before the committee was blocked last year by the Trump administration. On Friday, Clyburn sent him a letter to “renew” the committee’s request that he submit to an interview and hand over documents. In the letter, Clyburn noted, “The Trump Administration’s use of the pandemic to advance political goals manifested itself most acutely in its efforts to manipulate and undermine CDC’s scientific work.”
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169612314
-----end insert]

Dr Fauci, long considered his nation's top diseases expert, came under attack during a hearing in the House of Representatives in Washington last week. Republicans claimed he had promoted the view that an infected animal spread the virus to humans to deflect attention from US-sponsored research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

At the hearing, former Center for Diseases Control (CDC) director Robert Redfield accused Dr Fauci of freezing him out a high-level phone call among experts during the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 "because they wanted a single narrative and I obviously had a different point of view".

Dr Redfield suspected that coronavirus had leaked from a Chinese lab rather than being transmitted from bats in a Wuhan food market.

Dr Fauci rejected Dr Redfield's claims of bias against him as "completely untrue", adding that other people on the call had the opinion that COVID-19 might have been an engineered virus.


Dr Fauci (left) during a coronavirus briefing with then-president Donald Trump at the White House in 2020.
(AP: Patrick Semansky)

While he does not believe the virus was concocted artificially, Dr Fauci acknowledged that it was still possible that COVID had leaked from a lab as part of "a natural occurrence".

Three years into COVID pandemic
As much as we don't want it to be, COVID is still very much with us. But what have we learned that could help us accelerate a real and sustained exit, write Michael Toole and Brendan Crabb.
Read more > https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-10/covid-pandemic-what-we-need-to-focus-on-next/102077800

"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 a lab and then came out of the lab," Dr Fauci said.

-
"If that's the definition of a lab leak, then that is still a natural occurrence.
-

"The other possibility is that someone takes a virus from the environment that doesn't actually spread very well in humans then manipulates it a bit and accidentally it escapes and accidentally infects someone and you get an outbreak.

"[But] there are no lab leaks that have led to pandemics."

Dr Fauci, 82, who was accused by Mr Trump in 2020 of making "a lot of mistakes" in his handling of coronavirus, stepped down .. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-23/fauci-top-infectious-disease-expert-to-retire-in-december/101359612 .. from his role as chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden last December.

['OW, do you like that fluckin' mountain of projection. Straight from the filthy mouth of
America's 2nd worse virus since 2016. Trump is a disgusting, dirty, criminal fraud.]

He has long been the target of anti-vaxxers who blame him for the vaccine mandates imposed by some US states during the height of the COVID-19 outbreak.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-12/anthony-fauci-covid-19-bioweapon-pandemic-republicans-usa/102086412