National Institutes of Health director and White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci recently spoke out about a teleconference meeting with the world's top scientists in February 2020, just when the COVID outbreak would develop into a deadly pandemic. The secret meeting would set the stage for how scientists approached discussing COVID in public. Dr. Fauci admitted, "I remember it very well."
"We decided on the call [that] the situation really needed to be looked into carefully," Dr. Fauci told USA Today. The call was held on February 1, 2020 and "played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists" who would later go on to publish papers and public statements that veered off the Wuhan lab leak theory despite early opinions for it.
Now that the Wuhan lab leak theory is gaining credibility and being taken seriously by governments and investigative bodies, it's important to note what really took place during that secret meeting. The "urgent" meeting that was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon, took place just two days after a traveler from Wuhan came to Washington state and was recorded as the first COVID case in the U.S.
Before the secret meeting on February 1, however, the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California' expert in infectious disease genomics Kristian Andersen called and emailed Dr. Fauci to inform him that the genetic structure of COVID appeared to look like it was indeed engineered in a laboratory.
In an email to Dr. Fauci, which was reported on by BuzzFeed News, Anderson told Fauci in an email on January 31, 2020, "The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (
Anderson added that he, along with several other scientists Dr. Fauci knew, "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory." But because more research needed to be done, Andersen said that "those opinions could still change."
And change it did. Anderson's initial theory that COVID did not have a zoonotic origin had changed "dramatically" in just three days, despite Dr. Fauci saying that the secret meeting was a "very productive back-and-forth conversation where some on the call felt it could possibly be an engineered virus," while others believed the evidence "heavily weighted" to the coronavirus having a zoonotic origin.
According to The Blaze, Anderson switched sides as quickly as three days. He told the scientists that were part of the secret meeting that "the data conclusively show" that COVID was not engineered. He made those remarks as feedback to scientists who were going to release official advice to the U.S. government on COVID.
"The main crackpot theories going around at the moment relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case," Anderson argued. He, together with several other scientists later released a report on the COVID origins that quashed the Wuhan lab leak, saying that their research "clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
The report, published in the Nature journal, would soon become the widely influential study that most scientists referred to when talking about COVID origins, especially when it shut down the Wuhan lab leak theory with its declaration: "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
It's worth noting, however, that recently, some scientists admitted to downplaying the Wuhan lab leak theory at the start of the pandemic simply because President Donald Trump pushed for it, and that mainstream media chose to dismiss the theory as well because Republicans like Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were saying it as well.
Recent evidence, however, seems to indicate that Trump, Pompeo and others who believed in the same theory were correct..
