Report: Dr. Fauci participated in 'secret meeting' with scientists about COVID-19 origins in Feb. 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, admitted this week that a meeting took place with prominent scientists last February to discuss the origins of COVID-19 outbreak in China.
Just days after that meeting, one scientist who previously voiced concerns that COVID-19's genome was unnatural, completely reversed their opinion, and any suggestion that COVID-19 did not naturally emerge was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
What are the details?
According to USA Today, that meeting, which took place on Feb. 1, 2020, "played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic."
The call was convened after Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, told Fauci he was concerned COVID-19 may have been artificially engineered.
Among those on the call included Fauci, Andersen, Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, "plus several other international experts on emerging infectious diseases and virology," USA Today reported.
Following the meeting, the group decided that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu should be looped into their conversation. What came from contact with the controversial WHO is not clear.
What happened after the meeting?
Just three days later, Andersen told scientists "the data conclusively show" that COVID-19 was not engineered, denouncing suggestions that COVID-19 did not emerge naturally.
Several weeks later, Andersen and other scientists released a report on the origins of COVID-19, explaining their work, "clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
That report, according to USA Today, was "hugely influential and is among the key reasons that any kind of lab-related hypothesis — involving either a natural or man-made virus — was dismissed by so many for so long."