Fauci on Email Calling Lab Leak Theory 'Shiny Object': People Were 'Thinking out Loud' and Ended up Thinking 'It's a Natural Occurrence'

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed an email where he referred to the lab leak theory as a “shiny object” by saying that you can’t “take a group of emails when people are considering and thinking out loud and you stop there and don’t look at the weeks of careful examination by those same people that wrote the emails” who ended up believing “it’s a natural occurrence.”

Host Bret Baier asked, [relevant exchange begins around 9:45] “You’ve said that you didn’t believe that it came from a lab leak in Wuhan. Do you refute the accuracy of any of these emails that came out from the Oversight Committee showing top virologists warning you that the virus pointed to gain of function research and a lab leak?”

Fauci answered, “Yeah — but, no, actually, but what we did, we called a group of highly rated and competent virologists to actually look at that feasibility. They looked at the virus and they said, you know, we’ve really got to look at this more closely and I invite you to look and ask any one of those virologists who were there and when they finally looked at it carefully they said, you know, upon relooking at this carefully now, we think it’s more likely that it was a natural evolution.”

Later, after Fauci said one must keep an open mind, Baier said, “When you read those emails, it does not sound like you have an open mind, when you read the email from Kristian Andersen who says, ‘The unusual features of the virus make up a real[ly] small part of the genome’ and ‘one has to look really closely at [all] the sequences to see that some of the features [(potentially)] look engineered.’ And you say, this is a ‘shiny object’ and it ‘will go away’ it does not sound like you’re open-minded to it.”

Fauci responded, “Bret, I know you’re a good person. I’ve known you a long time. If you take a group of emails when people are considering and thinking out loud and you stop there and don’t look at the weeks of careful examination by those same people that wrote the emails and then say, you know, now that we’ve looked at it, in the published, peer-reviewed literature, they explain very clearly why they think it’s a natural occurrence.”

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