Dr. Fauci: Email about lab covid leak is being misinterpreted

Fauci doubts about the origins of the covid-19 6:08

(CNN) -

In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that an email he received last year from a US-based EcoHealth Alliance executive has been misinterpreted and offered a hint of regret for an email from February 2020 minimizing the need to wear a mask.

Earlier this week, outlets such as CNN, BuzzFeed News and

The Washington Post

obtained thousands of emails Fauci sent and received since the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases became a household name earlier in the year. past.

In an email sent to Fauci last April, an executive from the EcoHealth Alliance, the global nonprofit organization that helped fund some research at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, thanked Fauci for publicly stating that the scientific evidence endorses a natural origin of the coronavirus and not a laboratory leak.

(The origins of the virus remain unclear.)

• China responds to Biden's investigation into the origin of COVID-19 in a laboratory ... by asking to investigate a laboratory in the United States.

"There are some of your critics who say that this shows you have an overly welcoming relationship with the people behind the Wuhan lab research," CNN's John Berman told Fauci on New Day.

"What do you say to that?"

"That's nonsense," Fauci replied.

"I don't even see how they get that out of that email."

Fauci then emphasized that the email was sent to him, noting that the origins of the coronavirus are still uncertain.

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I've always said, and I'll tell you today, John, that I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human, but I keep an absolutely open mind that if there may be other origins of that, there may be another reason, it could have been a lab leak, ”Fauci told Berman. “I think if you look historically at what happens at the animal-human interface, in fact, you are most likely dealing with a species jump. But I keep an open mind all the time. And that is the reason why I have made public that we must continue looking for the origin.

“You can misinterpret it however you want: that email was from a person to me saying 'thank you' for whatever he thought I said, and I said that I think the most likely origin is a species jump.

I still think it is, while keeping an open mind that it could be a lab leak, ”Fauci said.

In another email sent to Fauci on April 16, the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, wrote "conspiracy theory gains momentum," a reference to the laboratory leak hypothesis.

But much of the email is edited, and Fauci said he did not remember its contents.

“They only took about 10,000 emails from me, of course I remember.

I remember 10,000 of them.

Please, ”he said.

“I don't remember what's in that edited thing, but I think the idea is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately designed something so that they could kill themselves and other people as well.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, John.

Berman also mentioned an email that Fauci sent on February 5, 2020 to Sylvia Burwell, a former secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, in which she did not recommend wearing a mask as she was traveling to a low-risk location.

The email was sent at a time before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic and before the CDC advised people to wear masks to protect themselves.

“A lot has happened since then.

If you had to go back and do it all over again, would you tell him something different?

Do you regret that? ”Berman asked Fauci.

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  What Fauci's emails reveal and what they don't

“Let's be real here: if you look at the scientific information as it accumulates, what is happening in January and February, what you know as fact, as data, that guides what you tell people and your policies.

If it happens in March, April, May, you accumulate much more information and modify and adjust your opinion and your recommendation based on current science and current data, ”Fauci told Berman.

“Of course, if we had known at the time that a substantial amount of transmission was in asymptomatic people.

If only we had known that the data shows that the masks outside of a hospital setting actually work when we didn't know then.

If we had realized all those things back then, of course, "he said.

"You're asking the question of 'would you have done something different if you had known what you know now?'

Of course people would have done that.

That is so obvious.

CNN's Eric Levenson contributed to this report.

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