Lab Leak Is Not a Conspiracy Theory, Anthony Fauci Concedes

Former White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci doesn't believe the lab leak explanation of COVID-19's origins is a conspiracy theory. He admitted as much during a closed-door grilling session before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday. Legislators did not release a transcript of his testimony, but Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), the chairman of the subcommittee, published some highlights on X (formerly Twitter).

In recent months, Fauci has denied he ever categorically rejected the possibility that COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But he faces very serious allegations that he deterred scientific experts from considering it. At issue is "The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2," a paper that appeared in Nature Medicine, a scientific journal, in March 2020 at the very start of the global pandemic. Fauci—who was then head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and Francis Collins—then director of the National Institutes of Health—participated in a conference call with the authors, whose initial openness to a lab leak explanation changed significantly prior to publication. The paper ultimately ruled out a lab leak as not just "unlikely"—the phrasing used in an early draft of the paper—but "improbable."