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.
News of the meeting is particularly noteworthy because the theory that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has gained significant traction in recent weeks. The theory was previously dismissed as a conspiracy theory despite a lack of evidence disproving the possibility.
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.
"The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered," Andersen wrote in an email prior to the teleconference, adding that he and other scientists "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
Andersen's email was one of more than 3,000 Fauci's work-related emails obtained by BuzzFeed News in early June.
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