Dr. Anthony Fauci wants to review the medical records of nine people in China whose illnesses might help determine the origins of the coronavirus, he said.
Fauci called on China to release the records following heightened public scrutiny of the theory that rather than originating in nature, the coronavirus might have been engineered by scientists and leaked from a Wuhan, China, laboratory.
“I would like to see the medical records of the three people who are reported to have got sick in 2019,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser, said. “Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with?”
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Fauci was referring to the cases of three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were reportedly hospitalized in November 2019 after falling ill.
Fauci also expressed interest in the records of six miners who fell ill after they went into a mine to clean bat excrement. Three of the miners ultimately died.
“The same with the miners who got ill years ago. … What do the medical records of those people say?” Fauci said. “Was there [a] virus in those people? What was it? It is entirely conceivable that the origins of Sars-Cov-2 was in that cave and either started spreading naturally or went through the lab.”
Fauci, who previously dismissed the Wuhan lab leak theory, said authorities should continue to look into the virus’s origins.
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“Certainly, the people who’ve investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could’ve been something else, and we need to find that out,” he said on May 11.
Some Republicans, including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, began suggesting the possibility of the lab leak theory as early as April 2020.
