Fauci pushes wet market hypothesis on COVID-19 origins

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Dr. Anthony Fauci pushed the hypothesis that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan wet market rather than a Chinese government lab, despite doubts cast on the market possibility by scientists, Republican lawmakers, and the Chinese CDC director.

Many scientists have concluded the Huanan Seafood Market may have been a super spreader event in late 2019 but that it’s not where COVID-19 began.

Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made his remarks on Face the Nation on CBS News during an interview with Margaret Brennan.

“What the Chinese did — I don’t have firsthand knowledge of that — but the people who were reporting it, who investigated, what they did is they cleaned out the markets as soon as it turned out that it was clear that there were clusters coming from the market. Which, you know, in typical fashion, I think trying to make sure that things don’t get pointed to them, they probably got rid of the animals that were the intermediary hosts there,” Fauci said. “And that’s the reason why it’s very important to continue to get the cooperation of the Chinese in allowing surveillance of the animals that ultimately go into the wet markets.”

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Brennan told him that “Beijing acknowledges now that they don’t think it originated in that market,” but Fauci disagreed.

“It may not have originated in the market, but it certainly could have. I mean, I don’t think that they admitted that it didn’t originate in the market. I think they’re saying they don’t know how it originated.”

Gao Fu, director of China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in May 2020 that he did not believe the Wuhan wet market is where COVID-19 began.

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Brennan argued that “the place of origin was not within the market itself.”

Fauci disagreed: “I don’t think you can say that. I think you could say we don’t know how and where it originated. There are wet markets in Wuhan that are ample opportunity for a virus to jump from an animal that gets brought in from all parts of China that are very closely related physically to bat enclaves and caves and come to the market.”

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Examiner that “no serious person believes SARS-CoV-2 first entered humans in mid-December 2019 at the Huanan Seafood Market.”

Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC under former President Donald Trump, said he believes the “most likely” origin for COVID-19 is a Wuhan lab escape. Trump deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said in January that “even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story.”

But evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey published a piece in Science last week arguing, “That most early symptomatic cases were linked to Huanan Market … provides strong evidence of a live-animal market origin of the pandemic” in December 2019. The New York Times wrote about Worobey’s article last week.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely originated from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan, while four other spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely has a natural origin.

ODNI’s report noted some scientists and Chinese public health officials “now view the market as a potential site of community spread rather than where the initial human infection may have occurred.”

The WHO-China joint study released in early 2021 noted that “no evidence of animal infections was found” at the wet market and that “more than 80,000 wildlife, livestock and poultry samples were collected from 31 provinces in China, and no positive result was identified” for COVID-19.

Fauci has been adamant NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, but earlier this year, NIH determined that EcoHealth Alliance, which it funds, violated its guidelines when doing risky bat coronavirus experiments in China.

EcoHealth founder Peter Daszak, who worked with Wuhan lab “bat lady” Shi Zhengli, was also part of the WHO-China team that dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as “extremely unlikely.”

Daszak, a wet market origin proponent, said in May that China swabbed 900 samples from the Wuhan wet market and said Shi went into Hubei province and looked at over 1,100 bat samples without finding COVID-19, and he admitted to 60 Minutes in March there was no direct evidence any animals at the wet market had been infected.

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House Foreign Affairs Republicans released an August report concluding COVID-19 most likely emerged from the Wuhan lab in September 2019.

“I believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak,” ranking member Rep. Michael McCaul said, arguing that “a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead to the WIV.”

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