On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service

by Anthony Fauci

As for the lab leak hypothesis, the most commonly discussed scenario is that Chinese scientists were working on viruses from the wild that accidentally infected one of them and then spread outside the lab to cause the COVID pandemic. We in the United States cannot account for all the research that takes place in Wuhan or in the rest of China. That is why, as I have often stated publicly, we must keep an open mind to the origin of COVID, as I do. Keeping an open mind about both possibilities does not mean that one cannot have an opinion. Possibility does not necessarily mean equal probability. Although U.S. intelligence agencies are not uniform in their opinion about COVID’s origin, the majority favor a natural occurrence. Importantly, experienced evolutionary virologists throughout the world, while acknowledging the lack of definitive proof, have published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature their belief, based on geospatial information from the Huanan wet market in Wuhan as well as on epidemiological and virological data, that the virus emerged as a natural spillover from infected animals brought illegally into the market.