- GATEWAY PUNDIT - Jim Hoft - MAR 13, 2023 -
Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed on Saturday that if a coronavirus lab leak is defined as an infected person who was infected in the wild, brought into a lab, studied there, and then came out of the lab, then it could still be considered a “natural occurrence.”
Fauci joined CNN’s Jim Acosta to discuss and downplay the “lab leak theory,” the theory that the spread of the Covid-19 virus was caused by experiments performed in the Wuhan laboratory.
“A lab leak could be that someone was out in the wild, maybe looking for different types of viruses in bats, got infected, went into a lab, and was being studied in a lab, and then came out of the lab. But if that’s the definition of lab leak, then that’s still a natural occurrence,” Fauci said.
Another possibility, according to Fauci, is that the virus got out of a lab by accident after it was taken from the environment.
“The other possibility is someone takes a virus from the environment that doesn’t actually spread very well in humans and manipulates it a bit, and accidentally it escapes or accidentally infects someone, and then you get an outbreak. Those are the possibilities when you’re talking about lab leaks,” he continued.
Fauci added that there have been no laboratory leaks that resulted in global pandemics.
“There are no lab leaks that have led to pandemics, so there have been accidents in the lab. That happens intermittently. We’ve had experiences with that in modern times, recently, but there has never been a situation where a virus escaped from a lab that’s a brand-new virus that no one has ever seen before that led to a pandemic. That has not happened,” he said.