Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently opened up about reports about where the novel coronavirus came from.
The 2019 lab theory
Fauci told The Financial Times that he hopes China will release the medical records of nine people who got sick at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November 2019.
- “I would like to see the medical records of the three people who are reported to have got sick in 2019. Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with?” Fauci said, according to Reuters.
The 2012 cave theory
Per Newsweek, Fauci, in the same interview, floated the idea that the novel coronavirus might have come from a cave where miners got sick in 2012. Three miners got sick from a coronavirus — it’s unclear if it was SARS-CoV-2 — after they visited a bat-filled cave in China in 2012. Fauci hinted to The Financial Times that it’s “entirely conceivable” the coronavirus came from that cave.
- “Was there (a) virus in those people?” he said, according to Newsweek. “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.”
Did COVID-19 start in a lab?
Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology got so sick in November 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID-19 that they were hospitalized, The Wall Street Journal reported.
- The researchers got sick “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
However, the World Health Organization and Chinese researchers said the virus likely transmitted from bats to humans through a third animal — but that third animal has never been identified.