Dr Fauci: More Likely COVID Was a Natural Occurrence than Lab Leak
US death rate still too high, former presidential adviser adds
Although not definitive, it's more likely that the COVID-19 pandemic began from animal-to-human transit rather than a leak from a lab in China.
That's the assessment by Dr Anthony Fauci, a celebrated public health expert who spent decades leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease before advising Donald Trump and then President Biden on the response to COVID.
The United States has recorded more than 100 million cases of COVID infection since the outbreak began more than three years ago, and seen more than 1 million deaths from the disease.
Dr Fauci, who retired from government service at the end of last year, has become a boogyman among those on the political right because of his clashes with Trump, who was given to expounding wild and dangerous theories about the disease.
Among those theories on the right is that COVID began as a bioweapon in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“Well, first of all, we don't know. And I think that's where a lot of the accusations and confusion about who says what. We don't know the definitive answer to that,” Fauci said Thursday. “Obviously, there are two possibilities that are being entertained, and I think we need to keep a completely open mind until we have definitive proof. However, having said that, if you look at the information, because something might be possible, one or the other that doesn't mean one is more probable than the other.
“And if you look historically, as well as information that has recently been published by a considerably large group of highly respected international evolutionary virologists, although it isn't definitive, they published in the peer reviewed literature — when you look at epidemiological, viral, logical and geospatial information from Wuhan — they feel and have published this, that it is more likely, not definitive, but more likely, that it's a natural occurrence from an animal reservoir to a human,” Fauci added. “Having said that, since it isn't definitive, all of us must keep a completely open mind that it could be one or the other.”
Meanwhile, the United States continues to experience more losses from COVID-19 — even at this late date — than it should, Fauci said, in an on-camera appearance on the MSNBC program, Morning Joe, speaking with co-host Joe Scarborough.
“Well, we still have an issue that we’re having more deaths than many of us in the public health sector feel are acceptable,” Dr Fauci said. “But if you compare, Joe, with where we were a year, a year and a half ago, we’re much better.
“Remember, we were having about 800,00 to 900,000 infections a day and about 3,000 to 4,000 deaths per day. We’re much further down than that right now. We’re doing comparatively speaking, much better,” he said. “But we can do better than we’re doing. We’ve got to get that death rate, which is around 400 or so sometimes as high as 500, sometimes down to 300 per day, we’ve really got to do better than that.
“I mean, if you look at the relative percentage of people who are updated on their boosters, we have less than 20 percent of the eligible people have received that updated BA.4 or 5 boosts. So we got to do better than that, even though we’re doing much better than we were,” Fauci added.
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