Anthony Fauci, the top expert on infectious disease in the United States, rejected on Friday a conspiracy theory claiming that the novel coronavirus was made in a lab.
“A group of highly-qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences in bats as they evolve,” Fauci said during a press briefing at the White House.
“The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
The remarks of Fauci, directer of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, came as some U.S. politicians and media outlets are pushing the conspiracy theory that the virus escaped from a Chinese lab despite lack of hard evidence.
In a study published in Nature Medicine in March, researchers said “they do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
The study, led by Kristian Andersen, a computational biologist at Scripps Research in California, compared the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, to the six other coronaviruses known to infect humans. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the study said.
