‘Give Me a Break!’ Fauci Dismisses ‘Far-Fetched’ Theory China ‘Deliberately Engineered’ Covid as a Bioweapon

Dr. Anthony Fauci fielded multiple questions about his newly-released emails during a lengthy interview with CNN’s John Berman.

As Berman spoke to Fauci about international efforts to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the CNN host shifted gears to note that Buzzfeed has released thousands of pages from Fauci’s emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Berman began by focusing on an email where Fauci was thanked by the head of EcoHealth Alliance for his assessment that the coronavirus emerged naturally as opposed to being released from a laboratory.

EcoHealth Alliance has been under the public microscope in recent days due to questions about their collaborations with the Wuhan Institute of Virology after receiving grant funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. As such, Berman asked Fauci for his response to critics who say he is “too cozy of a relationship with the people behind the Wuhan lab research.”

“That’s nonsense. I don’t even see how they get that from that email,” Fauci said. He continued by doubling down on his view that the coronavirus pandemic most likely came from a cross-species jump from animals to humans, but “I’m keeping an open mind that it might be a lab leak.”

I keep an absolutely open mind that if there may be other origins of that, there may be another reason, it could have been a lab leak. I believe, if you look historically what happens in the animal/human interface that, in fact, the more likelihood is that you’re dealing with a jump of species. But I keep an open mind all the time, and that’s the reason why I have been public that we should continue to look for the origin.

From there, Berman turned to an email exchange between Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, who warned that “conspiracy theories gain momentum.” Much of the email was redacted, so when Berman asked what he could remember from that, Fauci offered a snarky but chuckling retort.

“They only took about 10,000 emails from me. Of course, I remember. I remember all 10,000 of them,” he said. “Give me a break.”

Fauci refocused after that by offering his doubt that the Chinese “deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people.”

“I think that’s a bit far out,” he said.

Watch above, via CNN.