Scott Gottlieb Defends Fauci Over Email Release: Wuhan Lab Leak a National Security Issue, Not a Scientific One

Dr. Scott Gottlieb defended Dr. Anthony Fauci amid conservative criticism that the nation’s top immunologist was not forthcoming with the theory that the Covid-19 may have come from a Wuhan lab leak and instead was born from some natural evolution.

Gottlieb is the former FDA Director under the Trump administration, a vocal and largely apolitical media figure on the coronavirus. He spoke about Fauci with John Dickerson during a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation. 

Fauci has been victim to remarkably personal attacks on his scientific bona fides following an FOIA release of roughly 10,000 work emails of his that were obtained by both Buzzfeed News and The Washington Post. Conservative media has portrayed some emails as a “smoking gun” that Fauci somehow covered up the theory that the potentially deadly pathogen came from a lab and not a wet market as he has insisted, which Fauci has long claimed as its most likely origins.

Dickerson asked his guest what he made of the released emails to which he replied “I didn’t think there was anything remarkable in those e-mails, and I certainly don’t think there was anything that Tony said that expressed any ill-intent, and nothing that was new.”

“Some of the discussions that went on the e-mails that evidences a larger issue, which is that, early on, the e-mail that is being focused on as the so-called ‘the smoking gun,’ if you will, is an e-mail that Tony received from some really good scientists suggesting that they felt this could have been an engineered pathogen early on,” Gottlieb opened. “They were basing that assessment on their analysis of the sequence strain of the virus, so they were virologists looking at the virus itself. It was reasonable to draw conclusions based on an evaluation of the sequence because that was largely the best piece of information we had.”

“As time evolved, and as more virologists looked more carefully at this, the judgment of the scientific community is actually nothing that remarkable about this virus, all of the genetic diversity seen in the virus could have been derived from nature.

“So their initial analysis was based on the analysis of the sequence, their current analysis is also based on the analysis of the sequence and what is lost here is a broader mosaic here. We have other information now that fits into this picture the science is one piece of information, but there is a lot of other information that points in the direction that this could have come out of a lab, that we need to have a broader view about the potential risk that this was a lab leak.”

Dickerson followed by simplifying Gottlieb’s explainer into “two baskets of information,” which can loosely be defined as the scientific approach in looking at the pathogen’s origins and the other is the political approach.

Gottlieb replied by explaining how he was told at that time, back in spring of 2020, that Dr. Fauci had “gone over to a meeting of world health leaders in Europe and actually briefed them the information that they were looking at, this could have been a potential lab leak, that this strain looked unusual.”

Viewers of Monday’s Fox & Friends saw the above sound bite played a number of times to suggest that Fauci was aware of a lab leak and somehow was opaque in sharing the information. But it’s misleading to have only played that portion without the broader context.

The broader issue is we look at these things through the lens of science, and not necessarily through the lens of national security,” Gottlieb explained. “A scientific mindset looks at the virus and the virus’ behavior and draws a conclusion. a national security assessment looks at that and then looks at the behavior of the Chinese government, the behavior of the lab, other evidence around the lab, including the infections we now know took place, and that changes the overall assessment.”

It is not unfair to watch the interview and conclude that Dr. Gottlieb believes that Fauci was simply considering evidence of the virus’s origins with a reasonable, fact-based scientific approach, and the conclusion of how the Chinese government was handling the possibility of the lab leak was a failure of the National Security apparatus under the Trump administration instead.

Watch above via CBS.

Watch above via CBS.