Wednesday, May. 19, 2021
Did Dr. Anthony Fauci’s project manager confess to creating COVID-19?
The claim is based on a months-old interview with Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental health organization that has received funding from the National Institutes of Health. The video that purportedly includes his admission only shows Daszak talking about coronavirus research; he says nothing about creating SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Daszak's interview was with Vincent Racaniello, a podcaster and professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University.
Lead Stories asked Racaniello about the video's claim. In an email Racaniello wrote of Daszak: "He didn't confess to any such thing. These experiments are needed to examine the pandemic potential of viruses that circulate in bats."
Although the possibility that COVID-19 came from a lab cannot be ruled out, experts have independently concluded that the preponderance of evidence indicates it mutated naturally from animals to humans.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
- World Health Organization WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2: China Part
- Nature The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
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Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Lead Stories is a fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. It scouts for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. It actively monitors the fake-news ecosystem and doesn’t wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story.
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