ANTHONY Fauci finally acknowledged the "lab-made" Covid theory may have some weight as top Republicans call for him to be ousted after thousands of his emails were leaked.
The top doc spoke out on Thursday after being blasted bySenator Rand Paul and Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene when his correspondence came to light, while Candace Owens wants him "tried and imprisoned."
“I have always said, and will say today … I still believe the most likely origin is from an animal species to a human," he said on CNN.
"But 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."
More than 3,000 pages of Fauci's emails were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and published this week by Buzzfeed – but Fauci insisted that his they were "taken out of context."
Fauci dismissed "nonsense" reports about an email the EcoHealth Alliance president sent him, thanking Fauci for knocking the Covid "lab leak" theory last year.
The organization used its grant from the NIH to study coronaviruses in Chinese bats and sent the Wuhan lab nearly $600,000 over the course of five years starting in 2014.
“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," Fauci continued.
“That email — you can misconstrue it however you want — that email was from a person to me saying thank you for whatever it is he thought I said, and I said that I think the most likely origin is a jumping of species.
"I still do think it is at the same time as I’m keeping an open mind that it might be a lab leak."
But speaking to MSNBC’s “Deadline” on Wednesday evening, Fauci said he “can’t guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab” after thousands of his emails were published.
“It was just trying to get the right information, to try and get the right data. What they didn’t seem to understand, I guess that it is understandable that they didn’t understand it, is that science is a dynamic process," he said.
Other emails revealed that Fauci had been told about the laboratory theory, which he publicly downplayed, and dismissed a warning about China's Covid "cover-up" because it was "too long" for him to read.
On Wednesday, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke out in the wake of the email backlash after announcing the release of his pandemic playbook in November.
Speaking about the emails, he told NewsNation: “The only trouble is they are really ripe to be taken out of context.
"Someone can snip out a sentence in an email without showing the other emails and say, ‘based on an email from Dr. Fauci, he said such-and-such,' where you don’t really have the full context."
Emails show how Fauci, 80, was sent a lengthy message by physicist Erik Nilsen about his "suspicions" over China's true Covid death toll and warned of a "tsunami" of infections in the US.
Fauci apparently ignored the early warning message, writing it's "too long for me to read," in an email to his colleague Robert Eisinger.
During the NewsNation interview, he also addressed the US grant money given to the Wuhan laboratory in the early 2000s and insisted that Chinese scientists were not the Communist Party's military.
“We’re not talking about the Communist Chinese party. We’re not talking about the Chinese military. We’re talking about scientists that we’ve had relationships [with] for years,” Fauci said.
“The Wuhan lab is a very large lab, to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars — the grant that we’re talking about was $600,000 over five years," he said.
“I can’t guarantee everything that’s going on in the Wuhan lab, we can’t do that, but it is our obligation as scientists and public health individuals to study the animal-human interface."
However, Republicans haven't been quite so understanding, as Paul wrote “Told you” with eye emojis and the hashtag “#firefauci," while Owens went as far as to say Fauci should be jailed.
Likewise, Green, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) tweeted, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Rep Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and Rep. Dan Crenshaw have blasted the Fauci email scandal.
During his interview on “The Ingraham Angle," Paul referenced an email Fauci sent to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) deputy Hugh Auchincloss on February 1, 2020.
13“Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM,” Fauci wrote. “Keep your cell phone on," he wrote. "Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done.”
The journal Nature Medicine paper was co-authored by "batwoman" Dr. Shi Zhengli, a Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher, and titled: “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.”
Fauci also sent the paper to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak,.
“The experiments were performed before the gain of function pause [in October 2014] but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH," Auchincloss replied.
“Not sure what that means since Emily is sure that no Coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework. She will try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad."
"Stay tuned," Fauci replied – but Paul said, "the emails paint a disturbing picture."
"A disturbing picture of Dr Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding gain-of-function research and he knows it to this day and hasn’t admitted it," he said on Fox News.
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