On Thursday, former US President Donald Trump said that he is vindicated of his earlier pronouncement about the Coronavirus: ‘China Virus had come from a Wuhan Lab’. He also slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci after his released emails pointed out that he was aware of research on the virus being done in the Chinese laboratory and that he had rejected the lab origin theory despite being made by several people.

“It is for everyone to see. Even the so-called enemy are grudgingly accepting and beginning to say that President Trump was right about the China Virus coming from Wuhan Lab,” said the former US President Donald Trump.

In his characteristic combative tone against China, Trump asked for imposing a fine on China for the death and the destruction they have caused due to this ‘lab leak’. “The correspondence between Dr Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay USD 10 trillion to America, and the world, for the death and destruction they have caused!” said Trump.

“There are a lot of questions that must be answered by Dr. Fauci. The funding of Wuhan by the U.S. was foolishly started by the Obama Administration in 2014 but ended under the Trump Administration. When I heard about it, I said ‘no way.’ What did Dr. Fauci know about ‘gain of function’ research, and when did he know it?,” Trump said in a statement sent via email on Thursday.

Trump said that he is glad he didn’t always take the advice of Fauci, who was a member of his administration’s coronavirus task force.

“After seeing the emails, our Country is fortunate I didn’t do what Dr. Fauci wanted me to do. For instance, I closed our Borders to China very early despite his not wanting them closed. The Democrats and the Fake News Media even called me a ‘xenophobe.’ In the end, we saw this was a life-saving decision, and likewise with closing our borders to Europe, specifically to certain heavily infected countries,” Trump said.

The former president also revealed how Dr Fauci had been changing his opinions radically, like his views on wearing masks. “Also, Dr. Fauci was totally against masks when even I thought they would at least be helpful. He then changed his mind completely and became a radical masker!,” he said.

Trump’s proclamations come in the wake of the explosive revelation made in Dr Anthony Fauci’s private emails that were released to the press on the ongoing debate over coronavirus coming from Wuhan Lab. The emails revealed that during the early days of pandemic in the United States, Dr Fauci and his colleague were serious considering the possibility that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

However, soon after the emails were leaked, Dr Fauci tried to play down the consideration of the coronavirus being man-made, saying that he still finds it unlikely that a Wuhan laboratory released the virus. “I don’t remember what’s in that redacted [email], but the idea I think is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people,” he said. “I think that’s a bit far out.”

Former US President Donald Trump was one of the earliest proponents of the lab-leak theory

The claim that the coronavirus might be synthetic and a result of a lab experiment gone awry gained traction after then US President Donald Trump threw his weight behind the theory that the virus was manufactured by the Chinese Communist Party in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After trump’s endorsement, several experts and analysts alleged that the possibility of the virus emanating from the laboratory cannot be discounted, given that Wuhan Institute of Virology was known for carrying out such “risky” experiments.

However, a large section of experts had also dismissed the notion of the virus being artificially created, arguing that there was no evidence to support the claim and it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus was manufactured in a laboratory.

But in recent days, amidst criticism of inconclusive international inquiry into the origins of the virus and new reports of COVID-related illness emerging in the region weeks before it was officially identified, the belief that the virus may have indeed originated from a laboratory has gained renewed momentum.

Dr Fauci was informed in early 2020 that ‘the virus looks engineered’

The email leaks of Dr Fauci revealed that he was informed about the synthetic nature of the virus in early 2020. On June 1 (local time), Buzzfeed revealed that in the e-mails obtained through Freedom of Information Act request, Dr Anthony Fauci demanded information on gain-of-function experiments from the underlings.

In the academic paper attached to the e-mail titled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence,” there was information on researchers in the United States and China were manipulating viruses to understand their shift from animals to humans.

The abstract of the paper states, “Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin-converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells, and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”

References:

OpIndia