By Hanna Park
(WASHINGTON) Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, called on China to release medical records of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the laboratory where several scientists reportedly became sick with COVID-19-like symptoms prior to the pandemic, the Financial Times reported.
“I would like to see the medical records of the three people who are reported to have got sick in 2019,” Fauci told the news outlet. “Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with?”
Fauci said the records could help resolve the controversy over the origins of the virus, particularly if it resulted from a laboratory leak.
Fauci also asked for the medical records of six miners that got sick after entering a bat cave in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2012, according to The Washington Post. The cave was reportedly the home of a coronavirus, which was collected and studied at the institute.
“It is entirely conceivable that the origins of Sars-Cov-2 were in that cave and either started spreading naturally or went through the lab,” Fauci added.
The theory that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab has gained traction in recent weeks after The Wall Street Journal reported last month that several scientists fell sick with flu-like symptoms in November 2019.
Earlier last month, President Joe Biden has ordered the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” to come up with a conclusion on the virus’s origins.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported that the community has “coalesced around two likely scenarios: either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident.”