EXCERPT:
FAUCI: "Well, it’s not that unusual. You know, the first Covid, remember, the SARS-CoV-1, it wasn't Covid then, it was called SARS-CoV-1, it took a while for us to nail down completely and unequivocally that in 2022, when we had that outbreak, it took us a while of a few years to figure out that it was a bat to a civic cat, which people take into the markets and then into humans. So it’s not that unusual to not know right now. The problem we have is that because of the tension between China and the United States right now, we don’t have the opportunity to go and do the kind of surveillance with animals there, do serious surveillance to find out was it the same sort of thing, which many of the evolutionary virologists in the peer-reviewed papers that I had mentioned, that you just referred to, feel strongly that it very, very likely was that. But we haven’t nailed it down. It would be so much better if we had open transparency and communication, which is really a problem because there’s a great deal of hostility now between China and the United States."