COVID Shutdowns Should Be ‘Temporary,’ Chinese Lockdowns ‘Draconian,’ Lab Leak ‘Possible’: Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in Washington on Nov. 22, 2022. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Anthony Fauci, the outgoing medical adviser for President Joe Biden, criticized China’s handling of COVID-related shutdowns in recent interviews, and said that the lab leak theory could be “possible” but “essentially molecularly impossible.”

Fauci will step down next month as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and as the principal medical adviser to the president. Fauci started off his Sunday interview with NBC by criticizing China’s approach to handling the coronavirus situation, and said, “Well, their approach has been very, very severe and rather draconian in the kinds of shutdowns without a seeming purpose.” He talked about how the regime was running quarantine operations without an “end game” that “really doesn’t make public health sense.”

“So remember we were talking about flattening the curve and the social distancing and restrictions and shutdown, which was never really complete, is done for a temporary period of time for the purpose of regrouping, getting more personal protective equipment, getting people vaccinated. It seems that in China it was just a very, very strict extraordinary lockdown where you lock people in the house but without any seemingly endgame to it.”

Fauci also said he was “baffled” that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has only approved domestic vaccines within its borders and which were “not particularly effective at all compared to any of a number of the vaccines that were available.”

Regarding the lab leak theory that proposes, with substantial evidence, that SARS-Cov-2 was the result of research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and leaked outside its protective enclosure, Fauci said, “I have a totally open mind about that,” but a “preponderance of evidence” and “peer-reviewed papers” points to this “being a natural occurrence of a jumping of a virus from a bat to an animal species to human.”

Fauci then said that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over, and replied in the positive when asked whether the country was “ready for another pandemic?”

Regarding another surge, Fauci said, “We have an updated vaccine booster that we want to do, but the uptake of that is, you know, less than 15 percent. It’s somewhere between 11 percent and 15 percent. We’ve got to do better than that.”

Don’t Blame Scientists

In a Tuesday interview with CNN, Fauci said the scientific community is constantly learning from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we knew [about COVID-19] in January was very different from what we knew at the end of January, the beginning of February, and then very different from March,” Fauci said.

“Hopefully, we could have been more on top of appreciating the dynamic nature of how things change, thinking that it wasn’t aerosol spread in the beginning, and then you find out it is aerosol spread.”

Fauci said that this was not due to scientists “flip-flopping,” but that “the data are evolving in a very dynamic way.”

Regarding the Republican lawmakers’ claim that NIAID funded the SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, Fauci repeated that it was impossible for viruses that the agency funded to evolve into SARS-CoV-2.

“But if you look at the viruses that the NIH funded—and it was a very small grant, $120,000, $130,000 a year of granting—to study bat viruses in a surveillance way to see what’s out there … If you look at those viruses and you look at what was done with the viruses, it would be essentially molecularly impossible for those viruses to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they are so evolutionarily different.”

He also said, “It’s possible that there was a lab leak.”

China as Fauci’s Inspiration

During a Nov. 23 deposition, Fauci was forced to answer questions under oath from a federal judge who’s going to decide whether the government should be blocked from pressuring Big Tech firms into censoring posts and users.

In the seven-hour long deposition, Fauci claimed he could not recall many actions he took during the pandemic, but said that his decision to advocate for extreme lockdowns came from China following a visit to the country by Dr. Clifford Lane, a deputy director at the NIAID.

Lane reported China appeared to be controlling the COVID-19 virus through harsh lockdowns, and Fauci soon decided the United States needed to emulate China, at least to an extent, according to Jenin Younes, one of the lawyers present for the deposition.

“This is what we had to do. There were freezer trucks in New York full of bodies,” Fauci said, Younes told The Epoch Times.

“The question of human rights didn’t factor in” to Fauci’s mindset, according to Younes, a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance who is representing some of the plaintiffs in the case.

Protests against the Chinese communist regime for its harsh COVID-19 lockdowns and other severe measures have recently rocked the nation.

The protests were triggered by the horrific deaths of at least 10 people in Urumqi, Xinjiang, who died due to an apartment fire. First responders were unable to reach the scene on time due to prevailing COVID-19 blockades and lockouts throughout the residential compound. After the video of the incident went viral on Chinese social media, it sparked outrage.

On Sunday, protests erupted in Shanghai once more, with people demanding an end to PCR tests and insisting on their right to basic freedoms.

In videos from places like Guangzhou, Nanjing, and others, protestors were seen fighting against the police and dismantling barricades. In Beijing, demonstrations were reportedly held at 50 universities.

At Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s alma mater Tsinghua University, around 2,000 students called for “freedom of speech” and demanded easing down of COVID-19 controls.

Zachary Stieber contributed to the report.