Head of NIAID-Funded Galveston Lab Relayed Lab Leak Concerns to Head of Wuhan Institute at Onset of Pandemic

'If there are weaknesses in your program, now is the time to admit them and get them corrected'

Health care professionals prepare to screen people for the coronavirus at a testing site in Landover, Maryland, on March 30, 2020. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

News Analysis

In early February 2020, as Dr. Anthony Fauci and a small circle of collaborating scientists were in the process of establishing the natural origin narrative about COVID-19 that would pervade the media, the man who had personally trained staff at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology—and was the director of one of our nation’s most sophisticated biocontainment research facilities—was privately expressing concern that the pandemic might have originated from the Wuhan lab.