Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, appeared on Fox News on Wednesday to address the lab leak theory about the origins of the coronavirus.

Buzzfeed News recently released thousands of pages of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci they got through the Freedom of Information Act, which included several emails regarding the theory that covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

One of those emails was sent from Collins to Fauci in mid-April of last year, with the subject line was “conspiracy gains momentum.” Much of the email exchange is redacted. Collins linked to a Mediaite article on Fox News’ Bret Baier reporting at the time that multiple sources were saying “there is increasing confidence that the virus — Covid-19 — started in a Wuhan lab.”

An April 2020 email from NIH Director Francis Collins to Fauci under the subject line: Conspiracy gains momentum. The email included a link to an article about Brett Baier saying on FOX News that covid outbreak started in Wuhan lab. Fauci's response is redacted. pic.twitter.com/G8F7SUB23U

— Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) June 1, 2021

Martha MacCallum asked Collins about that email Wednesday, and he started by saying, “I never thought, Martha, that an e-mail only reported by the subject line would become a topic for Fox News afternoon programming, but here we are.”

He went on to say, “There were a lot of conspiracy theories and other ideas floating around at that point. One of them was that actually SARS-CoV-2 had been a bio-engineered bio-weapon created on purpose by human intervention by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That doesn’t fit with what we know about this particular viral genome. Another was NIH had somehow been complicit in the generation of this dangerous virus.”

As for the idea that the virus leaked out of the lab, Collins said “I never rejected that one, although there was no evidence to support it.”

“Let’s try to clarify the difference between those various statements or various options. Some of them are pretty outrageous. Some of them are still plausible.”

MacCallum questioned Collins on recent reporting about researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology falling ill in late 2019, and said, “Both you and Dr. Fauci really poked — any conspiracy theory that came from Senator Cotton or President Trump was shot down as just not being scientific and something that should be rejected.”

Collins disagreed with that characterization and said, “We were reacting to the more outrageous conspiracy theories that were getting blurred together here.”

He told MacCallum he still believes “the most likely explanation is still a natural transmission”:

Because that’s always been the case with other coronaviruses. With SARS it turned out to be a civet cat. With MERS it was a camel. With ebola, we still don’t know what the intermediate host was. It’s not easy to figure this out. So just on a historical basis, that’s the most likely path that was traveled. And again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To claim that the lab was responsible, we need to know that. But I don’t think anybody, you or any of the others who are commenting, should jump to the conclusion that that’s the most likely explanation right now. We do not know that. It might be, but we do not know.

MacCallum said she’s not jumping to conclusions and again said it seemed like they were waiving people off of the lab leak theory.

“I deny that you were waived off of that by me,” Collins said. “I would say you were waived off of some more outrageous conspiracy theories that had really no categorical sense to them. But the idea of a lab leak is never anything that I thought was impossible. I just want to say that right clearly now.”

You can watch above, via Fox News.

The post NIH Director Grilled By Martha MacCallum Over Exchange in Fauci Emails: ‘I Never Rejected’ Lab Leak Theory as ‘Impossible’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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