Former President Donald Trump released a statement Tuesday, saying that “everybody is agreeing” with his long-standing claims that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the true origin of COVID-19.
“Now everybody is agreeing that I was right when I very early on called Wuhan as the source of COVID-19, sometimes referred to as the China Virus,” Trump wrote in the statement.
Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America pic.twitter.com/g4VaUyqe0u
— RSBN ???????? (@RSBNetwork) May 25, 2021
“To me it was obvious from the beginning but I was badly criticized, as usual. Now they are all saying ‘He was right.’ Thank you!,” the statement concluded. (RELATED: Media Dismissed Lab Leak Theory Because Trump Talked About It, According To A Senior Washington Post Reporter)
Trump reiterated his criticism of the lab leak hypothesis’s sceptics in a Tuesday night interview with Newsmax. “I think it was obvious to smart people that’s [Wuhan Institute of Virology] where it came from. I had no doubt about it,” he said during the interview.
Trump asserted as early as April 2020 that he had seen intelligence which gave him a high degree of confidence that the virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, adding, however, that he was “not allowed to tell” his source.
“And I think the World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they’re like the public relations agency for China,” Trump said at that press briefing.
CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and a former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield are among the medical specialists that have by now recognized the lab leak hypothesis as worthy of some further consideration.
However, Dr. Anthony Fauci rejected the validity of Trump’s conclusion at the time.
“The best evidence shows the virus behind the pandemic was not made in a lab in China,” Fauci said in a May 2020 interview with National Geographic. “Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
The peak of Fauci’s gradual embrace of the lab leak hypothesis happened on May 11 when the White House chief medical advisor said he was no longer convinced that coronavirus developed naturally.
“No, actually … no I’m not convinced about that,” Fauci said to PolitiFact’s Katie Sanders, who asked if he was “still confident that it developed naturally.”