Fauci Acknowledges He Privately Entertained Lab-Leak, Genetic-Engineering Theories Early in Pandemic - Yahoo News

Anthony Fauci acknowledged that he and a group of scientists had discussed the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, and the possibility that it could have been genetically engineered, during a teleconference on February 1, 2020.

“I remember it very well,” Fauci told USA Today on Thursday.

Kristian Andersen, a participant on the call and specialist in infectious disease genomics at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told Fauci in an email on January 31 that “some of the features” of coronavirus “(potentially) look engineered.”.

The teleconference “was a very productive back-and-forth conversation where some on the call felt it could possibly be an engineered virus,” Fauci said.

Fauci has publicly supported the theory that the coronavirus first jumped from an animal to a human, and dismissed the the lab-leak theory as the less-likely alternative.

“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” he said in a May 2020 interview with National Geographic.

A researcher with ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology thanked Fauci in April 2020 for supporting the natural-origin hypothesis.

Alina Chan, a postdoctoral associate at Harvard University and MIT, said some scientists felt they could not speak freely about the lab-leak theory at the start of the pandemic, for fear of being associated with former President Trump.

This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially declared the Delta variant, a coronavirus strain first detected in India, “a variant of concern.” This designation is given to variants shown to be more transmissible than the original strain, that can cause more severe disease and potentially reduce the effectiveness of treatments or vaccines.

Kavita Patel, a primary care physician in Washington, D.C., who also serves as a health policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, answered some questions about the Delta variant, which some experts have called “the most troubling variant by far.”.

The COVID-19 Delta variant, first identified in India, has emerged as America's pandemic wildcard.

There was a time when Christophe Desportes-Guilloux feared being arrested in French nightclubs, simply for being gay.That era has now passed but he says there’s still a level of distrust between the police and France’s LGBT+ community.Desportes-Guilloux has made it his mission to fix that problem – by going into police stations and training officers in how to handle reports of crime from LGBT+ people.In 2020 police recorded 1,590 victims of crimes classified as homophobic or transphobic, according to French interior ministry data.But that's an incomplete picture.Another interior ministry study revealed that between 2012 and 2018 only 20% of people who were victims of anti-LGBT threats or violence filed a report with the police.(Christophe Desportes-Guilloux) "In fact we had been noticing for a while that homophobic acts were under-reported, there were too few complaints that were filed.

The idea is to improve the relationship between police officers and citizens."

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) -Denmark will offer COVID-19 vaccines for children aged 12-15 after the adult population has been inoculated to boost its overall immunity against the virus ahead of the winter, health authorities said on Thursday