Fauci says natural origins theory of novel coronavirus still 'the most likely'

WASHINGTON, July 19 (Xinhua) -- White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci has recently said that he believes the natural origins theory of the novel coronavirus is still "the most likely."

(File photo/Xinhua)

"The most likely explanation is a natural evolution from an animal reservoir to a human," Fauci, also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the United States, told CNN during an interview on Saturday.

Paul Offit, a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory committee, echoed Fauci's remarks.

"I think the chance that this was created by laboratory workers -- that it was engineered -- is zero," Offit told CNN in a separate interview.

Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Global Health Policy & Politics Initiative at Georgetown University told Rolling Stone, a U.S. magazine, earlier this month that U.S. President Joe Biden's use of the intelligence community and not health officials to conduct a review into the origins of the coronavirus may have already politicized the matter.

"This tells us that this is a political and an intelligence story: not a story mostly about science," Kavanagh said. "And so we should understand the picture in that sense, and not be naive about it. We're in a place where politics is driving people's scientific understanding in a dangerous way."

Kavanagh added that if the aim of Biden's report was to find a scientific explanation for the origins of COVID-19, he would have tasked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institutes of Health with it, instead of U.S. intelligence agencies.