Fauci tells China to release health records of nine bat cave patients

Washington, June 4: Top US scientist Anthony Fauci has urged China to release the medical records of nine people who fell sick with a coronavirus-like illness prior to the outbreak, saying they could provide insights into whether the pandemic came from a lab.

The “lab leak” theory has gained increasing traction, fueled by reports that six miners fell ill in 2012 and three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in 2019 after visiting a bat cave in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.

In an interview with The Financial Times on Thursday, US President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser said the records could answer critical questions over the contested origins of Covid-19 in Wuhan, where a pandemic that has killed over 3.6 million people worldwide began.

“I would like to see the medical records of the three people who are reported to have got sick in 2019,” Fauci said. “Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick with?”.

“The same with the miners who got ill years ago... What do the medical records of those people say?” he asked.

“It is entirely conceivable that the origins of Sars-Cov-2 was in that cave and either started spreading naturally or through the lab.”

Fauci has previously said he believes Covid-19 was a natural occurrence, though he has admitted to not being “100 percent” certain. China wholly rejects the lab leak theory, and has instead accused the US of peddling conspiracies and politicising the pandemic to divert attention from the high death rates there. Evidence to support the hypothesis is also scant. —

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