Todd: “Now there would be one theory as to why is the Chinese government acting so peculiar and weird, and they still have not come clean on what they can tell us about the start of this pandemic, have they?”

Fauci: “Yeah. Yeah. That is true. And that is, in some respects, and I don’t mean this in a broad, pejorative way, but in anything that we’ve had to do over decades, whether it’s bird flu, H5N1, H7N9, or the original SARS in 2002, even when there’s nothing to hide, they act in a suspicious, non-transparent way just probably because they don’t want to make it look like there’s a blame. When the reality is, if something evolves in your country, it’s not to blame but let’s find out what went on so we can be transparent about it and prevent it for the next time happening.”

Todd: “What can we do to once and for all, sort of, figure out whether the lab leak is a viable theory?”

Fauci: “Well, the only thing that can be done is to have an open, transparent interaction with their scientists and our scientists, get in there, look at the epidemiology, look at what went on there, look at what happened earlier on, maybe a month or so earlier. That has not been at all transparent enough for us to feel comfortable about it.”

Todd: “Where are you on this now? I mean, everybody’s always curious, “Where is Fauci on the lab leak theory?”

Fauci: “Yeah. I have a completely open mind about that, despite people saying that I don’t. I have a totally open mind about that. But if you look at the preponderance of evidence that has been accumulated by international group of highly respected evolutionary virologists, they feel — and they’ve written peer-reviewed papers on that — that the evidence strongly points to this being a natural occurrence of a jumping of a virus from a bat to an animal species to human. Hasn’t been definitively proven, but the evidence on that is pretty strong. Having said that, we still all have to keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”