Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified virtually before a Thursday Senate panel about the illness only a day after announcing he had contracted COVID-19.
Fauci, when asked if there were any breakthroughs in understanding the origin of COVID-19, said that researchers had concluded that it “very, very likely” had its genesis in an animal species.
Additionally, Fauci stated that the disease “almost certainly” spread to human beings in the Wuhan region of China. “There have been a number of papers that have come out from highly qualified virologists and viral phylogeneticists that indicate that this is very, very likely a jumping species from an animal host, perhaps through an intermediate host, into a human species which then spread throughout the human population certainly, almost certainly originating in China in Wuhan.”