Dr. Marc Siegel: COVID origins and Wuhan – here's what we need to remember about the lab in China

In 2004, on the heels of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, I examined the devastating impact that the fear of SARS had on our society as opposed the risks posed by the virus itself.

Fauci believed that we had come close, and was motivated to try to overcome the fact that SARS had been obscured and hidden by China until it had already spread beyond their borders. He told me on "Doctor Radio" on SiriusXM this past week that SARS was a main motivation for extending our resources to try to study emerging coronaviruses in China.  Viruses don’t simply jump from one species to the next – they evolve, via mutation, via repeated contact, over time. The problem with Fauci's approach wasn’t that he was wrong about coronaviruses, it was that he was naïve about the Chinese Communist Party. He and others relied on the cooperation and veracity of Chinese scientists who may well have been compromised by their association with the Chinese government.