Did Dr. Anthony Fauci's project manager confess to creating COVID-19?

The claim is based on a months-old interview with Dr. Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental health organization that has received funding from the National Institutes of Health. The video that purportedly includes his admission only shows Daszak talking about coronavirus research; he says nothing about creating SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Daszak's interview was with Vincent Racaniello, a podcaster and professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University.

Lead Stories asked Racaniello about the video's claim. In an email Racaniello wrote of Daszak: "He didn't confess to any such thing. These experiments are needed to examine the pandemic potential of viruses that circulate in bats."

Although the possibility that COVID-19 came from a lab cannot be ruled out, experts have independently concluded that the preponderance of evidence indicates it mutated naturally from animals to humans.