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Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted that a group of top scientists held a secret February 2020 call where they said they thought COVID-19 'could possibly be an engineered virus.'

The nation's top disease expert told USA Today this week that the group decided on the emergency call that the situation around the virus's origins 'really needed to be looked into carefully.' 

Publicly, Fauci adopted a stance that COVID-19 jumped naturally from animals to humans in a Chinese wet market close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. 

Fauci is now facing a backlash over his perceived flip-flopping about the origins of the virus as there is a growing belief that it was the result of a Wuhan lab leak. 

Trump's ex-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows waded into the criticism Friday, slamming Fauci and the media for 'ignoring the facts and siding with China.'  

'What actually should have happened is journalists should have done their job. There was a Pulitzer Prize waiting for somebody to report on it and candidly what they did is there was so much animosity toward Donald Trump, the president and his administration they weren't willing to look at the facts,' he told Fox.

'We had shared those with a number of reporters and you had Dr. Fauci and a number in the media that were willing to ignore it and actually side with China.' 

Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted that a group of top scientists held a secret February 2020 emergency call where they said they thought COVID-19 'could possibly be an engineered virus'

There is a growing theory that COVID-19 did not naturally jump from animals to humans but instead originated in the Wuhan lab during research into bat coronaviruses, before it was leaked - either accidentally or intentionally - into the world.

It's a theory that was long dismissed as a conspiracy touted by Donald Trump but has grown in prominence with experts and the Biden administration now investigating it as a real possibility. 

Fauci repeated his claims to USA Today Wednesday that he always had 'an open mind' about the virus but continues to believe it was most likely created naturally.

'I always had an open mind even though I felt then, and still do, the most likely origin was in an animal host,' he said. 

Fauci pointed to the emergency call - which had never been revealed before now - as proof that he was open to the possibility the virus was not formed naturally.

The call took place on February 1, just two days after the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency over COVID-19 and the US raised its travel warning on China to the highest level on January 30.   

He told USA Today the call was his idea after Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease expert at Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, raised concerns with him that 'at first glance' the virus looked unusual.  

On January 31, Anderson spoke to Fauci both by phone and email expressing his beliefs the virus may have been manufactured by humans, he said. 

In an email, released in the trove last month, he told Fauci he and several other top scientists believed the virus's 'unusual features' meant it looked 'engineered.'

There is a growing theory that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab (workers inside the lab in 2017) during research into bat coronaviruses

'The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,' the email read. 

Anderson said the genome was 'inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.' 

He added that 'those opinions could still change' after closer analyses. 

Fauci told USA Today Anderson had also expressed these concerns in a phone call with him and Jeremy Farrar, director the Wellcome Trust, that day.

Fauci said he 'suggested we bring together a multidisciplinary team,' he said.  

'We agreed to convene by phone the next day.'  

On the call were Fauci, Anderson, Farrar and NIH Director Francis Collins and several other international virology and disease experts.

Fauci told USA Today the conference call was 'a very productive back-and-forth conversation where some on the call felt it could possibly be an engineered virus.' 

Others, meanwhile, believed the evidence was 'heavily weighted' toward natural transmission of the virus.  

'I remember it very well. We decided on the call the situation really needed to be looked into carefully,' said Fauci of the call. 

Fauci adopted a stance that COVID-19 jumped naturally from animals to humans in a Chinese wet market close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China (above). He is now facing a growing backlash over his perceived flip-flopping about the origins of the virus

Publicly, however, Fauci supported the theory that COVID-19 was engineered naturally. 

'If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,' he told National Geographic in May.

Fauci changed tact in May this year saying he was 'not convinced' any longer that the virus evolved naturally.  

But, Fauci was not the only expert whose public stance appears to have stood in opposition to the one behind closed doors. 

Following the February 1 call the plan was for Anderson - who just 24 hours earlier spoke of its 'unusual' genome that led him to believe it was engineered - to spend the next two or three weeks looking into the virus sequences, Fauci said.

Yet, on February 4 - just three days after the emergency call - Anderson appeared to have had a change of heart, regaling in an email to other scientists that they should be 'more firm on the question of engineering' and slamming theories it had been deliberately engineered as 'crackpot.'   

Fauci with Jill Biden in New York last week. Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed a group of top scientists held a secret February 2020 emergency call about the origins of the virus and decided the virus's origins 'really needed to be looked into carefully'

Andersen sent an email to scientists who were writing a letter for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to send to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

'I do wonder if we need to be more firm on the question of engineering,' he wrote, according to USA Today.

'The main crackpot theories going around at the moment relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case. 

'Engineering can mean many things and could be done for either basic research or nefarious reasons, but the data conclusively show that neither was done.'

He continued: 'If one of the main purposes of this document is to counter those fringe theories, I think it's very important that we do so strongly and in plain language ('consistent with' [natural evolution] is a favorite of mine when talking to scientists, but not when talking to the public – especially conspiracy theorists).'

Similarly, in March, Anderson was part of a team who concluded in the Nature Medicine Journal that 'we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.' 

While China has tried to insist the virus originated elsewhere, academics, politicians and the media have begun to contemplate the possibility it escaped from the WIV - raising suspicions that Chinese officials simply hid evidence of the early spread

The lab leak theory has gained traction after it emerged that three workers at the Wuhan lab fell seriously-ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, months before China first reported the virus.  

Republicans are calling for Fauci to be fired over the funding and what they claim has been a flip-flopping from the top doctor over the origins of the virus.

The storm erupted in recent weeks when leaked emails surfaced between him and other virologists in the early days of the pandemic, discussing the possibility the virus was genetically modified.    

Last week, a classified report from influential government laboratory the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory revealed that experts recommended as far back as May last year that more investigation was needed into the lab leak theory.

The report found the hypothesis of a lab leak to be plausible and its conclusions were used by the State Department as it probed the pandemic's origins in the last months of the Trump administration, according to the Wall Street Journal.  

Biden last month ordered US intelligence agencies to find answers about the virus's origins. 

US officials have accused China of not being transparent about the pandemic and the origins of the virus.