Former DNI John Ratcliffe says the CDC Director, the Secretary of State, and the Director of National Intelligence agreed that COVID-19 was most likely created in the Wuhan lab, but Dr. Anthony Fauci labeled the lab origin as a "conspiracy theory" because he funded the lab: "You had the top diplomat, the top of the intelligence community, the top public health official all telling you with some confidence level that the most likely origin of this was a lab leak... Some of those individuals, including Dr. Fauci, were promoting the idea that this was natural origins, and notwithstanding the language which was read, they were referring to this publicly as a conspiracy theory in certain conversations and interviews... The best evidence of that is their own conversations, which say that they didn't want unwanted attention to the relationships that were taking place between Western virologists and those working within the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funding sources for some of that research."