Some of the scientists on a recently-revealed February 2020 phone call thought the virus that causes COVID-19 could have been engineered, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who convened the call, said in a new interview. “It was a very productive back-and-forth conversation where some on the call felt it could possibly be an engineered virus,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told USA Today. Others on the call believed evidence supported the theory that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus emerged from nature. Internal emails obtained by BuzzFeed News (pdf) through a Freedom of Information Act request show Fauci and others hopped on the call to discuss a document about the virus’s sequencing. The main speakers were Kristian Andersen, a professor in Scripps Research’s Department of Immunology and Microbiology, Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, and Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney. The contents of what …