Berenson is such a self-promoting histrionic drama queen.
This is from that same email author, Kristian Anderson, two months after the email from Anderson to Fauci that Berenson screen capped:
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus."
[url=https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9]
The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2[/url]
The science was (and still is) obviously evolving and the virus origins were not clear. They definitely weren't clear in January 2020.
Why is anyone acting like, in early 2020,
a) Trump didn't have a very serious credibility problem with the media and the American public because of his steady stream of lying about everything under the sun for four prior years;
b) Trump or his administration had produced clear evidence that the virus was engineered and escaped from the lab, and the media simply ignored that clear evidence because they were biased;
c) Trump didn't have a long history of anti-China rhetoric or xenophobic statements that played to his base;
d) Trump didn't have a pronounced history of trying to shift blame to others to make himself look better or to distract from his own failings;
e) Trump didn't have electoral motivations to downplay the seriousness of COVID or his responsibility to manage the COVID crisis in America; or
f) there would have been clear electoral benefit to Trump being correct about the origin of the virus being a lab escape instead of the wet market or some other natural zoonotic means?
There was never any mistaking that COVID came out of Wuhan, whether it was from the wet market or the virology lab, and regardless of its origins we still had a crisis to manage here in America and around the world. Trump being correct or partially correct about the virus origins wasn't going to allow him to escape responsibility for how well, or not, he managed the crisis although that was certainly what he hoped would happen.
In January, immediately pre-COVID, Trump was already trailing Biden in the polls. His best and maybe only shot at reelection was to downplay the virus, champion the health of the economy, and hope that the American public bought into that narrative, maintained consumer confidence and confidence in the markets, and that our economy kept humming along.
He was a virus denier because he thought he needed to be to win reelection, and the Kung Flu/China virus rhetoric was just an extension of his virus denialism.
If he had clear evidence that COVID escaped from a lab, or even worse was engineered, why didn't his team produce it at that time? We still don't have clear evidence now; they definitely didn't have clear evidence early in the crisis when he started ramping up the China blame game.
All this "woe is Trump, the meanie libtard MSM ignored his clear and rational take on the virus origins" is myopic and inaccurate revisionist history. It ignores his huge credibility problem late in his presidency, his steady stream of anti-China rhetoric for four years, and his motivations for trying to distract the American public from the gravity of the COVID crisis and his responsibility to manage the crisis effectively regardless of its origins.