“I remember it very well,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert at the National Institutes of Health, told USA Today.

“We decided on the call that the situation really needed to be looked into carefully," he said.

The teleconference on Feb. 1, 2020, appears to have played a pivotal role in shaping the early views of several key scientists whose published papers and public statements contributed to the shutting down of legitimate discussion about whether a laboratory in Wuhan, China, might have ignited the COVID-19 pandemic, the newspaper reported.

In an email to Fauci the day before the call, and reviewed by Fox News, Andersen wrote, "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."

In the email, Andersen added that he and several other experts thought that the genome was "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory," but noted that "those opinions could still change" following further analyses.

A day before the teleconference, Kristian Andersen, an expert in infectious disease genomics at the prestigious Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, had told Fauci first by phone and again later by email that the genetic structure of the virus looked like it might have been engineered in a lab, reports USA Today.

“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,” Andersen said in an email to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, the American newspaper reported.