A House subcommittee has subpoenaed a group of academics who wrote an article meant to discredit the so-called COVID-19 “lab leak theory” at the start of the pandemic in early 2020.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, has requested private messages between Dr. Kristian Andersen and other co-authors and contributors to a February 2020 scientific paper titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
According to earlier emails that the subcommittee obtained, Andersen said Dr. Anthony Fauci, who maintains that the virus most likely was not engineered in a Chinese lab, “prompted,” edited and gave final approval to the paper.
“We are following the breadcrumbs of a COVID-19 cover-up straight to the source,” Wenstrup said in a statement. “Dr. Kristian Andersen played a pivotal role in potentially suppressing the lab leak hypothesis, and Americans deserve to know why this happened, who was involved, and how we can prevent the intentional suppression of scientific discourse during a future pandemic.”
Wenstrup also said the Nature Medicine paper’s authors — who include Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry — “may have possessed conflicts of interest for supporting a zoonotic origin of COVID-19.”
“Fully investigating the internal messages between the co-authors and contributors is a crucial step to inform future legislation and hold guilty parties accountable,” he added. “The Select Subcommittee looks forward to Dr. Andersen’s speedy and comprehensive response to today’s subpoena.” --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| AFP via Getty Images |
A leading virologist advising the World Health Organization about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic said the UN agency should never have dismissed the lab leak theory in favor of China’s frozen food origin story.
Professor Marion Koopmans, who heads the Department of Viroscience at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, is one of 12 people investigating the emergence of the pandemic on behalf of WHO.
She said the theory that the virus escaped from a secretive lab in Wuhan could never be ruled out, telling the BBC podcast “Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin” that that “ranking in retrospect was not smart,” the Daily Mail reported.
She added: “We shouldn’t have done that.”
In 2021, the agency announced after a group of scientists traveled to Wuhan that “all hypotheses remain on the table,” adding that “we have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do.”
WHO, which ranked the likelihood of four popular theories, ruled that the natural-origins one was the most likely — and placed a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as “extremely unlikely” and behind the frozen-food origin theory.
Beijing has floated theories that the virus began in a US research facility in Maryland or in imported frozen food packaging. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
10 reasons we KNOW that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Lab
GOP-led House committee subpoenas messages in attempt to trace COVID origin 'cover-up'
USA TODAY: Coronavirus Updates
WSJ: Coronavirus Live Updates
YAHOO NEWS: Coronavirus Live Updates
NEW YORK POST: Coronavirus The Latest
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment