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Scientists who signed a paper claiming a natural origin turn out not to have believed it themselves.
The controversy over the origins of Covid-19 refuses to die, despite efforts early in the pandemic to kill it. It was natural to doubt it was a coincidence that an outbreak caused by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats began in Wuhan, China, the only city where risky experiments were being done on diverse and novel SARS-like coronaviruses from bats. The Chinese Communist Party did its utmost to dismiss such suspicions, but so did a group of influential Western scientists.
On March 17, 2020, the journal Nature Medicine published a paper by five scientists, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that dismissed “any type of laboratory based scenario” for the origin of the pandemic. It was cited by thousands of news outlets to claim that the virus emerged naturally. But Slack messages and emails subpoenaed and released by the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic suggest that some of the authors didn’t believe their own conclusions. Before, during and even after the publication of their paper, they worried privately that Covid-19 was caused by a laboratory escape, perhaps even of a genetically engineered virus.
The lead author, evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institution, told the journal’s chief editor, João Monteiro, that he would edit the paper “to make clearer that this [virus] does have a natural origin” (emphasis in original). The paper stated boldly: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Shortly after publication, Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote on the NIH website that “this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19.” Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said from the podium of the White House that the paper showed that the data were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In private, the authors celebrated the traction their paper was gaining despite angry emails from the public. “We RUUUUUUULE. That’s tenure secured, right there,” Mr. Andersen wrote.
The mainstream media frequently cited the paper in ridiculing any discussion of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory favored by racists and right-wing extremists. Facebook censored the topic for a year. Yet now the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department—the U.S. intelligence agencies with the strongest scientific expertise—have assessed that the pandemic likely had a research-related origin. --->READ MORE HERE
Who instigated the cover-up of the lab leak theory of Covid’s origins?
Many of us have assumed it was Anthony Fauci, then-Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). However, newly released emails and messages indicate that initially Fauci was open to investigating the possibility of a lab leak properly.
Following his now infamous February 1st 2020 teleconference with leading virologists Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes and others, Fauci wrote to several Government officials to inform them that Jeremy Farrar, the Director of the Wellcome Trust, and Francis Collins, the Director of the National Institutes of Health, had been tasked with contacting the WHO to set up an international investigation group into virus origins with “no judgement at all” on the outcome. “Where that leads remains to be seen,” he wrote.
Fauci writes that some of the scientists on the call deemed a lab origin possible or likely, doing so even “more strongly” after the call, while just two said they believed such a scenario could be ruled out (these were Ron Fouchier and Christian Drosten). Fauci thus presents the matter to Government colleagues as an unresolved scientific argument, with a number of scientists favouring a lab origin. The main course of action he proposes is to organise a group under the auspices of the WHO to look into it in an impartial way.
The following day, Collins wrote to Farrar to confirm he was following this up with WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Collins told Farrar he was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely” but said it needed to be looked into by the WHO – though also added that he “shares your view” that this is mainly to be a “confidence-inspiring” initiative to pre-empt “voices of conspiracy” that would otherwise do “great potential harm to science and international harmony”. This does suggest a non-neutral political agenda being pursued, much more so than Fauci’s email of the day before, an agenda apparently being driven by Farrar. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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