Proved by Correspondence: Scientists Who Influentially Ruled Out the Lab Origin of Covid-19 Found It Actually Highly Plausible
The authors of "Proximal Origin" discussed in a conversation with each other a mere month after their paper was published that the virus SARS-CoV-2 could have actually originated in a laboratory.
As we noted in our news round-up some time ago, microbiologist and immunologist Dr. Robert Garry and evolutionary biologist Dr. Kristian Andersen recently testified before the US House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These men were at the core of a group of five scientists who published a highly influential article “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine in March 2020, which claimed that SARS-CoV-2 was not a laboratory-created or engineered virus.
Before the article was written, the same men were of the opposite opinion. In early February of that year, Andersen wrote to Anthony Fauci, the then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) who later became the 'face' of US pandemic policy, that the virus had some features that “(potentially) look engineered”. After discussions with Fauci, as well as Francis Collins, head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other scientists and pandemic policymakers in key positions, Andersen and Garry changed their assessment and wrote the paper claiming the exact opposite.
The report of the House of Representatives subcommittee investigating the origins of the coronavirus revealed that, in fact, Fauci and Collins had been following the scientists' research step by step. It was Fauci who urged the researchers to write on the subject after their initial contact, and Collins, when the work was completed, said he was very pleased with the final result.
Andersen's and Garry's research teams received $25.2 million in funding from the Collins-led NIH for their projects from 2020-2022.
In testimony to Congress, Andersen said that he did indeed initially notice characteristics in the virus that led him to suspect a laboratory origin. But because he was not an expert on coronaviruses and was just becoming familiar with its characteristics, he was simply not aware of them all – a change of mind, he said, was the result of him becoming more knowledgeable, not a conference call with Fauci and company. Fauci, he said, had nothing to do with their research or the grants they received.
Garry said he was still convinced of the natural origin of Covid-19. "It is my opinion that SARS-CoV-2 emerged via wildlife trade on a market in Wuhan, China," he said.
Now, however, journalists Alex Gutentag, Leighton Woodhouse, Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have obtained hundreds of previously unreleased email and Slack direct messages which cover the period when Andersen and his colleagues collaborated to write the paper usually referred to simply as “Proximal Origin”. They show that the scientists misled the Congress while giving their testimonies. Their email exchanges and Slack messaging show that they believed a laboratory outbreak was possible and that the virus had been cultured in the laboratory at the same Wuhan Institute of Virology. The correspondence reveals that it was pressure from the so-called “higher-ups”, that led them to drop the lab origin claim. The emails do not reveal exactly who exactly the “higher-ups” were. “While we still don’t know if those referred to as “on high” or “higher ups” are Fauci, Collins, Farrar, the White House, or the intelligence agencies, it’s clear that the authors were not operating independently,” the journalist write. It also emerges that as late as mid-April, i.e. a month after the publication of the article dismissing the lab origin, Andersen wrote to colleagues that he was not really convinced that “no culture was involved” and thought they cannot “fully rule out engineering”.
However, during his appearance before Congress, Andersen affirmed that by the time the scientific article was published, he was already convinced that there was nothing artificial, i.e. laboratory-created, about the virus. Considering the e-mails, this seems to be a lie.
Andersen himself continues to stand by his version of events, even after the reporters' revelations. Although he did not respond to journalists' queries, he later referred to the published article as a conspiracy theory on social media.
Regarding the subject of Covid-19's origins, and who and how benefited from painting the laboratory origin to be a conspiracy theory, you may read further here.