Scientists Behind Paper Dismissing Covid Lab Leak Privately Lost Confidence in Findings — but Maintained Public Stance
Just three months after a group of scientists published a paper claiming that the Covid lab-leak theory was not “plausible,” several of the researchers began having doubts, according to newly released documents that raise questions about why those researchers continued to defend their conclusions publicly.
Read more Is Canada to Blame for the Wildfire Smoke ‘Invasion’?
Senator Rand Paul’s office released between the scientists who authored “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that would go on to be widely cited by the journalists and public health officials who roundly dismissed the idea that Covid-19 had emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Lawmakers would later discover that Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, prompted researchers to author the paper and was even involved in the editing and approval process for its final draft. When asked publicly in April 2020 whether Covid may have emerged from a lab, Fauci cited the paper to cast doubt on the theory.
But in June 2020, one of the scientists, evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research professor Kristian Andersen, suggested in private messages with his “Proximal Origin” co-authors — Andrew Rambaut, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry and Ian Lipkin — that he believed there was a 30 percent chance the virus had come from a lab — a sharp departure from the conclusion presented in the paper, which held that the lab leak was implausible. Holmes, meanwhile, assigned the lab-leak a 20 percent probability, though he later downgraded that to 10 percent.
“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,” Andersen told his colleagues in messages on June 11, 2020.
Paul’s office notes the “Proximal Origin” paper argued that purposeful manipulation of the virus was implausible, but Andersen began to question that after German scientists built a reverse-genetics system for SARS-CoV-2 in under two weeks.
In response to the German development, Andersen wrote, “Clearly it’s not that hard.”
He also acknowledged that the paper is inaccurate in its claim that bat coronavirus research was widely distributed in labs all over the world, a claim that was used to downplay the significance of the virus emerging in such close proximity to the Wuhan lab. “We describe this in the paper and say that this work is performed ‘all of the world,’ but that isn’t true — it has exclusively been going on at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology],” he wrote.
Just days before the messages were sent, Andersen had told the BBC for a June 6, 2020, article that “we know this is a fully natural virus, because there are so many similar viruses found in bats.”
“What we don’t know is how it got into the human population,” he said.
One month after he privately acknowledged there was a chance the pandemic had, in fact, started in a lab, Andersen was quoted in an article in Science in which Shi Zhengli, who led the group studying bat coronaviruses at WIV, denied responsibility for the pandemic and demanded an apology from President Trump.
Andersen told the magazine he suspected Shi’s answers were “carefully vetted” by the Chinese Community Party but said “they’re all logical, genuine, and stick to the science as one would have expected from a world-class scientist and one of the leading experts on coronaviruses.”
In a July 6, 2020, Sky News article, Andersen defended the “Proximal Origin” paper and criticized a paper from British clinical scientist Angus Dalgleish and Birger Sorensen, chairman of Norwegian company Immunor, that raised the possibility that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory.
Andersen called Dalgleish and Sorensen’s work “complete nonsense, unintelligible, and not even remotely scientific — leading the authors to make unfounded and unsupported conclusions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.”
Andersen added: “As we describe in our paper, all the data strongly suggest that this is a natural virus — no scientific data has been put forward suggesting otherwise, including in the present ‘study.’”
Read more Thousands of Non-Citizens Added to New Jersey Voter Rolls Due to Technical Error
Much of Andersen’s public commentary on the virus at the time of the private messages has been wiped from the internet; in June 2021, Andersen deleted 5,000 of his tweets spanning from late 2019 to mid-2021 after media outlets published an email he sent to Fauci on January 31, 2020, that indicated some of SARS-CoV-2’s features “potentially look engineered.” He said the “unusual features of the virus” made up a “really small part” of the genome.
Andersen defended the emails during an interview with Sky News in 2021, saying, “I know it’s super mundane, but it isn’t actually a ‘massive cover-up. It’s just science. Boring, I know, but it’s quite a helpful thing to have in times of uncertainty.” Still, he eventually deactivated his entire X account.
The “Proximal Origin” authors did not respond to requests for comment from National Review.
Later, in September 2021, details of a grant proposal submitted three years earlier by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance with Zhengli Chi of the Wuhan Institute of Biology and Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina were leaked to the public. The DARPA DEFUSE submission proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.
“The furin cleavage site is a feature in SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein that enhances how efficiently the virus enters human cells, and its presence became one of the central reasons many scientists suspected the virus had been engineered,” Paul’s office explains.
The grant proposal was made public after a whistleblower complaint was leaked.
Rambaut, one of the “Proximal Origin” authors, responded to the leaked proposal in Slack messages with his co-workers: “It really isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff. We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence.”
Andersen replied: “That’s the problem. There’s a big difference between ‘the lab was working on bat CoVs’ to ‘the lab was modifying bat CoVs using features we see being unique to SC2.’”
The group also began preparing for future Freedom of Information Act requests, with Rambaut urging his colleagues to “stay off email” or “carefully curate some emails for the FOI records.”
Rambaut also suggested a call to discuss “what our strategy should be so we don’t get associated with these fuckers,” referring to “the Baric/Daszak shitshow.”
Andersen agreed, adding: “I also need to get something back to Tony’s team at NIH.”
Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur who has closely followed the scientific literature around coronaviruses, told NR that the newly uncovered messages “only strengthen my previous conviction that there was a coordinated effort to prematurely discredit and suppress the lab leak hypothesis, most likely under pressure from Fauci and other senior figures involved in the early discussions.”
“That was the true ‘lab leak conspiracy,’” he said.
“What is particularly striking is the gap between the scientists’ private and public statements,” Deigin said. “Kristian Andersen and some of his co-authors privately acknowledged that a laboratory origin was a substantial possibility, yet publicly treated the hypothesis as a crazy conspiracy theory. It appears that, whatever their genuine scientific uncertainty, they ultimately felt compelled to fall in line with the prevailing institutional position.”
Read more Supreme Court to Hear Case of Alaskan Bush Pilot Who Had Plane Seized over Six Pack of Beer
