{"id":323,"date":"2026-07-22T19:38:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T19:38:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhousingtransition.com\/?p=323"},"modified":"2026-07-22T19:38:57","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T19:38:57","slug":"scientists-behind-paper-dismissing-covid-lab-leak-privately-lost-confidence-in-findings-but-maintained-public-stance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhousingtransition.com\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Behind Paper Dismissing Covid Lab Leak Privately Lost Confidence in Findings \u2014 but Maintained Public Stance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just three months after a group of scientists published a paper claiming that the Covid lab-leak theory was not \u201cplausible,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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Senator Rand Paul\u2019s office released between the scientists who authored \u201cThe Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,\u201d a paper published in Nature Medicine <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

But in June 2020, one of the scientists, evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research professor Kristian Andersen, suggested in private messages with his \u201cProximal Origin\u201d co-authors \u2014 Andrew Rambaut, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry and Ian Lipkin \u2014 that he believed there was a 30 percent chance the virus had come from a lab \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur paper was pretty strong in saying \u2018there\u2019s no way,\u2019 but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,\u201d Andersen told his colleagues in messages on June 11, 2020.<\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s office notes the \u201cProximal Origin\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In response to the German development, Andersen wrote, \u201cClearly it\u2019s not that hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe describe this in the paper and say that this work is performed \u2018all of the world,\u2019 but that isn\u2019t true \u2014 it has exclusively been going on at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology],\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

Just days before the messages were sent, Andersen had told the BBC for a June 6, 2020, article that \u201cwe know this is a fully natural virus, because there are so many similar viruses found in bats.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we don\u2019t know is how it got into the human population,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Andersen told the magazine he suspected Shi\u2019s answers were \u201ccarefully vetted\u201d by the Chinese Community Party but said \u201cthey\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a July 6, 2020, Sky News article, Andersen defended the \u201cProximal Origin\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Andersen called Dalgleish and Sorensen\u2019s work \u201ccomplete nonsense, unintelligible, and not even remotely scientific \u2014 leading the authors to make unfounded and unsupported conclusions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andersen added: \u201cAs we describe in our paper, all the data strongly suggest that this is a natural virus \u2014 no scientific data has been put forward suggesting otherwise, including in the present \u2018study.’\u201d<\/p>\n

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Much of Andersen\u2019s 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\u2019s features \u201cpotentially look engineered.\u201d He said the \u201cunusual features of the virus\u201d made up a \u201creally small part\u201d of the genome.<\/p>\n

Andersen defended the emails during an interview with Sky News in 2021, saying, \u201cI know it\u2019s super mundane, but it isn\u2019t actually a \u2018massive cover-up. It\u2019s just science. Boring, I know, but it\u2019s quite a helpful thing to have in times of uncertainty.\u201d Still, he eventually deactivated his entire X account.<\/p>\n

The \u201cProximal Origin\u201d authors did not respond to requests for comment from National Review<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe furin cleavage site is a feature in SARS-CoV-2\u2019s 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,\u201d Paul\u2019s office explains.<\/p>\n

The grant proposal was made public after a whistleblower complaint was leaked.<\/p>\n

Rambaut, one of the \u201cProximal Origin\u201d authors, responded to the leaked proposal in Slack messages with his co-workers: \u201cIt really isn\u2019t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff. We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andersen replied: \u201cThat\u2019s the problem. There\u2019s a big difference between \u2018the lab was working on bat CoVs\u2019 to \u2018the lab was modifying bat CoVs using features we see being unique to SC2.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The group also began preparing for future Freedom of Information Act requests, with Rambaut urging his colleagues to \u201cstay off email\u201d or \u201ccarefully curate some emails for the FOI records.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rambaut also suggested a call to discuss \u201cwhat our strategy should be so we don\u2019t get associated with these fuckers,\u201d referring to \u201cthe Baric\/Daszak shitshow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Andersen agreed, adding: \u201cI also need to get something back to Tony\u2019s team at NIH.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur who has closely followed the scientific literature around coronaviruses, told NR that the newly uncovered messages \u201conly 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the true \u2018lab leak conspiracy,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is particularly striking is the gap between the scientists\u2019 private and public statements,\u201d Deigin said. \u201cKristian 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Just three months after a group of scientists published a paper claiming that the Covid lab-leak theory was not \u201cplausible,\u201d several of the researchers began having doubts, according to newly released documents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-care"],"yoast_head":"\nScientists Behind Paper Dismissing Covid Lab Leak Privately Lost Confidence in Findings \u2014 but Maintained Public Stance - American Housing Transition<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanhousingtransition.com\/?p=323\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Scientists Behind Paper Dismissing Covid Lab Leak Privately Lost Confidence in Findings \u2014 but Maintained Public Stance - 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