Dr. Robert Garry, a Professor at Tulane University School of Medicine, and Dr. Kristian Andersen from Scripps Research are two of the top scientific advisors to Dr. Anthony Fauci. They are also co-authors of one of the most influential scientific documents published during the pandemic. “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published in Nature in March 2020 and was immediately accepted as gospel because it supposedly debunked the growing theory that COVID-19 originated in a lab.
In an appearance last week before the House Select Subcommittee on COVID Origins, both men stated that the coronavirus emerged in nature and not in a lab. Andersen acknowledged that he had sent emails to Fauci saying that he had seriously considered the lab leak theory as a serious possibility.
But Andersen told Congress that “culturing” in different cells or animal species in a lab — the kind of thing that can make a virus more infectious to humans — had not occurred. The only plausible explanation was that the virus was passed from animal to human.
“By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin,” Andersen explained in his written testimony, “I no longer believed that a ‘culturing’ scenario was plausible.”
But now, Public and Racket have obtained hundreds of previously unreleased email and Slack direct messages which cover the period when Andersen and his colleagues collaborated to write “Proximal Origin.”
Those communications paint a starkly different picture from the one Andersen and Garry presented to Congress last week. They show that Andersen and his colleagues clearly thought it was indeed possible not only that the virus that causes Covid-19 had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but specifically that it had been cultured in the laboratory.
Crucially, these new documents make clear that pressure from “higher ups” — not “additional data, analyses, learning more about coronaviruses, and discussions with colleagues and collaborators” — led Andersen, Garry, and two of their coauthors to abandon the lab leak theory as implausible.
More than a month after the publication of “proximal origin,” Andersen wrote to his co-authors on April 16, “I’m still not fully convinced that no culture was involved. We also can’t fully rule out engineering (for basic research).”
Some of the most damning evidence that the two scientists and many of their colleagues believed in the lab leak theory occurred in February-March 2020 while the “proximal origins” paper was being circulated in draft. At that time, Andersen changed the Slack channel name from “project-wuhan_engineering” to “project-wuhan_pangolin.” (Many boosters of the “natural origin theory” believe that the virus jumped to humans from pangolins.).
The name “project-wuhan_engineering” clearly suggested that Andersen and his colleagues believed in the lab leak theory.
Wrote Andersen on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” A few days later, he and the other authors were searching for a plausible intermediate host such as a pangolin that would allow them to refute the theory.
As for the draft paper, Andersen complained that the “lab origin” theory was dismissed “out of hand,” according to Matt Taibbi.
Andersen laments that a draft doesn’t “refute a lab origin,” which “must be considered as a serious scientific theory” and “not dismissed out of hand as a conspiracy theory”:
Only a tiny fraction of the communications between Andersen and his coauthors has been reported upon before now. Drawing on the newly released messages, Public has cataloged nearly 60 clear statements by Andersen and his colleagues expressing their belief that a lab leak, and the bioengineering of viruses, were the origin of Covid-19 between January 31 and February 28, 2020. Of those statements, only around a half-dozen have been previously reported upon.
In early February, Andersen and the other “Proximal Origin” authors agreed that the features they observed in SARS-CoV-2 exhibited exactly the steps they would have taken if they themselves had decided to engineer an infectious SARS-like coronavirus. The virus’ characteristics were “exactly what was expected by engineering,” wrote Edward Holmes on Slack on February 1.
Shortly after these emails and messages were sent, Andersen did a 180-degree turn and changed his hypothesis from a lab leak for the coronavirus origin to the virus having a natural origin. It was at this point that Andersen pulled a pangolin out of his hat and identified the mammal as the probable culprit in transmitting the virus from animal to human.
But in Proximal Origin, Andersen and his colleagues wrote something much more definitive: “The presence in pangolins of an RBD [receptor binding domain] very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans” [emphasis added].
Then, on February 18, two days after the pre-print publication of “Proximal Origin,” Andersen once again admitted, “Clearly none of these pangolin sequences was the source though.” And then once again, on February 20, Andersen emphasized. “Unfortunately the pangolins don’t help clarify the story.”
This was the origin of a government and media coverup where it was decided that, for political reasons, the lab leak theory had to be squashed.
But the messages and emails plainly show that what Andersen and his colleagues were doing wasn’t science but rather rhetoric. By their own account, they could not show how the virus had gone from bats to an intermediary, whether ferrets or pangolins, to humans.
I think Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) suggestion that the Department of Justice open an investigation into whether Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about COVID origins is spot on. While they’re at it, they might want to open investigations into how a few other scientists misled the media, misled the Congress, and blatantly and continually lied to the American people.