MESSAGE
| DATE | 2023-07-27 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] covid-19 lab origin theory
|
The Covid Lab-Leak Deception
Scientists who signed a paper claiming a natural origin turn out not to
have believed it themselves.
By Matt Ridley and Alina Chan
July 26, 2023 2:55 pm ET
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Dr. Kristian Andersen speaks at a congressional committee hearing in
Washington, July 11. PHOTO: ANNA MONEYMAKER/GETTY IMAGES
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.
Mr. Andersen’s messages confirm that senior scientists who controlled
the purse strings of large funding bodies prompted them to draft the
paper after a conference call on Feb. 1, 2020. They were Dr. Fauci, Dr.
Collins and Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust. Shortly before their
paper went public, evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes
of Sydney University reported to his fellow authors that “Jeremy Farrar
and Francis Collins are very happy” with the final draft. Two of the
authors wrote in private messages that they had rushed their paper out
under pressure from unidentified “higher-ups.” The role of these senior
scientists went unacknowledged in the paper.
When asked at a July 11 subcommittee hearing—before the latest release
of messages—about the contrast between their public and private
opinions, one of the authors, virologist Robert Garry of Tulane
University, replied: “I was doing what scientists often do, and that is
take a devil’s advocate position.” Mr. Andersen said that changing your
mind in the light of new evidence “is simply the scientific process.”
Yet the newly revealed messages show that the scientists didn’t change
their minds. They continued to advocate privately for the devil even
after a preliminary version of the paper went online on Feb. 16, 2020.
On Feb. 20, Mr. Andersen wrote to an editor at Nature (which was offered
the paper first but passed it to Nature Medicine) that new data from
pangolins didn’t help refute a lab origin, adding that “we all really,
really wish that we could do that (that’s how this got started), but
unfortunately it’s just not possible given the data.” Another author,
evolutionary biologist Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University, wrote: “I
literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.”
On April 16, a month after publication, Mr. Andersen wrote that “I’m
still not fully convinced that no culture was involved” and “we also
can’t fully rule out engineering”—i.e., that the virus not only was
released from the lab but had been genetically manipulated there. He
worried about the Wuhan lab’s research on live SARS-like viruses from
bats at low biosafety levels: “it’s definitely concerning work, no
question about it.”
So why did they publish a paper denying that laboratory origin was
plausible? The answer may lie in their messages. In early February 2020,
Mr. Rambaut wrote: “Given the s— show that would happen if anyone
serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we
should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered
virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and
escape so we are content to ascribing it to natural processes.”
Mr. Andersen replied: “I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable
conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science—but
it’s impossible not to.” On Feb. 19, the group became aware that Mr.
Farrar had signed a public letter in the Lancet “to strongly condemn
conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural
origin.”
To adjust the conclusions in a scientific paper for political reasons
isn’t part of the scientific process. The world was misled with serious
consequences. If experts hadn’t shut down the rational possibility of a
laboratory origin of Covid-19, a credible investigation might have taken
place (it still has not), the World Health Organization might not have
taken Chinese government assurances at face value, and governments might
have done more to detect and deter laboratory-based outbreaks in the future.
Mr. Ridley and Ms. Chan are the authors of “Viral: The Search for the
Origin of Covid-19.”
--
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