Caroline Downey of National Review Online reports on the latest disturbing revelations involving a high-profile government COVID scold.
Dr. Fauci commissioned a scientific study that purported to debunk the hypothesis that Covid escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, according to emails released by House Republicans.
On Sunday, the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealed that the nation’s leading epidemiologist in February 2020 directed and approved a paper titled, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which he later cited to cast the lab-leak theory as a myth.
“New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar went uncredited despite significant involvement,” a memo from the committee read.
On February 1, 2020, Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, held a call with several scientists to discuss the origins of the virus. A group of evolutionary virologists on the call informed Fauci and Collins that Covid may have stemmed from a lab accident and may have been genetically engineered, according to the memo.
Three days later, four of the experts who attended that meeting drafted a research document, which was forwarded to Fauci upon completion for editing and approval. The paper, later published in Nature Medicine, argued that Covid had “mutations” that supported the explanation that it had been transmitted to humans from animals.
One of the four authors, Dr. Kristin Andersen, admits in a cover email sent to Nature that Fauci “prompted” the paper’s drafting in order to “disprove” the lab-leak theory.
“There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space. [This paper was] Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins,” Andersen wrote in the email, released Sunday by the House committee.