From the FOIA fans at U.S. Right To Know, December 6:
Published early in the pandemic, an article in Nature Medicine titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — known to many simply as “Proximal Origin” — helped push the lab leak theory of the origins of COVID-19 to the outer fringes by March 2020.
“We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” the analysis stated, which had been read about three million times within weeks of publication. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
For years, the infectious diseases community had debated whether cutting-edge virology — gain-of-function research that generates more dangerous viruses — could cause a pandemic. Once a pandemic arrived, that debate abruptly ended.
The virologists had sold the public on an irrefutably natural origin.
But emails and Slack chat messages acquired through the Freedom of Information Act and subpoenaed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis show that the virologists who wrote the analysis privately expressed concerns that the virus could have emerged from a lab. They also reveal the depth of involvement of some of the most powerful men in science, including former pandemic response leader and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, in shaping the article. Fauci’s institute had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology through an American research organization called EcoHealth Alliance.
The controversy over “Proximal Origin” represents years of unanswered questions about how a scientific hypothesis that some scientists and intelligence agencies now consider likely was cast as a conspiracy theory — culminating in a committee hearing this summer.
Four of the five virologists behind “Proximal Origin” — Scripps Institute virologist Kristian Andersen, University of Sydney virologist Eddie Holmes, University of Edinburgh virologist Andrew Rambaut and Tulane School of Medicine virologist Robert Garry — have subsequently coauthored other high impact articles in favor of the theory that the pandemic emerged from the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan. (A fifth coauthor of “Proximal Origin,” Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, has since distanced himself from the group.) In the world’s most prestigious journals and newspapers, these four virologists have cast the evidence for a natural origin as so compelling — so “dispositive” — as to render evidence pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology immaterial or the makings of a conspiracy theory.
The virologists’ Slack messages, emails, early drafts, and interview transcripts span 1,096 pages, while emails released through FOIA include hundreds more — yet the controversy over “Proximal Origin” remains unsettled.
Five thousand people have signed a petition accusing the virologists of fraud and calling for the retraction of “Proximal Origin,” including dozens of professionals in science and technology. Yet the virologists and their defenders say their private messages expressing concern about genetic engineering and the Wuhan Institute of Virology simply show a change of their perspective over time — a “textbook example of the scientific method at work.”
“It is easy to sow doubt – to take sentences from here and there in email streams and compare early thinking with later conclusions and presume any change is due to some unspecified pressure rather than a change in the weight or direction of evidence,” the Australian Academy of Science said in an August statement.
Yet a new timeline by U.S. Right to Know shows that some of the contradictory private and public statements were written on the very same day. The timeline shows that, even as the virologists incorporated core concepts into their paper that were in favor of a natural origin, they simultaneously bemoaned to their coauthors that they were incomplete — even “crap.”...
....MUCH MORE
January 24, 2000, Publicly disclosed:
The Wuhan Institute of Virology Senior Scientist Zhengli Shi sequences the novel coronavirus and announces the lab discovered its closest known relative in its own freezers, a virus called RaTG13: The novel coronavirus is ”96% identical at the whole genome level to a bat coronavirus [RaTG13]. … Importantly, we have confirmed that [it] uses ACE2.” The announcement comes three days after a paper in the Chinese Journal of Bioinformatics identifies the furin cleavage site in an ideal position in SARS-CoV-2, which makes it uniquely dangerous among betacoronaviruses, but this is not mentioned in Shi’s paper.
January 27, Private:
Farrar acquires a burner phone. Farrar knew by Jan. 20 that the virus was behaving like a “flu-SARS hybrid” and had probably gone pandemic, emails later revealed....
And we're off.
