Emails reveal scientists suspected COVID leaked from Wuhan lab – then quickly censored themselvesBy Nicholas Wade
January 24, 2022
From almost the moment the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now, a string of unearthed e-mails — the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its Jan. 11 letter — is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci.
The latest e-mails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features, and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.
They agreed, until they didn’tThe story begins with a Jan. 31, 2020, e-mail to Fauci from a group of four virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 had been published three weeks before, giving virologists their first look at the virus’s structure and possible origin.
Andersen reported to Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Eddie is Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney; Bob is Robert F. Garry of Tulane University; Mike is Michael Farzan at Scripps Research. In their unanimous view, the virus didn’t come from nature and may instead have escaped from a lab.
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But something remarkable happened at the conference, because within three days Andersen was singing a different tune. In a Feb. 4, 2020 e-mail, he derided ideas about a lab leak as “crackpot theories” that “relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.”
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What happened at the Feb. 1 teleconference to make the virologists change their minds so radically? It was impossible to tell from the e-mails released in June 2021 because almost every word in them was redacted. The House Oversight and Reform Committee was allowed to view the e-mails only in camera, meaning members weren’t given copies, but staffers are allowed to transcribe them by hand while viewing them.
A striking feature of the excerpts released in the committee’s Jan. 11, 2022 letter is that the virologists had little doubt that the virus bore the fingerprints of manipulation. The focus of their attention was a genetic element called a furin cleavage site.
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A member of the Andersen group, Garry of Tulane University, remarks in the latest e-mails on the fact that the inserted furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA, the virus’s genetic material, was exactly the required length, a precision unusual in nature: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”
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You might think that the senior administrators present at the conference would have rushed to investigate the startling inference that their expert advisers had drawn. But just one day after the teleconference at which his experts explained why they thought the virus seemed manipulated, Collins complained about the damage such an idea might cause.
“The voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony,” he wrote on Feb. 2, 2020, according to the new e-mails.
Even after the March 2020 Nature Medicine article, which made the natural-origin theory the mainstream view, Collins still fretted that the lab-leak idea had not been sufficiently suppressed. “Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy,” he e-mailed Fauci on April 16.
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So what induced these virologists to such a radical change of view? “The Feb. 1, 2020, telecon sent a clear message to participants that Fauci and Collins regarded discussion of the lab leak possibility, even though plausible on scientific data, to be politically unacceptable and something that had to be blocked,” says Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, a molecular biologist and a leading critic of gain-of-function research.
Fauci oversees a large portion of funds available for virology research in the US. It is not unreasonable to suppose that virologists keen on continuing their careers would be very attentive to his wishes. Both Garry’s and Andersen’s labs receive large sums of money from the NIAID. “Telecon participants with current and pending grants controlled by Fauci and Collins could not have missed or misunderstood the clear message,” Ebright says.
The repudiation by Andersen, Garry, and Holmes of their original conclusion, expressed in the Jan. 31, 2020, e-mail was of enormous benefit to Collins and Fauci. Though primary responsibility for any lab leak would rest with Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with Chinese regulatory authorities, Collins and Fauci could share a portion of the blame for having funded gain-of-function research despite its obvious risks and then failing to ensure that grant recipients were taking all necessary precautions.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/01/24/emails-reveal-suspected-covid-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab-then-censored-themselves/
