Scientists acknowledged the fallout that would occur if “anyone serious” called out the possibility that COVID-19 originated due to a Chinese leak rather than naturally, according to private messages included in a report released on Tuesday.
Scientists discussed the potential consequences of accusing China of leaking COVID-19 and agreed to attribute the virus to a natural source in a private Slack channel in February 2020, according to a report by the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Evolutionary biologist Dr. Andrew Rambaut wrote that it would be a disaster to blame China for an escaped virus and stated that he would be comfortable saying it was a natural occurrence, and immunologist Dr. Kristian Andersen said that he concurred.
“Given the shit 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 with ascribing it to natural processes,” Rambaut wrote.
“Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion,” Andersen responded. “Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”
Smoking gun
Wowhttps://t.co/nve8tRuJeg pic.twitter.com/c2J5iflwm1— The Honest Broker (@RogerPielkeJr) July 11, 2023
The report also claims that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci initiated an effort to suppress the theory that the origins of COVID-19 could be traced to a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Fauci reportedly pushed researchers to write a paper to “disprove” the lab leak theory on multiple occasions.
“Our main work over the past couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered,” Andersen wrote in a February 2020 email, according to the report.
Rambaut and Andersen co-authored the research paper, called The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, that concluded “[COVID-19] is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” according to the report.
Andersen did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Rambaut automatically responded that he is away from work until August.
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