When Danish virologist Dr. Kristian Andersen appeared before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month, he was adamant that it was an honest reading of the available evidence — and not any political consideration or the interference of governmental authorities — that led him to deem the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origins “implausible.”

That was the conclusion Andersen reached in a highly influential paper he co-authored along with leading virologists from around the world in February 2020. The paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” quickly became the most widely cited piece of evidence used by public-health authorities, most prominently Dr. Anthony Fauci, to knock down the lab-leak “conspiracy theory” in the ensuing months.

Curiously, just four days before Andersen submitted a pre-print of the paper to the leading scientific journal Nature, he endorsed the notion that the lab leak was very much a live possibility in an email exchange with his co-authors and NIH officials.

So how did he come to change his mind in that small window of time? To listen to him tell it at the hearing, he and his colleagues were simply following the evidence where it led.

“As is almost always the case in science,” Andersen wrote in his written testimony, “this change in belief was not based on a single piece of evidence, but a combination of many factors, including additional data, analyses, learning more about coronaviruses, and discussions with colleagues and collaborators.”

But hundreds of previously unreleased Slack and email messages obtained by the House Oversight committee and provided to independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger reveal that Andersen and his co-authors were in fact being influenced by unnamed “higher ups.”

In a total of 60 different messages sent in the spring of 2020, the scientists express varying levels of skepticism of the natural-transmission theory and repeatedly raise evidence which suggests that the virus may have been engineered in a lab.

In one early February message, British evolutionary virologist Edward Holmes writes that Covid’s genetic makeup is “exactly what was expected by engineering.” Referencing the virus’s “furin cleavage site” — the feature that allows the virus to bind to human cell receptors — Holmes writes, “[American virologist Dr. Robert Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add.”

“Yeah,” Andersen concurs, “the furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

The messages expressing support for the notion that the virus was engineered continue from there. (So plausible did they think the lab-leak theory that their slack channel was named “project-wuhan_engineering.”)

But things took a turn on February 3, two days after Andersen and his colleagues met with Fauci, NIH director Francis Collins, and representatives from the FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Two days after that meeting, Andersen abruptly changed the name of the slack channel to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”

Days later, as the scientists were busy entertaining the possibility of a lab leak amongst themselves, including by pointing out that transmission via pangolin was implausible, they rushed out a a paper that dismissed the lab-leak theory and expressed support for pangolin transmission — because the “higher ups” wanted them to.

“I was actually in the desert when that got pushed out, so a little rushed IMO.” Andersen wrote of the paper in an email to a colleague on February 17. “But pressure from the higher ups to get it out.”

When asked by House Republicans who Andersen was referring to, his colleague Robert Garry replied: “I don’t want to speculate on who their higher-ups were. But, I mean, I was aware that there were people that were discussing the potential origins and, you know, a possible lab origin at, you know, different government agencies.”

Andersen, for his part, suggested the higher ups were in the intelligence community, but played dumb on the specifics.

“I mean,” Andersen told the subcommittee, “it was clear that the White House Office of Science Technology Policy at that February 3rd conference call, Dr. Fauci, in my initial email to me, talked about contacting the intelligence community both here and in the United Kingdom. So that’s what my assumption is, that when we’re talking the higher-ups here, the White House was aware of this.”

Fauci went on to cite the paper as evidence of natural transmission in an April 17 White House press briefing, telling reporters that the work was done by a “group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists,” while failing to disclose that he had prompted the paper’s drafting and had collaborated closely with those highly qualified experts.

So who were these higher ups and why were they so eager to weaponize the authority of the world’s leading virologists to rule out an entirely plausible scenario as to how the world’s most destructive pandemic began? In at least one case, it seems we have our answer: Dr. Jeremy Farrar

In time, House Republicans must be sure to answer that question.

For now, Shellenberger and Taibbi have done invaluable work bringing the findings of the committee to the public — work that the country’s leading newspapers and news networks have not seen fit to do. I encourage everyone to read their findings in full here.