NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A merican scientists inappropriately suppressed the probable origins of the Covid-19 pandemic to save face and protect the Chinese government from scrutiny, according to recently released private messages.
A small group of scientists colluded with U.S. government officials to suppress the hypothesis that Covid-19 originated from a lab leak in China; they knowingly promoted misinformation via a peer-reviewed paper in a major journal. Records of these scientists’ internal communications explicitly show that they believed that the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible, if not likely; but, for what they admit were political reasons, they claimed the opposite in a scientific paper.
Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, says that the man who “led the denial of the possibility of a lab leak,” Kristian Andersen, wrote: “Main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape..is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” Andersen had made that observation on February 1, 2020.
Yet in a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, Andersen and his colleagues Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry wrote that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
This was the one of the most cited research papers of 2020, accessed more than 5.8 million times. It rapidly became the basis on which mainstream media, tech companies, and government agencies began suppressing discussion of the lab-leak hypothesis.
It is also a lie, and the authors knew it before the paper was published. Emails show that the paper was rapidly guided to publication to “get ahead of the science and the narrative of this” and to “lay down a respected statement to frame whatever debate goes on — before that debate gets out of hand with potentially hugely damaging ramifications.”
The messages, revealed via Freedom of Information Act disclosures, prove that every one of the paper’s authors knew this was a lie when they wrote it, and they knew that reverse-genetics approaches had already been used to generate novel bat coronaviruses in certain Chinese labs.
They lied explicitly and at the request of U.S. government officials, with the clear intent of using scientific literature to shape a misleading public narrative. The cover-up was designed to render discussion of a lab leak off-limits, and it was wildly successful during a critical time in the course of the pandemic. Currently, the U.S. intelligence community states that “two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”
“Given the sh** 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 possibility distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes,” Rambaut wrote in a message, sent over Slack, the instant-messaging app that the researchers seemed to have deliberately chosen over email for their conversations.
“Yup, I totally agree that’s a very reasonable conclusion,” Anderson responded. “Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that.”
Andersen went on to state that the paper had been “prompted” by Fauci to tamp down on conspiracy theories. A company Andersen is associated with received a $8.9 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pandemic-preparedness grant finalized just two months after the paper was published.
Messages by Andersen seem to indicate that he was worried that Fauci, who approved the multimillion-dollar grant, might block the money if Andersen didn’t publicly share Fauci’s positions. Fauci was and remains a vocal supporter of the kind of gain-of-function research that was being conducted in Wuhan, even arguing, in 2012, that the research was worth the risk of a pandemic from a lab leak.
Garry, meanwhile, wrote that he was “pretty sure that ‘a proper paper on the origins and spread of the virus’ can be crafted that will not result in any casualties.” “We already know that the Chinese went into deep cover-up mode for example by shutting down the market and destroying the ‘evidence.’”
Anderson, Rambaut, and Holmes would go on to attend a key conference call with Fauci, which was summarized in an email by an attending Dutch virologist. The participants in the call concluded that “further debate about such accusations [of a Chinese lab leak] would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis has documented that multiple people on the call at the time viewed a lab leak as a probable cause of the outbreak. Holmes, for example, stated that he leaned “60–40 lab,” while Rambaut said that the natural-origin hypothesis “strikes me as unusual.”
In short, American scientists covered up the possible origin of Covid-19 — in part to protect “science in China.” It’s worth noting that the initial response of many Democrats to then–President Trump’s initial travel restrictions meant to block the spread of Covid into the U.S. was to attack them as xenophobic.
There is now a petition to retract the fraudulent Nature Medicine paper, which obviously downplayed the lab-leak hypothesis and, in so doing, inappropriately advanced the researchers’ financial interests as well as the Chinese government’s cover-up. But — as Nature states flat-out that it will only publish research that aligns with its ideological goals — don’t hold your breath.