Officials at the National Institutes of Health were heavily involved in downplaying the lab leak theory of the origin of the coronavirus, according to a new report released by the Republican majority on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
"This is the anatomy of a cover-up," the report read.
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“America’s leading health officials vilified and suppressed the lab leak theory in pursuit of a preferred, coordinated narrative that was not based in truth or science,” Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) said in advance of a public hearing on Tuesday regarding the publication of the paper "The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2," which was cited by top officials in 2020 as evidence that the virus did not originate in a lab.
“The Select Subcommittee’s report proves that the conclusions championed by the co-authors of Proximal Origin are not only inaccurate, but were crafted to appease a stated political motive,” Wenstrup said.
The Republican report synthesizes over 8,000 pages of documents collected from a subpoena of the communications between the authors, which reveal that National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, then-NIH Director Francis Collins, then-NIH ethics director Lawrence Tabak, and World Health Organization Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar were instrumental in the writing and publication of the paper.
Kristian Andersen, a researcher at the Scripps Research Institute and later one of the authors of the paper, spoke with Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, at which time Andersen expressed concern that the virus was engineered, possibly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The next day, the soon-to-be authors of the scientific paper engaged in a conference call with Fauci, Collins, Tabak, and other scientists. Communications between the authors after the Feb. 1 conference call led the subcommittee to surmise that the political implications of the scientific findings were discussed on the call.
Lamenting the political consequences of their research, author Andrew Rambaut said in private communications on Feb. 2: “Given the s*** 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 process.”
Andersen agreed with Rambaut, noting: “Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but its impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that.”
Anderson also commented at the time that the team’s research was “really critical to countering all the friggin’ bulls*** coming out and at the end of the day that’s probably the most important thing that’ll come out of this!”
“While the exact motives to want to downplay a specific theory are not clear, the authors‘ communications suggest they wanted to avoid blaming China and defend gain-of-function research,” the subcommittee’s report read.
The subcommittee also revealed that the journal Nature initially rejected the final draft of "The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2" because it did not discount the lab-leak theory strongly enough. After revising to strengthen the language denying the lab-leak theory, the paper was accepted into Nature Medicine on Feb. 27 and published on March 5.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released a declassified report demonstrating that the intelligence community’s assessment of the lab-leak theory is divided and that there is not enough information to determine the human involvement in manipulating the coronavirus.
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"The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2" has over 5.8 million views and has been cited over 2,800 times since its publication, making it the fifth-most influential scientific paper on record.
“Proximal Origin employed fatally flawed science to achieve its goal [of avoiding blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic]. And, finally, Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci used Proximal Origin to attempt to kill the lab leak theory," the subcommittee report read.