Andrew Rambaut, evolutionary biologist and co-author of the highly influential essay “ The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 ,” which purportedly “debunked” the lab leak theory of COVID’s origin in March 2020, wrote the following to a fellow co-author a month before its release:

“Given the s*** show that would happen if anyone serious[ly] 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 to ascribing it to natural processes.”

The paper’s lead author, evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute, concurred, replying, “I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to.”

On its own, the exchange is damaging in the extreme, since it reveals that the scientists behind the seminal article put political considerations ahead of “the science.” Indeed, the authors, acting at the behest of former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins and former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, conducted a disinformation campaign to mislead the public on events surrounding the most consequential event of the century.

The implications for their malfeasance are so various and extensive that it is impossible to fully comprehend. Cited by more than 2,000 news outlets and viewed by millions of individual readers, the paper was used to mock dissenters, curtail civil liberties, and protect the Chinese Communist Party from facing consequences over its role in the outbreak of the global pandemic, all while depriving our pandemic response apparatus of the good science it desperately needed.

The emails establish that the authors themselves didn’t even believe what they wrote. In one email, Rambaut wrote: “I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural.” In another, written a month following the release, Dr. Andersen wrote that he “still couldn’t rule out engineering” and that “accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory.” These statements flatly contradict their words in the conclusion of the paper, which read: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

In one truly stomach-turning message, Andersen wrote the following to celebrate their newfound scientific celebrity: “We RUUUUUUULE. That’s tenure secured, right there.”

But the most troubling revelation from the emails is the picture it paints of Andersen and Co. as mere pawns in a larger plot to mislead the public. Andersen recently testified to Congress that the idea for the paper stemmed from a phone conversation between him and Fauci in late January. Once a draft was complete, the latter then sent edits to Andersen through Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust. And before the paper went up for publication, another co-author, Edward Holmes of Sydney University, signaled to his fellow authors that the paper had the stamp of approval from higher-ups, saying that “Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins are very happy” with how it turned out.

Following the paper's publication, a grant request for $8.9 million that Andersen had made to NIH was suddenly approved. Andersen now denies there was a quid pro quo. Naturally.

We must never forget that these same figures harangued skeptics to “follow the science” — a slogan parroted endlessly by supporters of the liberal establishment to bully and silence opposition. (Fauci even went so far as to declare himself “The Science” in his creepily messianic fashion.) But science had very little to do with the government line on COVID origins from the earliest stages. There was always an agenda toward which the facts were steered. The U.S.’s scientific establishment clearly didn't want the public to think that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab (we can only guess as to why), though this is now the favored explanation of the FBI and the Department of Energy’s elite “Z Division .”

Consider this breathtaking sequence of events: Fauci and Collins requested the “Proximal Origins” paper to be written, edited its drafts, authorized it for publication, and then proceeded to cite the paper as if it were independent scientific evidence! This is Soviet-level institutional dishonesty.

The ripple effects of this malfeasance are unfathomable. We needed good science to inform our COVID-19 response. We needed our leaders to tell us the truth, or at least not lie, in order to preserve what remained of our trust in institutions. Instead, we got sham science and scam leadership, which resulted in one of the world's worst pandemic responses, along with government imperiousness, as evidenced by recent revelations that the government and Big Tech colluded to censor dissent on COVID origins.

The "Proximal Origins" episode leaves the public with no reason to trust their institutions in similar crises in the future. This is an unqualified tragedy that will take generations to correct — if we make it that far.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and the founder of Crush the College Essay. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, the National Catholic Register, and the American Spectator.