(Daily Caller) Dr. Anthony Fauci was part of a group of scientists who, according to at least one of them, were working to “disprove” the lab-leak theory in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, emails show.
Fauci, who at the time was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, worked alongside others, including National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar, Scripps Research’s Kristian Andersen and Dutch Virologist Ron Fouchier to investigate early evidence on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, emails obtained by journalist Jimmy Tobias revealed. On Feb. 8, 2020, Andersen wrote in an email that the group’s work was “focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.”
Andersen ultimately became the first author listed on the paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the most influential paper published about the origins of COVID-19 during the early stages of the pandemic. The paper was cited by more than 2,000 media outlets and viewed nearly six million times online, according to The Intercept.
Unredacted NIH records detail early efforts to rule out lab origin of Covid — my latest for @theintercept and @thenation. It took more than a year of #FOIA litigation to obtain the documents featured in this story: https://t.co/U1Lqq4ZgHS
— Jimmy Tobias (@JamesCTobias) January 19, 2023
“Proximal Origin” promoted a natural origin theory of COVID-19 and was co-authored by several scientists who were in communication with Fauci in the weeks leading up to its publish date. Several members of the group were at first supportiveof the lab-leak theory before abruptly changing their course. By the end of things, Andersen was claiming the group existed to debunk the theory all along.
“Our main work over the last 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,” he wrote in that Feb. 8 email to the other scientists.
