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Congressional researchers working on the House Coronavirus Pandemic Select Subcommittee claim that there is evidence to suggest that Dr. Anthony Fauci “prompted” the drafting of a paper to “disprove” the theory that the Covid-19 virus originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
According to a memo circulated in the House, the committee researchers wrote, “The evidence available to the Select Subcommittee suggests that Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘prompted’ Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research (Scripps), to write Proximal Origin and that the goal was to ‘disprove’ any ‘lab leak theory,'” the memo claims.
The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was published in the academic journal Nature Medicine in March of 2020, one month after Dr. Fauci was informed that the original strain of Covid-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that his agency has been accused of funding to perform gain-of-function research.
Fauci vehemently denied his agency funded the research when confronted with the allegations in a congressional hearing by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.
On Feb. 1, 2020, Dr. Fauci participated in a conference call with other prominent scientists where the scientists identified the “very real possibility of accidental lab passage” from the Wuhan lab.
However, just three days later, on Feb. 4, 2020, four of the scientists on the conference call collaborated on the “Proximal Origin” paper and concluded that “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
According to the committee researchers, Dr. Fauci “prompted the drafting of a publication that would disprove the lab leak theory.”
The lead author of the paper, Dr. Kristian G. Andersen from Scripps Research, wrote the following email on Feb. 12, 2020, to Nature Medicine explaining the reasons for the paper:
“There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space and we thought that bringing some clarity to this discussion might be of interest to Nature [sic]. Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus.”
A paper draft was sent to Dr. Fauci and the then-Director of the National Institute of Health Francis Collins for “edit and approval.”
So, unbeknownst to the public, the committee researchers claim, that Dr. Fauci commissioned and edited the study published in an academic journal he later cited on the national stage to discredit the Wuhan lab leak theory; instead, he continued to claim that the virus jumped from an animal to a human in a natural setting.
