Emails from early 2020 show that UK’s top scientists were warned that Covid-19 could have evolved in laboratory animals but concealed those findings after consulting with Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The recently released emails reveal that authors of the “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” one of the most influential papers regarding the COVID virus, all had concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s store of novel coronaviruses.
The authors of the “proximal origin” article are virologists Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, Robert Garry, Andrew Rambaut and Ian Lipkin.
It took freelance journalist James Tobias 15 months and a Freedom of Information request to obtain the emails.
A teleconference In Feb. 2020, organized by Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar and including Dr. Anthony Fauci was significant in forming the early drafts of the paper. However, it is now revealed that several of the doctors on the call had conflicts of interest due to their connections to the Wuhan lab.
Some background on Sachs’ reference to February 2020, an article I wrote for @USATODAY:
'I remember it very well': Dr. Fauci describes a secret 2020 meeting to talk about COVID originshttps://t.co/TCGxgqHyIz
— Alison Young (@alisonannyoung) September 16, 2022
The emails also showed that it was Farrar, with the agreement of Fauci, who pushed the Directors of WHO to “get ahead of the science and the narrative of this.”
The timeline of events reveals that in January 2020, Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen discovered a paper involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology describing gain-of-function techniques with coronaviruses.
Anderson discussed her finding with Fauci. Anderson and two other virologists found the virus to be “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
A draft circulated in February did not mention the lab leak theory.
In April, Fauci, using the paper as his source, told reporters that COVID-19 is “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
In August, a new grant was extended from NIAID to Andersen’s lab.
In June, Fauci and the other three virologists encouraged a researcher to rethink a preprint about early SARS-CoV-2 sequences and to delete it from the preprint server.
Fauci has repeatedly denied downplaying the possibility that the virus came from the lab for political reasons.
In March 2021, The World Health Organization’s report on COVID’s origins was released, stating that a lab origin was “extremely unlikely.“
