I don't see much MSM so I don't know how much, if any, they're covering this, but I get the impression that it's not very much. The communications between the scientists were published by PUBLIC the other day, although I don't know if you have to be a subscriber to see them or not. I'm a subscriber and I don't know what non-subscribers see. The communications start at Feb 1, 2020 and go on some months, I don't know how many. I've only read the first few days worth so far. Not surprisingly, behind the scenes there was real doubt about the origin, unlike the face they presented to the public.
Anthony Fauci Behind Covid Origins Disinformation, Evidence Suggests Communications between scientists show pressure from “higher ups” to dismiss the lab leak theory of Covid origins
Last week Public and Racket revealed that top researchers privately believed a lab leak was plausible despite claiming to rule it out in a hugely influential March 2020 paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” These revelations have led to growing calls by neutral observers for Nature Medicine to retract the paper. “I’m not a big petition guy,” said statistician Nate Silver, “but if Nature isn't ready to retract this paper on their own that's a big L for their credibility and about as clear a sign as you can get that they're elevating politics above science.” Roger Pielke, Jr., a leading science policy expert, wrote, “The case for retracting Proximal Origins is overwhelming because we now know, undeniably, that it was seriously flawed and misleading.” Yet on July 22, Nature Medicine’s editor-in-chief, Joao Monteiro, told The Telegraph that a retraction was “not warranted” because the paper was a “point of view” and not a research study. In 2020, however, Nature Medicine and the paper’s authors presented “Proximal Origin” as a peer-reviewed analysis, not as an opinion piece. Then-director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Anthony Fauci, upheld the paper as definitive scientific research, and the World Health Organization (WHO) used it as a basis for ruling out “deliberate bioengineering” in its own origins investigation. It appears that Nature Medicine is framing this paper as a “point of view” because the authors’ private Slack messages show that they had major misgivings about their own evidence and findings. The question now turns to why the scientists decided to rule out “any laboratory-based scenario” despite privately recognizing that such a scenario was, indeed, highly plausible. Share As Public documented, the process of writing “Proximal Origin” was a scramble for intermediate species — first, ferrets, and then pangolins — to explain how the virus could have jumped from bats to humans. And even then, the scientists did not fully believe their own explanation. In April 2020, two months after the pre-print of “Proximal Origin,” Andersen and the other authors still had doubts about the zoonotic spillover hypothesis. The authors now claim that their decision to mislead the public and conceal information was simply “scientists doing science,” but the discrepancy between their public and private statements is simply too large to justify. Good scientists frequently make painstaking observations before they can come to conclusions. Data must be collected, often multiple times. Analyses must be conducted and re-conducted to ensure that the findings are sound. There are good reasons for such patience. Science has for years been in what is known as a “replication crisis.” Efforts to replicate the findings of even famous studies have repeatedly failed, in multiple disciplines. And the cost to scientists’ reputations and careers of rushing to judgment is high, as the recent demands for the retraction of “Proximal Origin” show. So why, then, did the “Proximal Origin” scientists risk their reputations by pushing forward with a poorly-reasoned paper? For their three months of discussion, the authors were keenly aware of the political implications of a lab leak. If anyone accused China of releasing the virus, it would be a “shit show,” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh said. But political concerns alone do not explain the authors’ decision to publish. They knew that completely discounting a “laboratory-based scenario” was unwise and that they lacked sufficient evidence to do so. “As to publishing this document in a journal, I am currently not in favor of doing so. I believe publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this state,” Andersen wrote on February 8, 2020. “I think it’s important that we try to gather additional evidence — including waiting on the pangolin viral sequences and further scrutinize the furin cleave site and O-linked glycans — before publishing.”
We know though, that the group never did find conclusive pangolin sequences. “Unfortunately the pangolins don’t help clarify the story,” Andersen wrote on February 20, three days after the authors published their pre-print. If Andersen didn’t get the evidence he said was needed, why did he publish? The authors were also aware of the fact that misrepresenting the data would be unethical. On February 9, Robert Garry of Tulane University argued that not addressing accidental infection in a lab would look “like a cover up.” And again, on February 17, Garry asserted that ruling out accidental release would lead to “cries of COVER-UP.”
So why did the “Proximal Origin” scientists end up jeopardizing their status and esteem by rushing to publish a paper they knew was misleading? And who ultimately pushed them to engage in this cover-up? Please subscribe now to support Public’s groundbreaking investigative reporting. “Pressure From On High”
For the “Proximal Origin” scientists, the possibility that the virus had been engineered was never just a vague concern but was directly tied to experiments that implicated both the Chinese and American governments. On February 2, 2020, after sharing alarming papers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with his colleagues, Andersen noted that these papers were associated with the USAID-funded PREDICT program, a $140 million effort to “predict pandemics” by finding and sampling viruses from animal hosts, including bats. “One thing I find kinda funny here,” wrote Andersen, “— all of this work getting bat samples was supported by PREDICT. So if they’re not able to predict the pandemics they themselves cause, then I’d say their program is in pretty bad shape.”
Responded Rambaut, “Perhaps they had planned a press conference predicting which virus would cause the next pandemic but then it escaped from the lab early?” This exchange suggests that the authors themselves harbored suspicions, not only that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a Chinese lab, but also that a US-funded program may have been involved as well. In this context, the implications of a lab leak would have enormous global ramifications. “Destroy the world based on sequence data,” wrote Andersen on February 1, 2020, “Yay or nay?” If they came to the conclusion that the sequence data suggested engineering, Andersen implied, it would figuratively “destroy the world.” Tellingly, Andersen sent this question to the Slack channel while they were on a conference call with Fauci. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and Jeremy Farrar, former chief scientist at the WHO and then-director of the Wellcome Trust, were also on the call. The Slack channel during this brief time frame thus gives us a glimpse into the scientists’ back-channel discussions about whatever Fauci and his colleagues were saying. “Big ask!” Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney wrote about 40 minutes into the teleconference. “Makes sense what he’s saying - but man that’s hard to pull off,” Andersen wrote.
What was this “big ask” that was “hard to pull off”? The communications that follow indicate that Fauci, Collins, and/or Farrar asked the scientists on the call to prove that the virus was not the result of gain-of-function research, and suggested that they write a paper to discredit the lab leak theory due to, as Collins wrote in one email, the theory’s “great potential harm to science and international harmony.” A few days later, Andersen told Nature virology editor Clare Thomas that Fauci, Collins, and Farrar had “prompted” the scientists to write “Proximal Origin.” At this time, Andersen had an $8.9 million NIH grant hanging in the balance. During the writing and editing process, the authors referred to Collins and Fauci as the “Bethesda boys” because their offices were located in Bethesda, Maryland. The “Bethesda boys” and Farrar did not merely supervise the writing of the paper - they appear very likely to have directed its content. After Andersen suggested that a first draft should be sent “up the chain,” Fauci and Collins voiced concern that culturing or serial passaging (a process through which a virus can be made more infectious to humans) was still included as a possible origin. Farrar, for his part, pressed the authors to remove it. Shortly after publishing the preprint, Holmes told Andersen, “Sorry the last bit had to be done without you… pressure from on high.”
Ten minutes later, Holmes sent another email that stated, “Jeremy Farrar and Francis Collins are very happy. Works for me.” Farrar was so heavily involved in the paper that the scientists wanted to list him as a co-author. Farrar refused in order to appear “neutral.” But he wasn’t. Indeed, Farrar contacted Nature’s editor-in-chief directly, in early February, asking her to publish what would become “Proximal Origin.” Later, on February 17, when the authors published their pre-print, Farrar wrote that rumors about bioweapons were why he was “so keen to get [the paper] out ASAP” and that he would “push Nature.” So why were Fauci and his allies pressuring Nature and the “Proximal Origin” authors to manufacture the natural origin narrative? Despite Fauci’s repeated claims under oath that the NIH never funded gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, it is clear that the agency did in fact fund this type of research through its private grantee, EcoHealth Alliance. On January 27, 2020, Fauci received an email alerting him to the fact that NIAID had given a grant to EcoHealth Alliance for its work in Wuhan. He therefore knew that his agency was directly funding research that likely led to the development of SARS-CoV-2. A newly released email shows that by February 1, 2020, Fauci was concerned about the fact that scientists in Wuhan were “working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection.”
On June 13 of this year, Public and Racket reported that, according to government sources, the first three people infected with COVID-19 were Chinese scientists conducting gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronaviruses. The Wall Street Journal has since corroborated this reporting. Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that one of the researchers, Ben Hu, was a lead experimenter on three grants (totaling $41 million) issued by USAID and Fauci’s NIAID. These grants funded the sampling of bat coronaviruses in the field and the creation of recombinant viruses that were transmissible in human cells - precisely the kind of research Fauci was concerned about in his February 1 email. Although Fauci had clear personal reasons to discredit the lab leak hypothesis, he did not act alone. Several messages and emails indicate that other top government officials and the intelligence community may have also been involved. “I suspect Bethesda will be sending it around already,” Rambaut wrote on February 5, 2020, suggesting that Fauci and Collins were sharing a draft of their paper with other individuals. Five days later, Holmes wrote that their co-author Ian Lipkin of Columbia University was “very worried about the furin cleavage site and says that higher ups are as well, inc. intel.” Holmes added that this was “consistent with all we know too.” In their interviews with the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Andersen and Garry said that “higher ups” could have meant the intelligence community, government agencies, and/or the White House. The new trove of Slacks and emails obtained by Public and Racket show that, in addition to the February 1 teleconference, Fauci organized another pivotal meeting with Andersen on February 3 that may have involved such “higher ups.” This meeting was with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), and it included personnel from the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In an email on February 4, Andersen wrote that Fauci “called that meeting” and that the purpose was to put out “a statement about this not being ‘engineering.’”
Before this meeting, the “Proximal Origin” authors were still using their Slack channel to discuss different theories about the virus’ origin. After the NASEM meeting, they began communicating as though their only goal was to prove natural origin. Although we still do not know what exactly happened on February 3, it is clear that several government agencies and officials had immense and inappropriate power over the scientific process, and that they pressured leading virologists to manufacture a “scientific consensus” for political and self-interested reasons. Share The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of “Pandemic Preparedness”
For Fauci and Collins, hiding evidence about a possible lab leak may have been a matter of self-preservation. For decades, U.S. health institutions have been funding gain-of-function research. Time and time again, Fauci and Collins personally ignored calls for safety, regulation, and caution during their respective tenures at NIAID and NIH. After 9/11, President George Bush passed the “Biodefense in the 21st Century Act” and put Fauci in charge of civilian biodefense efforts. In a 2002 talk at George Washington University, Fauci stated that he learned how to fulfill his new role from “bioweaponers,” and between 2004 and 2007, Fauci earned a 68% pay increase in his annual salary. Another part of Bush’s “Biodefense” Act was “Threat Awareness,” which would likely include the USAID PREDICT Program that Andersen joked was “not able to predict the pandemics they themselves cause.” There were many warning signs that government-funded gain-of-function experiments could go wrong. The first sign came in 2011, when virologist Ron Fouchier modified H5N1 (bird flu) to make it transmissible among ferrets. Due to safety concerns, the NIH biosecurity board unanimously recommended against publishing certain research methodologies. In response, Fauci and Collins doubled down on the importance of gain-of-function research and wrote an op-ed called “A flu virus risk worth taking,” in the Washington Post. Two years later, the NIH issued its initial $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance. Shortly afterward, Fauci and Collins received another warning sign. Several lab accidents occurred in the U.S., involving smallpox, bird flu, and anthrax. As a result, the Obama Administration froze gain-of-function funding and established a committee that could oversee NIH projects. This should have been a wake-up call for Fauci and Collins. Instead, they took steps to off-shore gain-of-function work and weaken the authority of the federal oversight committee. In doing so, Fauci and Collins created a situation in which there was little proper regulation for potentially dangerous research. In early February 2020, Fauci began calling the lab leak a “conspiracy theory,” even though he knew that gain-of-function research was potentially dangerous, that lab accidents had happened in the past, and that SARS-CoV-2 had features indicating a possible lab origin. “We know that these things come from an animal reservoir,” Fauci told Newt Gingrich on February 9, 2020. “I've heard these conspiracy theories,” Fauci said, “And like all conspiracy theories, Newt, they're just conspiracy theories.” The actions described above suggest that Fauci suspected, or knew, that his skirting of the ban on funding gain-of-function research may have caused the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. The purpose of the biodefense initiatives that began twenty years ago was to equip the country’s institutions with funding to combat, predict, and preempt biological threats. This was the beginning of the 21st-century militarization of public health, and it ultimately led to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Biodefense and pandemic preparedness resulted in the creation, rather than the prevention, of a major health catastrophe. Yet instead of taking time to re-assess the role of biodefense and the failures of preparedness initiatives, last week the White House established a permanent Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy that will be led not by a public health expert but by a former military Major General. As the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic continues to investigate Covid’s origins and the Covid response, it is essential that we recognize the lessons of the “Proximal Origin” debacle. What the authors’ Slack messages have exposed more than anything else is that peer-reviewed science is not sacred and that scientists are not neutral arbiters of truth. Today, the scientific process and scientific institutions are dominated by warped financial incentives, military contracts, and political motives. When the next medical and scientific crisis inevitably arrives, it is incumbent on us all to remember that “scientific consensus” is not always determined by discovery and open debate, but often by the demands of dishonest and self-interested “higher ups.” |
