Often cited study that he ordered up
Former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly dismissed concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China, after he commissioned a paper to “disprove” the theory, according to newly released emails.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released evidence Sunday that Fauci ordered, helped to edit, and gave final approval to a paper titled, “The Proximal Origin of SARSCoV-2,” which was published Feb. 17, 2020. Exactly two months later, Fauci used that same publication to wave away concerns that the virus might have come from the facility.
Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pointed reporters on April 17, 2020, to a paper by “a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists” published in Nature Medicine that showed the coronavirus had “mutations” that were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Fauci also told the White House press corps that “the paper will be available.”
One of the paper’s co-authors, Dr. Kristian Andersen, said Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins were two of several big scientific names who “prompted” him to write the study, according to a cover email submitted with the article to Nature Medicine on Feb. 12, 2020.
“Fear-mongering”
“There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space. [This paper was] prompted by . . . Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins,” Andersen wrote.
Sunday’s email release by the GOP-controlled panel calls into question repeated statements made by Fauci to members of Congress and the media during the pandemic, especially regarding NIH funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In a high-profile clash during a July 2021 hearing, Fauci told Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that “you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly,” when asked about his involvement with the research.
In January 2022, Paul and Fauci were at loggerheads again over a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call convened by Fauci, Collins and at least 11 other scientists, four of whom put their names on a first draft of the “Proximal Origins” paper to Fauci and Collins three days later.
“Did you communicate with the five scientists who wrote the opinion piece in Nature, where they were describing, ‘Oh, there’s no way this could have come from a lab’?” asked Paul at the time.
“That was not me,” Fauci said. “You keep distorting the truth. It is stunning how you do that.”
However, Andersen suggested otherwise Feb. 8, 2020, when he emailed a contact at the German Center for Infection Research: “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.”