Virologists told the public the virus could not have come from a lab – but privately knew it was plausible
Early in the COVID pandemic in March 2020, a paper in Nature Medicine – known for short as "Proximal Origin" – helped push the lab-leak theory of the origins of COVID-19 into the realm of taboo. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," and, "We do not believe that any type of lab-based scenario is plausible," its authors, Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Robert Garry, and Andrew Rambaut, stated. Yet new Slack messages (till 2022) from the Proximal Origin authors, released by Sen. Rand Paul, show that in late 2021, these influential virologists
— knew it was plausible that Wuhan scientists had created COVID-19 (genetically modified origin)
— were still talking to Anthony Fauci's people about COVID origins.
There is also further confirmation in the Slack messages that the Proximal Origin authors, who were such key players in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory, had privately considered a lab leak to be plausible from very early on, even claiming, in the words of Eddie Holmes, to be "some of the very first people to actually raise the lab escape issue".
That they had considered a lab leak plausible before writing the Proximal Origin paper, which unambiguously asserted the exact opposite, was already known from previously released private messages, including one in which Kristian Andersen told his colleagues in February 2020 that a lab escape was "so friggin' likely to have happened because they [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario".
What the newly released Slack messages now make clear is that behind closed doors they considered a lab leak plausible both before and after they wrote Proximal Origin. In fact, just a few months after the publication of their paper, Kristian Andersen told his co-authors he believed both a natural and a lab-origin scenario were "equally probable".
The new Slack messages also make clear that the authors considered themselves far from alone among their peers in finding a lab leak plausible. Kristian Andersen even said in a June 2020 message: "Most scientists I talk to believe there is a likely connection to the lab – people that are themselves doing GOF [virus gain-of-function] and culture-type of experiments, they know the risks and don't seem to think that a natural explanation is more likely".
You can read researcher Alina Chan's damning thread on X about the newly released messages here. She comments: "I cannot see how anyone can read these 1000+ pages of slack messages and still walk away thinking these Proximal Origin virologists are the good guys (or even good scientists) in this story."
Molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright commented on the revelations: "The claim – repeated literally thousands of times by journalists – that most scientists favour a natural origin of COVID and oppose a lab origin of COVID always was a lie. And almost always was a deliberate lie."
And Andrew Noymer, associate professor at the UCI Program in Public Health, commented on the paper that was so influential at the time in stifling debate globally on the possibility of a lab leak: "To everyone who threw up the 'proximal origins' ['P.O.'] paper as strong evidence of zoonosis [natural spillover of the virus from animals]:
— credulous people like you believed it;
— bad-faith actors espoused it without believing it;
— its own authors, we now know from the Slacks, didn't believe it before or after publication."
Noymer is calling for retraction of the Proximal Origin paper on the grounds that it is fraudulent, in that the "Just-released Slack messages prove that conclusions in P.O. were not the good-faith beliefs of the authors."
GMWatch challenged the Proximal Origin claims from the start, arguing that a laboratory accident or research-related escape was plausible.
In 2021 FBI stopped US Customs and Border Protection from questioning Daszak
Newly released government records show that, as part of an investigation tied to the origins of COVID-19, US Customs and Border Protection prepared in February 2021 to detain and question Peter Daszak, the British zoologist and then president of EcoHealth Alliance, when he landed at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport following a World Health Organization mission to China. EcoHealth Alliance had been a contractor and collaborator on work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on novel chimeric bat coronaviruses and, according to the documents, investigators intended to examine the flow of US federal research funding to the WIV and Daszak's role in that relationship. But the interview never happened. Three days before the planned stop of Daszak, the FBI's New York Field Office intervened, instructing CBP to immediately halt the operation. The previously undisclosed episode came to light through official documents released by Sen. Rand Paul.