ANALYSIS: ‘I Hate When Politics Is Injected Into Science’: Text Messages of Top Scientists Shed Light on COVID Origin Response

Messages suggest politicized response to COVID origin concerns in attempt to protect China

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. Thomas Peter/Reuters

News Analysis

A new report released by Republican members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic includes new evidence that a group of scientists who received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), conspired to dismiss the origin of the pandemic in order to protect China.

The text messages were exchanged between authors of the Proximal Origin paper, initiated by then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, which had the explicit purpose of dismissing the lab leak theory for the pandemic’s origin. The Proximal Origin paper, which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” became one of the most cited science papers of all time and was prominently used by Dr. Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus came from nature.

While Dr. Fauci’s role in directing the paper’s creation as well as the paper’s many scientific and logical flaws have been widely documented, the exact circumstances of the paper’s origin have remained unclear. Text messages released by the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic now reveal that it was fear of upsetting international relations, and the Chinese regime in particular, that drove the inception of Proximal Origin.

According to emails obtained by the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, concerns regarding COVID-19’s engineered-looking features were first discussed by Proximal Origin author Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney and British pharmaceutical trust director Jeremy Farrar on Jan. 8, 2020. Mr. Farrar is now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist. Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as well as unnamed Chinese officials were also included in these early, behind-the-scenes discussions.

It remains unknown why Mr. Farrar—who later co-organized with Dr. Fauci a Feb. 1, 2020, teleconference that resulted in the drafting of Proximal Origin—was deeply entangled in the effort to suppress the lab leak theory and instead elevate the natural origin narrative. Notably, Mr. Farrar is a close personal friend of Gao Fu, who was at the time the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. Mr. Farrar later admitted in his book “Spike” that he was concerned at the time about Sino–U.S. relations.

While Mr. Holmes, Mr. Farrar, Dr. Collins, and the unnamed Chinese officials were discussing the virus’s unusual features, NIAID-funded scientist Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute contacted Mr. Holmes to share his own concerns about the new virus, in particular its unusual receptor binding domain and furin cleavage site. Mr. Andersen had also uncovered that the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Shi Zhengli, had—together with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, who is sometimes referred to as the godfather of gain-of-function experiments—inserted furin cleavage sites into SARS viruses. In other words, Mr. Andersen had detected a highly unusual furin cleavage site in COVID-19, a site that has to this day never been observed in naturally occurring viruses of this kind, and found direct evidence that the WIV had inserted such sites into coronaviruses. Mr. Holmes responded, “[expletive], this is bad” and “oh my god what worse words than that.”

On Jan. 31, 2020, Mr. Farrar talked to Dr. Fauci about the virus’s unusual features. At the same time, Mr. Andersen contacted Dr. Fauci by email, saying that the virus’s features looked potentially engineered and that its genetic makeup was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

It was at this point that Dr. Fauci and Mr. Farrar organized the teleconference, which was held the next day, on Feb. 1, 2020. The ostensible purpose of the teleconference was to develop the Proximal Origin paper to counter the lab leak theory. Mr. Andersen became the paper’s lead author and was joined by fellow teleconference participants Mr. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, and Robert Garry of Tulane University as co-authors.

A fifth co-author, Ian Lipkin of Columbia University, was brought on board later in February 2020. Mr. Lipkin did not participate in the teleconference and has since distanced himself from the natural origin narrative. Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) has stated that Mr. Lipkin is cooperating with congressional investigators.

The new text messages released by Mr. Wenstrup’s Committee reveal for the first time that the four Proximal Origin authors who attended Dr. Fauci’s teleconference started a Slack group to discuss the paper. In a message sent in the morning of Feb. 2, 2020, the day after the teleconference, Mr. Rambaut told co-authors Mr. Andersen, Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Garry:

“Given the [expletive] show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”

Within three minutes, Mr. Andersen replied:

“Yup, I totally agree that that’s a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that.”

These messages contradict the public claims by Mr. Andersen that he was not concerned with politics and that it was others who politicized the question of COVID-19’s origin.

The exchange between Mr. Rambaut and Mr. Andersen indicate that the efforts of Dr. Fauci’s group to elevate the natural origin theory had nothing to do with science and were driven from the start by a desire to protect China. Mr. Rambaut’s admission that it is not possible to distinguish between natural evolution and lab creation and that the Proximal Origin group should therefore simply blame natural processes is tantamount to a smoking gun. It suggests the authors never had the intention of writing a scientific paper—instead, they were focused on covering up the pandemic’s true origin.

Mr. Andersen went even further, telling his co-authors that given the political concerns, the preprint site bioRxiv should “start screening submissions – it’s a slippery slope, but it’s justified at this stage.” A preprint site is a site where scientists can upload their research prior to peer review. Mr. Andersen was essentially proposing to censor scientists who did not toe the political line on COVID-19’s origin.

The political motivations of the origins cover-up are further corroborated by a previously released message from Ron Fouchier, who also attended the teleconference. At the same time that the Proximal Origin authors were having their discussion on Slack on Feb. 2, Mr. Fouchier wrote an email to the teleconference group stating that “further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”

Mr. Fouchier is a Dutch virologist whose controversial gain-of-function experiments, whereby he created airborne viruses, led the Obama administration to impose its 2014 moratorium on such experiments. The moratorium was later lifted by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins during the Trump administration.

In response, NIH head Dr. Collins chimed in, telling the group, “the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”