GOP leadership on a House committee said Sunday it discovered new email evidence suggesting Dr. Anthony Fauci “prompted” the drafting of a “proximal origin” publication intended to “disprove” the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
In a new memo released Sunday, Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Majority Staff warned the rest of the committee members about “New evidence arising from the Select Subcommittee’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 – ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS -CoV-2’.'”
“New evidence released today by the Select Subcommittee suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory. The authors of this paper twisted available evidence to achieve that goal. , and Dr. Jeremy Farrar uncredited despite significant involvement,” the memo says.
On February 1, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and at least 11 other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. During the call, Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and may have been deliberately genetically engineered, the memo said.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, allegedly “prompted” the preparation of a publication that would “disprove” the lab leak theory, according to a new memo from the House committee. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Three days later, four conference call participants wrote a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2″ (Proximal Origin) and sent a draft to Fauci and Collins. Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the article was sent to Fauci for editing and approval.
“On April 16, 2020, a little over two months after the original conference call, Dr. Collins sent an email to Dr. Fauci expressing his displeasure that Proximal Origin – which they saw before publication and were given the opportunity to to edit — the lab did not squash the leak hypothesis and asks if the NIH can do more to ‘suppress’ the lab leak hypothesis,” the memo says. “The next day — after Dr. Collins had explicitly called for more public pressure – quoted Dr. Fauci Proximal Origin from the White House podium when asked if COVID-19 was leaking from a laboratory.”
The committee, chaired by Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, cited several emails that GOP leadership says, “suggests that Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘asked’ Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research (Scripps), to Proximal Origin and that the goal was to “disprove” any lab leak theory.
“On August 18, 2021, Scripps responded to the letter of July 29, 2021 from the then Committee on Oversight and Reform, James Comer, and the letter of July 29, 2021 from the then Committee on the Judiciary, Jim Jordan, to Dr. Andersen, the memo says. “In this letter, Scripps claims that Dr. Andersen “objectively” investigated the origins and that Dr. Anthony Fauci did not attempt to influence his work. Both statements do not appear to be supported by the available evidence.”
A researcher works in a lab in Wuhan in central China. A new memo from the House committee says Dr. Fauci urged researchers to disprove the lab leak theory at the start of the pandemic. (Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
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For example, in an excerpt from a Feb. 12, 2020 email included in the memo, Anderson writes that he, Fauci, Farrah, and colleagues Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and Ian Lipkin “are a major part of the (mainly) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypotheses about the origin of the virus.”
In a July 14, 2021 interview with The New York Times, Andersen was asked how his opinion changed from a possible lab leak to definitely zoonotic. Anderson claimed that he and other researchers “looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which showed that the features that first seemed unique to SARS-CoV-2 were, in fact, found in other, related viruses.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci quoted “Proximal Origins” from the White House podium after colleagues were upset that the paper was not doing more to “put down” the “lab leak hypothesis”. (Getty Images)
But as the majority of the committee points out, while Proximal Origin underwent a peer review with Nature Medicine more than a year earlier, Andersen found the pangolin data actually unconvincing.
“Privately, Dr. Andersen did not believe the pangolin data disproved a laboratory leak theory, despite saying so publicly. It is still unclear what intervening event changed the authors of Proximal Origin in such a short time. Based on this new evidence , the pangolin data was not the compelling factor—to this day, the only known intervening event was the Feb. 1 conference call with Dr. Fauci.
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In another email while drafting the paper, Lipkin claimed, “It doesn’t rule out the possibility of accidental release after adjustment by selection in the culture of the Wuhan institute. to judge.”
In an email dated February 17, 2020, Lipkin thanked Farrar for “herding” the paper, noting, “Rumors of biological weapons are now circulating in China.” Farrar agreed to push Nature to publish it.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.