House Republicans probing the Covid-19 pandemic uncovered new emails that reveal that Dr. Anthony Fauci “prompted” or commissioned a scientific paper in February 2020 to disprove the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Fauci also had final approval on the paper.
Dr. Fauci stood side-by-side with then-President Donald Trump eight weeks later and cited the paper as evidence that the theory about a lab leak was implausible. He pretended the paper had nothing to do with him and did not know the authors.
When Fauci was asked if the virus could have originated in a Chinese lab, he told reporters on April 17, 2020, that “There was a study recently, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences…in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
“So, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you,” said Fauci.
Fauci edited the draft form and gave final approval of the paper
The paper, titled” The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was sent to Dr. Fauci to edit the draft form and then again to give final approval before it was published on February 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine.
The report was written four days after Dr. Fauci and his boss at the NIH, Francis Collins, held a call in which the four authors discussed reports that Covid-19 may have been leaked from the Wuhan lab and “may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.”
The House Oversight subcommittee published emails on Sunday in which the paper’s co-author, Dr. Kristian Andersen, admitted Dr. Fauci “prompted” him to write the paper with the overarching goal to “disprove” the theory of the lab leak.
February 12, 2020, Andersen submitted the paper to Nature Medicine, along with a cover email that read, “There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space. [This paper was] Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins.”
The then head of the British nonprofit the Wellcome Trust, Farrar, was given the critical role of Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization last December. The nonprofit has historical ties to the Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical industry.
The “Proximal Origin” paper was published, and on the same day, emails showed Farrar pushing for a critical change, “Sorry to micromanage/micro edit! But would you be willing to change one sentence?”
Farrar requested to change the word “unlikely” to “improbable” in a statement about the origin of the lab leak so that it would read, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus.”
The lingering question of why Fauci went to such great lengths to cover up the origins of Covid-19 is a critical focus on the GOP-led committee.
