"In Their Labs": Fifteen Illuminating Passages in The Proximal Origin Chats and Emails
Communications between officials and scientists who wrote the key paper promoting a natural origin for Covid-19 show doubts, interference, politicized science, and more
Public and Racket have just published a pair of stories about a scientific cover-up and the manufacture of a major media deception, respectively, in the Covid-19 crisis. Both stories rely upon newly released documents from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating communications between the authors of the influential Nature article from March, 2020, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, and health officials like Drs. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar.
You can read the backstory involving these documents in the two pieces linked above. The key characters are Proximal Origin co-authors Dr. Kristian Andersen, Dr. Robert Garry, Dr. Andrew Rambaut, Dr. Edward Holmes, and Dr. Ian Lipkin. Here, I thought Racket readers might benefit from a simple list of illustrations showing key exchanges. You can draw your own conclusions:
Jeremy Farrar, now of the WHO, not only edited the Nature draft, he made a key change to its most quoted line:
Proximal Origin Co-Author Kristian Andersen makes reference to a draft being ready to “go up the chain”:
Dr. Garry mentions that some may not like an early draft because it “allows… the nCoV may have arisen during cell culture passage in a lab (their labs).”
Farrar will “push Nature” to get the article out “ASAP”:
Andersen gets rejection letter from Nature, with concern about “whether such a piece would feed or quash the conspiracy theories”:
Andersen laments that a draft doesn’t “refute a lab origin” which “must be considered as a serious scientific theory” and “not dismissed out of hand as a conspiracy theory”:
Co-author Ian Lipkin is not only “very worried about the furin cleavage site,” but “high ups are as well, inc. intel”:
“Close enough?” Co-authors propose cartoon image of EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak:
Dr. Holmes: “Good idea not to mention all the other anomalies as this will make us look like loons.”
Garry roots for Trump to “say more dumb stuff about the origins of the China virus, possibly poisoning Sino-American relations for decades,” then asks, “Does this make me a bad person?”
Holmes on news that Lipkin has contracted Covid-19: “Well, that’s made my day.”
Andersen “still leaning towards” cell culture hypothesis:
“The furin would be the first thing to add for sure.”
“Whatever has happened here, the virus has become very quickly loaded for human transition.”
Andersen: “The presence of furin moves me a posteriori slightly more towards accidental release..”
They were having discussions among themselves, but were quick to throw dissenters off social media for asking THE SAME QUESTIONS being asked by the experts. And we never once heard those questions get asked in public.
The more we learn, the worse this looks.
“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site,” writes Dr. Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of covid. At least 11 such experiments have been published, including one by Shi Zhengli, the "bat woman" who was the scientist leading gain of function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of the California Institute of Technology.
https://euphoricrecall.substack.com/p/covid-came-from-the-wuhan-institute