According to the 55-page subcommittee report, up until this date, it has received over 8,000 pages of documents and over 25 hours of testimony from those involved in the impactful March 2020 study titled "The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2," which was published in the journal Nature. (Related: Congress seeks emails suggesting Fauci worked behind the scene to discredit COVID lab leak stories.)
?BREAKING ?
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic's report on the Suppression of the COVID-19 Lab Leak Hypothesis is out!
A few revelations below ?
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) July 11, 2023
The said piece played a major role in shutting down allegations that the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIH) in China.
The paper's four official authors, Kristian Andersen, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward Holmes and Robert Garry, concluded with dogmatic certainty that they do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. It was also proven that then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Fauci gave the scientists huge grants around the same time they published the paper.
Moreover, the study writers did not specify in the publication's ethics declarations that it was Fauci who oversaw the funding of coronavirus research at the WIH and commissioned and edited the paper. But the Congressional investigators eventually found the retired health official did so.
"This is one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history … expressing conclusions that were not based on sound science nor, in fact, but instead on assumptions," the subcommittee noted and called what happened to be "the anatomy of a cover-up."
"America's leading health officials vilified and suppressed the lab leak theory in pursuit of a preferred, coordinated narrative that was not based in truth or science" but was "crafted to appease a stated political motive," the committee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in a press release. "Stifling scientific discourse and labeling those who believe in the possibility of a lab leak as 'conspiracy theorists' caused irrefutable harm to public trust in our health officials."
The House report further detailed the "previously unrevealed Slack messages and emails between the co-authors, unabridged transcripts of interviews with every U.S.-based contributor to the paper, and a detailed analysis of the coordinated effort to suppress the lab-leak theory." It highlighted how another author Andrew Rambaut, communicating with his coauthors over a private chat channel on Feb. 2, 2020, wrote: "Given the sh** 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 processes."
Andersen replied, "Yup, I totally agree that that's a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science it's impossible not to, especially given the circumstances. We should be sensitive to that."
Another email released by the committee was from Ron Fouchier, one of the scientists who was on the February 1, 2020, conference call with Fauci and the paper's future authors. Like the other scientists, he expressed concern about the possibility of China facing any fallout over the pandemic.
"An accusation that nCoV-2019 might have been engineered and released into the environment by humans (accidental or intentional) would … do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular," he wrote.
The subcommittee identified that a possible motive behind the apparent efforts to downplay the lab-leak theory is that virologists either wanted to defend China or play diplomat. Another is that they may have wanted to "lessen the likelihood of increased biosafety and laboratory regulations."
The lab leak theory was initially discredited by scientific authorities and U.S. government officials, though recently, some agencies have endorsed the theory that the virus may have originated in a laboratory. As per FBI Director Christopher Wray back in March, the intel agency has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident. Meanwhile, in February, the Department of Energy took back its initial assessment and now it said its stand was no longer "undecided." It was announced to have "low confidence" in a lab leak being the origin. And in 2021, President Joe Biden noted that the intelligence committee had "coalesced around two scenarios" of coronavirus' origin, one of which was the lab leak theory.
What was initially tagged as a "conspiracy theory" is now starting to be proven true. Fauci has not yet responded to requests for comment.
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