Rand Paul Discloses COVID Authors' Private Lab Leak Conversations
The messages show some authors privately assigned up to a 30% chance of a lab origin while publicly backing a natural explanation.
- On Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul released internal Slack messages from authors of 'The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,' revealing that Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut privately harbored significant doubts about ruling out a laboratory origin.
- While the group's March 2020 Nature Medicine paper publicly argued for natural zoonotic spillover, internal messages show they privately discussed Gain-of-Function research risks and noted the 'remarkable similarity' between COVID-19 and a 2018 grant proposal.
- In the messages, Andersen reportedly assigned a roughly 30% probability to a lab origin, while Holmes estimated 10%. The authors also discussed the virus's furin cleavage site as 'some smoking guns' that eroded their confidence in ruling out laboratory involvement.
- The Slack exchanges reveal close coordination with the National Institutes and the Intelligence Community, with Andersen telling co-authors he would 'have a handler' on the same day Anthony Fauci met with intelligence officials during the 90-day origins sprint.
- Senator Rand Paul argues the messages demonstrate a stark contrast between the authors' private assessments and their public stance, as the committee continues investigating federal handling of COVID-19 origins and the Nature Medicine paper's influence on early pandemic discourse.
64 Articles
64 Articles
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Authors who dismissed COVID-19 lab-leak theory in paper privately said they weren't sure
Share This StoryAuthors of a paper that dismissed the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory said months after the paper was published that it was possible COVID-19 came from a lab, according to newly released messages. “Gotta say – some smoking(ish) guns starting to appear that I’m not comfortable with,” Kristian Andersen, one of the authors and a professor at Scripps Research, wrote in a Slack message on June 11, 2020. He was responding t…
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