Former White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly dismissed concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China — after he commissioned a paper to “disprove” the theory, according to newly released emails.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released evidence Sunday that Fauci ordered, helped to edit, and gave final approval to a paper titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published on Feb. 17, 2020. Exactly two months later, Fauci used that same publication to wave away concerns that the virus might have come from a Chinese facility.
Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pointed reporters on April 17, 2020, to a paper by “a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists” published in Nature Medicine that showed the coronavirus had “mutations” that were “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Fauci also told the White House press corps that “the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”
One of the paper’s co-authors, Dr. Kristian Andersen, said Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins were two of several big scientific names who “prompted” him to write the study to debunk the lab leak theory, according to a cover email submitted with the article to Nature Medicine on Feb. 12, 2020.
“There has been a lot of speculation, fear-mongering, and conspiracies put forward in this space. [This paper was] prompted by … Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins,” Andersen wrote.
