The Origins of COVID

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 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.

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.

Sunday’s email release by the GOP-controlled House select committee calls into question repeated statements made by Fauci to members of Congress and the media during the pandemic — especially regarding the NIH funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a high-profile clash during a July 2021 hearing, Fauci told Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that “you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly,” when asked about his involvement with the research.

WASHINGTON — With tensions between the United States and China deepening, the question of how and where the coronavirus originated remains an intense point of contention, especially as the “lab leak” hypothesis gains traction.

There is consensus that the pandemic originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, perhaps as early as September 2019. But did it start at a wildlife market, jumping from a bat or another animal host to humans? Or did the coronavirus emanate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the result of an accident?

More than three years since the pandemic began, these fundamental questions remain unanswered. If anything, the fiery, partisan debates over masks and vaccines have been eclipsed by the question of how the virus first entered the human population.

‘The spell is broken’



Perhaps nobody did more to popularize the notion of a lab leak than comedian Jon Stewart, who made the case in a viral appearance on Stephen Colbert’s late night talk show in 2021.

“Science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science,” Stewart said in an extended riff about how he could not accept as mere coincidence that the coronavirus originated in a city that was also home to a laboratory devoted to studying coronaviruses.

“The backlash was swift, immediate and quite loud,” Stewart reflected last month. Since then, however, more and more experts have come around to his view.

Recently, the Department of Energy’s so-called Z Division told the Biden administration it was becoming more confident that the virus originated in a laboratory. Other intelligence agencies continue to favor zoonosis — the relatively common process of a virus transferring from an animal population to humans — but because much of the evidence on which those assessments were made remains classified, it has been difficult to parse on what grounds the agencies disagree.

Initially, many scientists and public health experts argued that endorsing anything other than the zoonotic hypothesis would stoke conspiracy theories and anti-Asian sentiment, which was on the rise.