House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020.
Much of Tuesday's hearing focused on a critical few days in early February 2020, beginning with a conference call February 1 that included the eventual authors of the paper and Drs. Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then head of its parent agency, the National Institutes of Health.
In a Slack exchange on February 2, 2020, between Andersen and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences, it becomes clear how seriously the authors took the hypothesis that Covid may have leaked from a lab, rather than emerged through natural means, before they ultimately became dedicated to publicly dismissing it.
In the messages, he is seen sharing drafts of the paper with Fauci and Collins and asking the authors for edits, at one point in mid-February asking that a lab scenario be downgraded in their paper from "Unlikely" to "Improbable" - a change that Andersen, the lead author, agreed to.
The new documents also include a message from Nature - where the authors pitched the "Proximal Origin" paper before sending to Nature Medicine - explaining its rejection.
Despite the paper leaning heavily toward a natural emergence and downplaying the potential of a lab leak, one Nature reviewer found that even leaving open the possibility of a lab escape would fuel conspiracy theorists, a Nature editor wrote to the authors.
The group edited their paper further to more strongly dismiss the possibility of a lab leak for its later submission to Nature Medicine.
https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-republicans/
No comments:
Post a Comment