In this new article he draws on recently released emails that, in his view, support the view that the scientist's reversal was due to pressure from very powerful figures in the science bureaucracy, especially Fauci and the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Dr Frances Collins. The new emails, according to Wade, indicate the likelihood of political motivations for the suppression of the leak hypothesis.
An earlier release of emails confirmed the remarkable reversal by the group of four scientists three days after the teleconference. This was followed by a letter by a group of scientists to the Lancet orchestrated by Dr Peter Daszak, who was instrumental in securing US funding for gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.
It is hard for the non-specialist to make sense of the technical aspects of this debate. However I am struck by the remarkable coincidence of a novel but naturally occurring bat virus popping up a few hundred meters from a laboratory containing the world's largest collection of bat viruses, together with the failure after more than two years to come up with a single animal host for the virus.
From almost the moment the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan, the medical-research establishment in Washington and London insisted that the virus had emerged naturally. Only conspiracy theorists, they said, would give credence to the idea that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now a string of unearthed emails—the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its January 11, 2022 letter—is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.
The story begins with a January 31, 2020, email to Fauci from a group of four virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 had been published three weeks before, giving virologists their first look at the virus’s structure and possible origin.Andersen reported to Fauci that “after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” Eddie is Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney; Bob is Robert F. Garry of Tulane University; Mike is Michael Farzan at Scripps Research. In their unanimous view, the virus didn’t come from nature and may instead have escaped from a lab.
We knew this much already from emails obtained in June 2021 by a Freedom of Information Act request, as well as from the fact that a teleconference took place the following day (February 1, 2020) to discuss the virologists’ conclusion. But something remarkable happened at the conference, because within three days Andersen was singing a different tune. In a February 4, 2020 email, he derided ideas about a lab leak as “crackpot theories” that “relate to this virus being somehow engineered with intent and that is demonstrably not the case.”