Slack messages released by Rand Paul appear to show authors of key COVID-19 origin paper held private doubts

Newly released messages among the authors of a widely cited paper regarding the origins of COVID-19 privately raised doubts that the virus originated from bats, as their paper stated.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Tuesday released the internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut.

“The idea that it came from lab is implausible and yet privately they’re saying the opposite is this level of dishonesty I think needs to be exposed,” Paul told Fox News. “These are people who get large, multimillion-dollar grants from our country, and we shouldn’t be giving money to people who lied to us.”

The paper was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, and was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. However, the released messages appear to show that its authors were less certain than their public conclusions suggested.

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Some raised concerns that the virus originated in a lab. 

Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin while Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, though he later revised that to 10%. Either way, both figures contrast with the paper’s public assertion that the virus had not been manipulated.

“The part I’m really struggling with is that at the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other — and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there,” Andersen wrote on June 11, 2020, according to the documents. “That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”

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The documents also reveal internal debates over the furin cleavage site, the genetic feature at the heart of the lab-leak question. At one point, Andersen told colleagues that “some smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that made him “not comfortable,” and that he had “less confidence… at this stage,” a news release from Paul’s office states.

In addition, the authors coordinated with the U.S. intelligence community and National Institutes of Health (NIH) leadership as they were publicly defending their conclusions. Another topic of discussion among the authors was Ralph Baric, a prominent coronavirus researcher.

While they acknowledged his expertise, their internal messages revealed a highly contentious relationship with him, characterized by professional rivalry and suspicions that he actively tried to undermine them.

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They also suspected Baric was the anonymous leaker, whom they dubbed “Deep Throat,” who shared confidential peer-review information with a journalist. The leak suggested that the authors initially suspected a lab origin before changing their minds.

A World Health Organization (WHO) scientific advisory group released a report last year on the origins of COVID-19, concluding that the deadly pandemic was caused by “zoonotic spillover,” either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.

On Monday, Paul released documents that revealed U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents were preparing to question British zoologist Peter Daszak upon his return to the United States from the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19, before the FBI intervened and asked agents to stand down.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the U.S. response to the pandemic, is slated to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the origins of the virus this month following a subpoena issued by Paul, the committee chairperson.

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Fauci has been accused by some of manipulating intelligence on the origins of the pandemic and lying to Congress to cover up alleged wrongdoing.