Jon Cohen
Science, July 11, 2023
“We’re examining whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly, perhaps biasedly, tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory.”
Two scientists who are co-authors of a 3-year-old article on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic faced down Republican lawmakers today in what might be the most in-depth discussion ever of a scientific paper in the halls of the U.S. Congress. At a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing, Republicans asserted that top officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) prompted the researchers to write the paper to try to “kill” the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University’s School of Medicine, two of the article’s five co-authors, flatly rejected the allegation. And as the hearing extended over 3 hours, committee Democrats chided their colleagues on the other side of the aisle for staging a “vendetta” and “weaponization” of the origin discussion, and for slinging “baseless allegations” that amounted to a “mission to destroy two people” and “vilify” public health experts.
The paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was published in Nature Medicine on 17 March 2020 and argued that SARS-CoV-2 had most likely evolved naturally, rather than being engineered by scientists. It has become central to the assertions of many lab-leak proponents that NIH funded risky coronavirus experiments, which, in turn, led to the pandemic. In this scenario, high-ranking agency officials, such as Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Francis Collins, NIH’s director, tried to suppress any scientific discussion that could expose this.
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