Scientists Agreed To Downplay Chinese Lab Leak Theory For Fear Of ‘S*** Show’, Messages Indicate | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Daniel Chaitin.

    Scientists who authored a paper on the origins of COVID-19 agreed the best course of action was to downplay the Chinese lab leak theory over concerns about international fallout, newly released internal messages show.

    Dr. Andrew Rambaut and Dr. Kristian Andersen discussed the issue in an early February 2020 Slack conversation with colleagues, which took place several weeks before their "Proximal Origin" report got published in the journal Nature Medicine in March of the same year.

    Rambaut, on February 2, 2020, said, "given the s*** show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process."

    In response to Rambaut's message, Andersen replied, "Yup, I totally agree that that's a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science - but its [sic] impossible not to, especially given the circumstances."

    Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic disclosed the Slack discussion in a staff report, highlighting the exchange as evidence of "possible motives" by researchers to "defend China and play diplomat."

    During a hearing on Tuesday, Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) even confronted Andersen with the Slack messages, saying the witness had a "preferred political narrative." Still, Andersen and Robert Garry, another author on the paper, both testified under oath that they stand by their report's ultimate conclusion that COVID-19 was not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

    The GOP staff report also raises concerns that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and specifically Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins, exerted undue influence over the "Proximal Origin" paper to dismiss the Chinese lab leak theory, which over time has gained traction over the natural emergence theory among agencies in the U.S. intelligence community.

    Democrats on the COVID panel released their own report insisting that all evidence available to the subcommittee, including testimony from Anderson, "demonstrates that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins did not lead, oversee, or influence the drafting and publication of 'Proximal Origin' or seek to suppress the lab leak theory through the paper's conclusions."

poll#177

Considering the irrefutable fact that the Left /the Democratic Socialists, beginning in March of 2020, employed the repetitive use of the Covid Pandemic as a political cudgel to wrest a presidential election, where their candidate rarely left his basement, from a frightened and beaten down citizenry of this Representative Republic: What does your knowledge NOW, in hindsight, aid in your understanding of the motives of the Authoritarian Left?

  The "Left" cares about all Democratics, so it was imperative that we do whatever it took to elect a lifelong politician to become that Democratic Socialist to forever change US.

  Pandemics are serious business, where our leaders must use wisdom and practicable efforts of all that serve to protect the public from not only the pandemic, but these ignoble usurpers of the Left.

  I lost almost everything in the Covid Pandemic, and I want justice; a justice where only the truth prevails, and the rampant fraud that is now legend is remedied.

156 total vote(s)     What's your Opinion?