Covid Origins Scientist Denounces Reporting On His Messages As A Conspiracy Theory
But his emails and Slack messages show that there was nothing theoretical about his conspiracy to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. Andersen makes clear in his messages that the purpose of the Proximal Origin paper was to disprove, in his words, the lab leak hypothesis. It was a propaganda exercise, not a scientific one.
The documents that Public and Racket were the first to report on show Andersen and his co-authors, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry, conspiring by which we mean they made secret plans to engage in deceptive and unethical behavior and to spread disinformation. Their conspiracy included coordinating with their higher-ups in the US and UK governments to deceive journalists, including a New York Times reporter.
Our reporting led several people sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis to demand the release of all the emails and Slack messages. This calls for more transparency, tweeted Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at Columbia University and a contributor to the New York Times, rather than selective, partial releases especially since the messages imply coordinated efforts for manipulating journalists etc&
We agree and are thus happy today to release the full cache of Slack messages and emails covering the discussions between Andersen et al. as they wrote their influential Proximal Origin, paper, which Anthony Fauci and others in the US government used to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.
If I were Dr. Anderson I would just shoot myself at this stage, were I not Roman Catholic. But presumably he’s not, so he should just go ahead. But of course, no one’s responsible for anything these days, including a global pandemic.
Are we still paying for new GOF research on new deadly viruses? Last I heard we were. Could we at least stop doing that, please?