Congressional memo: Virologists drafted article against the lab leak theory on behalf of Wellcome Trust, NIH – U.S. Right to Know

Virologists who worked to squelch consideration of a lab origin of COVID-19 in early 2020 worked in tandem with leaders in scientific research funding, according to their private emails.

Leaders of the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom played an undisclosed role in persuading virologists to write an influential article asserting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2, according to a memo released Sunday by investigators with the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

By mid-February 2020, social media sites in the West and in China buzzed with speculation about a possible connection between the emerging novel coronavirus pandemic and labs specializing in coronaviruses at its epicenter.

The lab leak theory cast suspicion not only on the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its neighboring labs, but also on their esteemed funders and collaborators in the West.

A March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine titled The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 assured the public that the virus genome demonstrated an origin in wildlife. Hundreds of news organizations cited the article to assert that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory.

But the new congressional memo shows that the lead author of the article told the scientific journal that the writing had been prompted by then-Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar, leader of NIH s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, and NIH Director Francis Collins.

via usrtk.org

It turns out the real conspiracists were the ones attempting to debunk the lab leak theory.