It was probably about following the science or something.

Just three months after a group of scientists published a paper claiming that the Covid lab-leak theory was not “plausible,” several of the researchers began having doubts, according to newly released documents that raise questions about why those researchers continued to defend their conclusions publicly.

Senator Rand Paul’s office released private Slack messages between the scientists who authored “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that would go on to be widely cited by the journalists and public health officials who roundly dismissed the idea that Covid-19 had emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. Lawmakers would later discover that Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, prompted researchers to author the paper and was even involved in the editing and approval process for its final draft. When asked publicly in April 2020 whether Covid may have emerged from a lab, Fauci cited the paper to cast doubt on the theory.

But in June 2020, one of the scientists, evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research professor Kristian Andersen, suggested in private messages with his “Proximal Origin” co-authors — Andrew Rambaut, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, and Ian Lipkin — that he believed there was a 30 percent chance the virus had come from a lab — a sharp departure from the conclusion presented in the paper, which held that the lab leak was implausible. Holmes, meanwhile, assigned the lab leak a 20 percent probability, though he later downgraded that to 10 percent.

These new private messages don’t settle how COVID actually started. There’s still no solid proof either way—no clear animal source virus has been found, and no lab records have been produced that pin it on a lab accident.

What the messages do show is that the scientists who wrote a very strong public paper saying a lab leak was basically impossible were later, in private, giving it a 10–30% chance. That’s a big difference from “not plausible.”

That mismatch between what they said publicly and what they thought privately, plus how influential that paper was in shutting down discussion early on, is the main point of the reporting. Similar private doubts versus public certainty have turned up in other COVID-origin documents over the years.

So the article highlights the tension the messages create. The bigger questions—how the scientific consensus got locked in so quickly, how uncertainty was handled, and what the evidence really shows—are still very much open.

It is very likely that Kristian Andersen and his co-authors knowingly made false or misleading scientific statements in exchange for funding or favor from a corrupt National Institutes of Health. The resulting damage is huge: science as an institution has suffered a huge loss in public trust. That loss will matter in future emergencies when society will again need trustworthy scientific guidance.

PHOTO CREDIT: Pixabay