US House Panel Says Fauci Prompted Paper Downplaying COVID-19 'Lab Leak' Theory

Former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci prompted a flawed academic paper that downplayed the so-called lab leak theory of the COVID-19 pandemic's origin, the US House oversight panel's Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said on Tuesday

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th July, 2023) Former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci prompted a flawed academic paper that downplayed the so-called lab leak theory of the COVID-19 pandemic's origin, the US House oversight panel's Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said on Tuesday.

In January 2020, Fauci prompted medical researchers including Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute to author a paper on the lab leak theory, the panel said in a report.

The subsequent paper, dubbed Proximal Origins, has been accessed nearly 6 million times since its publication, making it the fifth most popular article ever tracked, the report said. Proximal Origins claimed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic was not a laboratory construct or manipulated virus.

"Dr. Fauci prompted Proximal Origin, which's goal was to 'disprove' the lab leak theory to avoid blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic. Proximal Origin employed fatally flawed science to achieve its goal... Fauci used Proximal Origin to attempt to kill the lab leak theory. This is the anatomy of a cover-up," the report said.

When prompting Andersen to draft the paper, Fauci warned that law enforcement would be contacted if it determined that the lab leak theory was accurate, the report said. However, after the paper failed to suppress the lab leak theory, Fauci cited the report directly from the White House podium, the report said.

Proximal Origins expressed conclusions that were based neither in "sound science" nor fact, but instead on assumptions, the report said. Researchers expressed concerns that the theory may harm "science in general and science in China in particular," according to emails cited in the report.

A second possible motive of downplaying the lab leak theory was to reduce the chance of bolstered biosafety and laboratory regulations, the report said.

The paper rested on three Primary contentions: that non-optimal receptor-binding domains exist in other viral sequences; that furin cleavage sites exist in other coronaviruses; and that any laboratory manipulation would have used a previously published viral backbone, the report said.

However, all three arguments are "flawed" and rest on unsupported assumptions, the report said.

After Proximal Origins was turned down for publication in the journal Nature for not downplaying the lab leak theory enough, the authors edited it before submitting for approval by Natural Medicine, where it was published, the report said.

The panel's report on Proximal Origins comes amid divided analyses on the COVID-19 pandemic's origins.

Three of the earliest people infected with COVID-19 were gain-of-function researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, media reported last month, citing US government officials.

However, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence also released a report last month claiming that there is no indication that the novel coronavirus came from the Wuhan lab.

The Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released their report on Proximal Origins in conjunction with an in-person hearing on the matter, featuring testimony from Andersen and another author of the paper, Robert Garry.