For more than three hours yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled a pair of virologists about their participation in an alleged “cover-up” of the pandemic’s origins. Republican lawmakers zeroed in on evidence that the witnesses, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, and other researchers had initially suspected that the coronavirus spread from a Chinese lab. “Accidental escape is in fact highly likely—it’s not some fringe theory,” Andersen wrote in a Slack message to a colleague on February 2, 2020. When he laid out the same concern to Anthony Fauci in late January, that some features of the viral genome looked like they might be engineered, Fauci told him to consider going to the FBI.
But days later, Andersen, Garry, and the other scientists were starting to coalesce around a different point of view: Those features were more likely to have developed via natural evolution. The scientists wrote up this revised assessment in an influential paper, published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020, called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The virus is clearly “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper said; in fact, the experts now “did not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” and that the pandemic almost certainly started with a “zoonotic event”—which is to say, the spillover of an animal virus into human populations. That analysis would be cited repeatedly by scientists and media outlets in the months that followed, in support of the idea that the lab-leak theory had been thoroughly debunked.
The researchers’ rapid and consequential change of heart, as revealed through emails, witness interviews, and Slack exchanges, is now a wellspring for Republicans’ suspicions. “All of a sudden, you did a 180,” Representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York said yesterday morning. “What happened?”
Based on the available facts, the…
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