by Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola:
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence
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- The emails reveal there was great concern among NIH leadership, as SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China
- The emails show they were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and that they were determined to suppress questions about its origin
- A group of scientists convened by Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, published a paper in which they claimed the virus was decidedly not the result of intentional engineering. They did admit accidental creation in a lab could not be ruled out, but that natural evolution was the most likely scenario. Some of these same scientists had previously shared details indicative of genetic engineering in emails to Fauci
- The “Proximal Origin” paper, which was edited by Fauci and “debunked” the lab leak theory without any evidence, became the most-read published paper in history. More than 2,000 media outlets have cited it to support their propaganda
In January 2022, House Oversight Committee Republicans released a batch of emails sent to and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).1,2,3 A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by Jimmy Tobias at The Intercept4 also forced the release of unredacted NIH correspondence in late November 2022, just as Dr. Anthony Fauci prepared to retire from his position as director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The emails reveal what many had suspected all along, namely that SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be a genetically engineered virus that somehow escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China. (In a January 17, 2023, Twitter thread,5 molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., summarized the lab-origin hypothesis.)
The correspondence also reveal that a) NIH leaders were nervous about the possibility that they’d funded the creation of this virus, and b) they were determined to suppress questions about its origin.
Summary of Key Findings
As reported by the House Oversight Committee:6
“Excerpts of emails released today reveal the following:
- January 27, 2020: Dr. [Anthony] Fauci knew NIAID [National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] had funded EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV was a subgrantee of EcoHealth, and EcoHealth was not in compliance with its grant reporting, in particular a grant that NIAID knew had gain-of-function potential on novel bat coronaviruses.
- February 1, 2020: Dr. Fauci, [then-NIH director] Dr. [Francis] Collins, and at least eleven other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. On the conference call, Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.
- February 4, 2020: After speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, four participants of the conference call abandoned their belief the virus originated from the Wuhan lab and authored a paper7 entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.’ Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval.
- April 16, 2020: More than two months after the original conference call, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that the Nature Medicine article — which they saw prior to publication and were given the opportunity to edit — did not squash the lab leak hypothesis and asks if the NIH can do more to ‘put down’ the lab leak hypothesis.
- April 17, 2020: After Dr. Collins explicitly asked for more public pressure, Dr. Fauci cited the Nature Medicine paper from the White House podium likely in an effort to further stifle the hypothesis COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab.”
Fauci Tipped Off About Lab Leak Possibility
January 31, 2020, Fauci received an email from Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, asking him to call Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an evolutionary biologist and professor in the department of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. As reported by The Intercept January 19, 2023:8
“Fauci had his phone call with Andersen that night, and what he heard clearly disturbed him. In an email to Farrar after the call, he wrote the following:
‘I told [Andersen] that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities.
I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5′ … What were Andersen’s concerns? And why were they so dire they might merit a call to the FBI?
Andersen laid them out plainly in an email to Fauci that same evening. ‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,’ Andersen wrote in the email.
‘I should mention,’ he added, ‘that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.'”
NIH Funded Risky Research at the WIV
The following day, February 1, 2020, at 2 p.m., Fauci, Farrar, Collins, Andersen and several other virologists had their conference call, and Andersen clearly wasn’t the only one who had noticed tell-tale signs of genetic engineering. Farrar himself wrote “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release — I am honestly at 50!” 9
According to The Intercept,10 Fauci spent that morning “brushing up on what sorts of grants and collaborations his agency was involved in with research institutions in China.”
In all likelihood, he discovered (if he was somehow previously unaware, which seems doubtful) that the NIH had provided research grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn subcontracted coronavirus experiments to the WIV — including an experiment involving humanized mice that were infected with chimeric hybrids of SARS-related bat coronaviruses.11
According to The Intercept, it’s highly unlikely that these experiments resulted in SARS-CoV-2, as the viruses are too dissimilar, “but it does raise questions about what other kinds of experiments were going on in Wuhan and haven’t been disclosed.”
NIH-Linked Scientists Suspected Lab Leak From the Start
February 2, 2020, Farrar circulated a set of notes summarizing the discussion, which he said was to be treated “in total confidence.”12 Michael (Mike) Farzan, Ph.D., an expert on the entry processes of enveloped viruses, was bothered by the presence of a furin cleavage site — a novel feature that allows SARS-CoV-2 the ability to infect cells in the human airways.
According to Farrar’s note, Farzan “has a hard time explain[ing] that as an event outside the lab.” Farrar’s summary goes on to state that:13
“… the likely explanation could be something as simple as passage SARS-live CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans via gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adoption to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage …
So, I think it becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature — accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”
A note from professor and microbiologist Robert (Bob) Garry, Ph.D.,14 reveals he had similar concerns:
“… I aligned the nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD [receptor binding domain] the S proteins are essential [sic] identical at the amino acid level — well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds [sic] the furin site.
