OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Republican leaders on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees have released excerpts of emails that they say reveal National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Director Dr. Anthony Fauci knew that COVID-19 may have been intentionally modified and leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In a letter, GOP Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan noted a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call that included Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, where the virus’ origins were discussed.
“It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the WIV and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated,” the Republicans’ letter said.
The congressmen said that “it is unclear if either Dr. Fauci or Dr. Collins ever passed these warnings along to other government officials or if they simply ignored them.”
The letter said other scientists participated in the call, four of whom wrote a paper titled, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” that they sent to Fauci and Collins three days after the call.
Republicans are questioning whether Fauci and/or Collins played a role in the “lab leak” theory being dropped.
“It is unclear what, if any, new evidence was presented or if the underlying science changed in that short period of time, but after speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak,” Comer and Jordan said, adding that they do not know whether Fauci or Collins edited the paper before it was published in Nature Medicine.
One email that detailed the meeting in question came from Dr. Jeremy Farrar to Collins, where Fauci and current NIH Acting Director Lawrence Tabak stated that “a likely explanation” could involve “accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans[.]”
Discussing the similarities to a bat coronavirus and the very specific differences, Farrar said he “just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.”
In response, however, Collins wrote that he was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely.”
Below are copies of the letter from Jordan and Comer:
In April, just a few months later, Collins, Fauci, Tabak, and others were emailing about a “very destructive conspiracy” detailing the lab leak theory.
“I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this. But probably didn’t get much visibility,” Collins said.
“I would not do anything about this right now. It is a shiny object that will go away in time,” Fauci wrote back.
Comer and Jordan are asking HHS for information about whether Collins or Fauci warned the White House about the “lab leak theory” between Feb. 1 and Feb. 4, 2020.
“Time for answers,” the House Oversight Committee Republicans tweeted Tuesday morning.
🚨BREAKING🚨
We've released never before seen emails showing Dr. Fauci may have concealed information about #COVID19 originating from the Wuhan lab & intentionally downplayed the lab leak theory. @RepJamesComer & @Jim_Jordan want Fauci under oath. Time for answers. 1/2👇 pic.twitter.com/p8aIBJ3nom
— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) January 11, 2022
