As Jim Geraghty writes, “For the entirety of 2020 and long after, the ‘it started in a wet market’ view was the respectable one. Believing that somebody at the Wuhan Institute of Virology hadn’t been careful one day and had gotten accidentally infected with a virus that had gained a function or two during its time in the lab made you a crazy conspiracy theorist. In fact, the lab leak theory was evidence of your racism. And now — in July 2026! — we learn that Fauci himself had dismissed the wet market as a potential source at the end of January 2020.”

And much more.

What kind of doctor wants to work for government? Biggest mistake [Trump] ever made was letting the federal government do its job re covid. We’re only now starting to plumb the depths of what the federal government’s job was.

Tony’s Diary.

Roger Pielke Jr.

In early February 2020, four virologists — Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Robert Garry, and Andrew Rambaut — told each other and Anthony Fauci — then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and member of President Trump’s just-created Coronavirus Task force — privately that a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 looked plausible.

Weeks later the same group published a paper — “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” hereafter Proximal Origin — declaring flatly that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

That paper became the authoritative justification for treating the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and settled science. Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins promoted Proximal Origin from the White House to quash debate over COVID_19 origins, without ever disclosing that they helped set the paper in motion.[…]

This week, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) released two new batches of the group’s Slack messages — first batch (AM drop) and a second batch (PM drop} — spanning April 2020 through September 2021, with incredible details of how doubt never faded for the Proximal Origin gang, despite their public expressions to the contrary.

Authors coordinated with Intelligence Community And NIH;

Andersen told his co-authors he expected to “have a handler” beginning that week as the intelligence community’s 90-day review was underway. Holmes repeatedly referenced a source in China he called “my spy.” Following the leak of the DARPA DEFUSE proposal, which detailed a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and to “carefully curate” their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while also noting the need to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH.”

And then there was other coordination.

The president of EcoHealth Alliance had just spent weeks in China as part of the World Health Organization’s team investigating the origins of COVID-19 — the mission that took him, however briefly, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab his own organization had helped fund with U.S. taxpayer money. His flight was booked: Qatar Airways 701, Doha to New York’s JFK, landing February 5 at 2:25 p.m.

Waiting for him, on paper, was U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Until they weren’t.

Yuri Deigin had their number right out of the blocks: Wow, I saw 72 mentions of my name in those Slack messages.