The man who led the denial of the possibility of a lab leak wrote this: "main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape..is so friggin' likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario"

— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) July 19, 2023

Last week,

… two of the top scientific advisors to Anthony Fauci testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating the origins of Covid-19.

Bob Garry told members of Congress that the novel coronavirus had emerged in nature and not from a lab.

His colleague, Kristian Andersen, denounced Republicans for spreading a “conspiracy theory” that he and Garry had worked with Fauci in early 2020 to produce disinformation about Covid’s origin in the form of a March 17, 2020 Nature Medicine paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

That paper dismissed the lab leak theory and has been viewed nearly six million times since its publication.

Andersen, a professor at Scripps Research, acknowledged that some earlier, heavily-publicized emails between him, his colleagues and Fauci had shown that they had previously considered the lab leak hypothesis as a serious possibility.

But, Andersen told Congress, after he and his co-authors had carefully considered the evidence, they concluded that “culturing” in different cells or animal species in a lab, which can make a virus more infectious and well-adapted for humans and other animal species, had not occurred, and that the virus had spilled over from wildlife to humans.

“By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin,” Andersen explained in his written testimony, “I no longer believed that a ‘culturing’ scenario was plausible.”

Andersen emphasized to Congress that this wasn’t because Fauci, National Institute of Health Director Francis Collins, or anyone in the White House or Intelligence Community had asked him to. The reason was simply that he and his colleagues were practicing science.

“As is almost always the case in science,” explained Andersen, “this change in belief was not based on a single piece of evidence, but a combination of many factors, including additional data, analyses, learning more about coronaviruses, and discussions with colleagues and collaborators.”

But now, Public and Racket have obtained hundreds of previously unreleased email and Slack direct messages which cover the period when Andersen and his colleagues collaborated to write “Proximal Origin.”

Those communications paint a starkly different picture from the one Andersen and Garry presented to Congress last week. They show that Andersen and his colleagues clearly thought it was indeed possible not only that the virus that causes Covid-19 had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but specifically that it had been cultured in the laboratory.

In non-conspiracy theory developments, the US government has announced they will no longer fund that research lab in Wuhan that Fauci & Co. had nothing to do with.

On a local level…

There's something seriously "off" with the @CkomNews director when investigations into the origin of a pandemic that killed thousands of #Saskatchewan residents is under news blackout – while @ErinMcNutt blathers on about loose rabbits in Florida and Taylor Swift record sales…

— Katewerk (@katewerk) July 19, 2023