It was reported recently that 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.
