Part 3, the Conclusion
Text Book Scien(tism)
Incredibly, Andersen et al. turned around and submitted a draft of the Proximal paper to Nature with the exact opposite claims, e.g. that the virus was “NOT human-engineered.”
Is it really presumptuous to say that the authors made a hard pivot to suppress the discussion of the lab leak theory?
During the hearing, Andersen made it seem that making a 180-degree shift in just a few days from man-made to a natural spillover was simply “textbook science in action.”
When asked about the millions of dollars he received after the publication of Proximal Origin, he said it wasn’t related.
“There is no connection between the grant and the paper. Funding decisions… were made before the pandemic, months before February.”
There is also an allegation that Andersen stated this would also secure his tenure.
With all due respect, Andersen is not trustworthy, he lied under oath a few times. It reminded me of when Dominion President & CEO John Poulos fibbed under sworn testimony before the House Administration Committee on January 9, 2020.
Within hours of receiving the first draft, Dr. Fauci reportedly worried about the possibility of “serial passage” in lab animals and asked the whole group:
“Would serial passage in an animal in the laboratory give the same result as prolonged adaption in animals in the wild? Or is there something that is fundamentally different in what happens when you serial passage versus natural animal adaption?”
Serial passage is the successive transfer of an infectious agent through a series of cultures or experimental animals, usually to attenuate pathogenicity.
Dr. Garry responded,
“It’s possible to fairly rapidly select for more pathogenic variants in the laboratory. ”
Thus confirming Dr. Fauci’s fear of a potential lab leak.
Through its investigation, the Select Subcommittee learned that Dr. Francis Collins pushed for publication and approved the substance of Proximal Origin. However, Virologist Ron Fouchier’s, who had a significant but silent role in shaping the paper, argued against publishing ‘as is’ with any reference to an existing reverse genetic system.
As Husseini points out, if they had mentioned passaging as a possible scenario, they would be opening up a can of worms, along with threatening the future GOF research.
“… I’d have thought Garry and Andersen understood the threat to them from the top and that’s exactly part of the reason Fauci and Farrar wanted them to write the piece,” added Husseini.
In any case, Nature rejected the first draft reportedly because it didn’t downplay the lab leak theory enough.
Consequently, the authors amended their paper.
They also brought in Ian Lipkin for “gravitas.” Dr. Garry testified that Lipkin “…made a nice authorship contribution” and that “he read the paper many times and made some good comments back and forth…”
If you read the substantial messages and emails between the “Bethesda Boys” (Fauci and Collins) and the Proximal authors, you can clearly see for yourself that they were colluding and that this p*andemic was very likely not an incident involving a raccoon dog or pangolin at a wet market. To me it’s as though they were trying to write the best plausible cover-up (albeit mediocre) for non-inquiring minds.
Take below the February 10, 2020 email between Robert Garry, Andersen, Rambault, and Holmes where they talk about the “Grand Wizard of EgoHealth” (Dazack of EcoHeatlth) and “Butt Lesion” (Ian Lipkin).
Later in February 2020, Farrar illegitimately dismissed the possibility of the lab origin of Covid along with Peter Daszak and 27 other scientists in a signed Lancet letter, stating:
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The Lancet letter was “the other main pillar of propaganda from 2020 on Covid origins,” adds Husseini.
During the month of March 2020, Scripps Research put out a press release and there were also several who issued a statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
Then on March 26, 2020, Dr. Collins wrote a blog for the NIH regarding Proximal Origin, stating “Either way, this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19.”
And on April 17, 2020, Dr. Fauci made it official when he cryptically cited Proximal Origin from the White House podium:
“There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. So, I mean, the paper will be available — I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make that available to you.”
Later, Fauci stated he may not have ever actually read Proximal Origin. Can you imagine? And if that were true, what does it say to cite a paper from the White House podium you have not even read as proof COVID-19 was not the result of a lab leak?
Despite attempts to hide Fauci and Farrar, their fingerprints were all over this. Farrar, the owner of a now discarded burner phone was even touted as the “father figure” of the paper, leading the drafting process and making at least one uncredited direct edit to Proximal Origin.
Designer BioWeapons In A Post-Truth Age
In an unclassified memo, Andersen who clearly flip-flopped on his stance, said he doubted it was man-made because the virus is not engineered to bind to human cells in an ideal way.
“If you look at the furin cleavage site that we are specifically finding in SARS-CoV-2 has never been used in experiments prior to this, further, the furin cleavage site itself is suboptimal and likely out of frame, suggesting that this is a clear result of natural selection,” he said.
Being suboptimal serves as proof this was natural? As if man is superior. If anything, the defects are more of an indicator that this “virus” was meddled with by man. And just because the furin cleavage site isn’t optimal, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a designed bioweapon.
It wasn’t clear how the authors explained how the furin cleavage site has inserts like four amino acids, and 12 nucleotides added at the exact same time. Isn’t this gain of function?
Two years ago, Virologist Robert Garry also downplayed the probability of man’s meddling with SARS-CoV-2 during an interview with Vincent Racaniello (TWiV 762).
“I mean, no virologist could have conceived of the RBD with their head because the particular binding solution that the SARS-CoV-2 RBD actually came up with in nature was one that you couldn’t design with the computer. In fact, the computer designs at the time said that RBD shouldn’t even bind to human ace, at least not very effectively. So obviously nature came up with a way to do it that no human artificial intelligence or anything else, maybe an alien from the future possibly.”
During the July 2023 Select Subcommittee hearing, Garry testified under oath that he has not reviewed all the research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So how would he know for certain what is possible?
Safe Dangerous
A hypothesis stands as just that until it’s disproven. When you look at the correspondence between these scientists, they conspired to lie.
Downplaying the lab leak is antithetical to science. That’s what Dr. Redfield, the former CDC director and renowned virologist, testified in March 2023. He added that science never selects a single narrative. And the truth, meanwhile, should never be suppressed.
However, in this A.C (After Corona) World, the truth is slowly leaked (pun intended) until they can co-opt the narrative and rewrite it, long after the fact. Comedian Sam Tripoli calls it “Safe Dangerous.”
“How has that proximal paper held up,” Racaniello (TWiV 762) asked Garry about the SARS-CoV-2 origins during a 2021 interview.
“It’s held up very well. In fact, our conclusion that it didn’t leak from the lab is even stronger today than it was when we wrote the paper.”
Comical. Now that the possibility of a lab origin had been acknowledged by the WHO, the intel community, and even Democrats, the authors of this now infamous paper are changing their tune, saying that they never ruled out a lab leak.
Sort of.
They’re actually speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
On one hand, the authors admit that technologies allow scientists to manipulate viruses “without a trace,” while also standing by their conclusion that the genome shows the virus is not engineered.
“Three and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic, it is still my opinion that there is no credible scientific evidence for a lab-based origin for SARS-CoV-2,” said Andersen under oath.
Later during the same hearing he also said, “In the paper, we concluded that it was likely that SARS-CoV-2 had evolved naturally. We specifically did not rule out the laboratory origin.”
Half-truths and Intentional vagueness are propaganda techniques that conveniently muddy the waters. Which is unfortunate when the government is hammering into our heads that the question as to the origins of COVID-19 “is fundamental to helping us predict and prevent future pandemics.” Because the next one is coming, and as Bill Gates warned, it will get our our attention.
Consider that if a ‘virus’ with less than a 1 percent fatality rate toppled our world, what happens when a more “optimal” bioweapon is unleashed?
Let’s figure out and expose what really happened so that we make sure this isn’t repeated. This involves acknowledging that this was a man-made biological weapon, and while the jury is out on whether this was deliberate or an accident, it was definitely a lab leak.
**Dozens of scientists have now signed an open letter to Nature Medicine calling for the paper to be retracted.
However, they will not be retracting the paper, which was intended to present a “point of view” on the issue rather than being a research study.
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Maryam Henein is an investigative journalist, and founder, and editor-in-chief of the health magazine and marketplace HoneyColony. She is also a functional medicine consultant/coach, and the director of the award-winning documentary film Vanishing of the Bees, narrated by Elliot Page. Follow her on Twitter @maryamhenein. Email her: maryam@honeycolony.com.