In January 2020, the scientific world was startled with the breaking news of a novel coronavirus. Thanks to a brave Chinese scientist, the DNA sequence of this virus was released to the world.
Upon reviewing this genome, several of the world’s top virology experts sent emails to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. These emails suggest that scientific leaders believed the virus possessed features that looked engineered — several even believing there was a more than a 50% chance it had originated in a laboratory.
Then something astonishing happened. Over the next two months, many of these same scientists, federal grantees, completely reversed their opinion and stated in three separate scientific journal articles that the lab origin theory was impossible.
So, what changed their minds?
On Feb. 1, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins spearheaded a private, off-the-record teleconference with several of these scientists in an effort to influence them and reverse their opinion that “the genome is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” and may have been engineered in a laboratory. Six weeks later, a Nature Medicine article authored by some of these same scientists stated unequivocally that the novel coronavirus came from nature and a lab origin was out of the question. All the while, Collins, Fauci’s boss, encouraged Fauci in emails to squelch any ideas of a lab leak theory.