Scientists at House hearing refute claims they were bribed and influenced to deny Covid-19 ‘lab leak’ theory

Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said they aimed to use a hearing Tuesday to set the record straight on Republicans’ claims that Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins steered scientists investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic away from the idea that the virus was created in a lab in Wuhan, China.

In a report released in advance of the hearing, Democrats highlighted sworn testimony by authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper that was published in March 2020 in the journal Nature – the paper that first concluded that the pandemic was most likely caused by a viral spillover event from animals to humans.

That testimony, they said, shows that Dr. Jeremy Farrar, a British biomedical scientist who was then director of the Wellcome Trust health research charity and is now chief scientist for the World Health Organization, organized and led the scientific effort that produced both that paper and the February conference call that laid the groundwork for it, rather than Fauci or Collins. Fauci was then head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Collins was head of the National Institutes of Health. Both played critical roles in the nation’s pandemic response.

The conference call and the paper have become fodder for conspiracy theories claiming that Fauci and Collins pressured scientists to abandon the “lab leak” theory in favor of the natural origins hypothesis.

Dr. Kristian Andersen, who studies the genetics of infectious diseases at the Scripps Research Institute, testified Tuesday that in the early days of the pandemic, he first thought the virus that causes Covid-19 had genomic features that might have pointed to laboratory manipulation.

“My initial hypothesis was that SARS-CoV-2 was likely an engineered virus,” Andersen told the committee. “This was based on limited data and preliminary analyses where I had observed features that appeared to be unique.”

He shared those early concerns with Fauci, who advised him to draft a scientific paper outlining his theory. But Andersen said he changed his mind after learning more about these kinds of viruses.

“We soon discovered that those features are readily found in related coronaviruses, and the virus itself looks to be a clear product of natural selection and not actual engineering,” he said.

He said scientists often adjust their thinking in the face of evidence. It’s not a flip-flop but how the scientific process works.

Andersen, who said he found his name on online “kill lists” because of allegations that he was part of a coverup, also disputed allegations that he and his co-authors were bribed to change their public statements with promises of grant money.

“It has also been suggested that a grant awarded to myself and colleagues from five different countries was a quid pro quo for changing our conclusions. These allegations are false,” he said.

Republicans on the committee weren’t happy with those explanations.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican, pressed Andersen to explain the change in his thinking.

“Within a matter of days, something changed,” she said, between Andersen’s emails and calls to Fauci in late January 2020 and the February 1, 2020, conference call with about a dozen other researchers from around the world. “And that’s what this committee is trying to get to the bottom of. What happened within that three-day period between the conference call and the paper that all of a sudden you did a 180, and it couldn’t possibly come from a lab?” she asked. “What happened in those three days?”

Dr. Robert Garry, a microbiologist and immunologist at Tulane University, explained that they examined the genomes of other coronaviruses.

“Well, we examined the genomes more closely. We looked at other coronaviruses. And there was some new data that came. There was the data come from the scientific literature,” he said.

Garry said the publication of a similar coronavirus isolated from animals called pangolins showed some of the same changes as the virus that eventually infected humans.

“It was a very important piece of data, because it showed that a lot of the theories about the virus having been engineered or put together in a laboratory were not true, because here was a virus in nature that had a receptor-binding domain with exactly” the same features, he said.

Andersen said the genetic adaptation that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans was “suboptimal,” suggesting to him that it was of natural origin. If the virus had been engineered in a lab, he said, the changes probably would have been more precise.

Andersen also pushed back on the timeline repeated by Republicans on the committee: He said he didn’t change his mind in three days but within about 45 days, as he drafted the Nature paper.

Both scientists said that if convincing evidence were to emerge that supported the theory that the virus came from lab manipulation, they would consider it.

“It is still my opinion that there is no credible scientific evidence for a lab-based origin for SARS-CoV-2,” Garry said.

Rep. John Joyce, a Republican physician from Pennsylvania, asked how some US intelligence agencies – namely the Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – had concluded that the virus probably came from a lab.

“Dr. Andersen, you also said in your testimony, ‘we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,’ and yet two conclusions by the Department of Energy and the FBI directly contradict your position. How do you bring that together?” Joyce said.

“I think you could say that our conclusions completely contradict their conclusions, too,” Andersen said. “I think it’s important to understand that we’re looking at different things here. You’re talking about the intelligence community. If you look at the scientific literature, the scientific evidence for this pointing to a single market in the middle of Wuhan is overwhelming.”

Democratic Rep. Raul Ruiz, an ER doctor who is ranking member of the committee, said that months of the panel’s work had been a biased effort that had shed no additional light on the pandemic’s origins but had sown mistrust in science and the nation’s scientists.

“We have undertaken all of this work, but to what end? Has targeting these researchers and probing the publication of this paper meaningfully advanced our efforts to prevent and prepare for future pandemics?” he asked.

“Or has it been about fishing for evidence to prove their confirmation bias, their theories with a goal of advancing a predetermined partisan narrative targeting Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins and our nation’s scientists and public health officials.”

Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, chided her Republican colleagues for feeding public hatred of scientists and public servants.

“I am so offended by some of the things I’ve heard today, of baseless allegations against our nation’s scientists, our public health experts, including Drs. Fauci and Collins, and instead of being on a mission to destroy two people, I wish we were on a mission to get the facts,” she said.

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