The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic issued a subpoena on Friday demanding the private messages of Dr. Kristian Andersen relating to a research study meant to disprove the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
This is in relation to an academic paper titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which Andersen co-authored and published in Nature Medicine in March 2020. The paper says the virus has a natural origin.
Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, testified before the subcommittee on June 16 that he and the co-authors communicated primarily over Slack while drafting the paper.
During the hearing, Andersen said that he had not provided all messages relevant to the subcommittee’s inquiry because not all participants of the Slack channel—which he privately owned—approved of their release.
Wenstrup said the subpoena was issued to compel the production of Andersen’s Slack messages relating to the “drafting, publication, and critical reception” of the academic article and the origins of COVID-19.
“Andersen played a pivotal role in potentially suppressing the lab leak hypothesis, and Americans deserve to know why this happened, who was involved, and how we can prevent the intentional suppression of scientific discourse during a future pandemic,” he added.
Wenstrup said the authors “may have possessed conflicts of interest for supporting a zoonotic origin of COVID-19.”
Fauci’s Alleged Role in Drafting Study
The subcommittee issued a memo (pdf) on March 5 saying that it uncovered new email evidence suggesting that Fauci “prompted” the drafting of the study.
The memo detailed a conference call between Collins, Fauci, and at least 11 other scientists in early February 2020, about a week after the first Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus—commonly known as the novel coronavirus—case was confirmed in the United States.
Collins, Fauci, and others were warned in the Feb. 1, 2020, call about the possibility that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, according to the memo.
“The presence in pangolins of [a virus’ receptor-binding domain] very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans,” the paper reads.
But the March 5 memo, citing internal emails, stipulated that Anderson “did not find the pangolin data compelling” and only wrote the paper after being “prompted” by Fauci, Collins, and the others.
“Privately, Dr. Andersen did not believe the pangolin data disproved a lab leak theory despite saying so publicly. It is still unclear what intervening event changed the minds of the authors of Proximal Origin in such a short period of time,” the House committee stated.
