Dr. Anthony Fauci had a central role in shaping the narrative that the origin of Covid was “natural,” according to emails which House Republicans were granted only limited access to.
Fauci pushed the “natural origin” narrative in an ostensibly authoritative paper titled “Proximal Origin” even though at least three authors of the article told Fauci they were 60 to 80 percent sure that COVID-19 had come out of a lab.
Fauci “not only initiated efforts to cover up evidence pointing to a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 but actively shaped a highly influential academic paper that excluded the possibility of a lab leak,” Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke wrote for The Epoch Times on Jan. 20.
Proximal Origin, first published online on Feb. 16, 2020, was co-authored by five virologists, four of whom participated earlier in a Feb. 1, 2020 teleconference convened by Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Jeremy Farrar, who heads the UK-based Wellcome Trust.
The Epoch Times report said the hastily-called teleconference was organized after reporting emerged of a potential link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the Covid-19 outbreak.
“Proximal Origin” formed the primary basis for the Fauci-led Covid task force and its Big Media allies to claim the “natural origin” theory was the most likely theory.
“While the contents of emails previously released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show the Proximal Origin paper clearly conflicts with the authors’ private views on the virus’ origin, it was unclear if the authors had preemptively reshaped their views to please Fauci or if Fauci himself had an active role in shaping the article,” The Epoch Times report noted.
Newly released notes taken by House Republican staffers from emails that still remain largely redacted clearly point to Fauci’s active role in shaping the article and its conclusion.
Following the online publication of Proximal Origin on Feb. 16, 2020, the article was published in the prominent science journal Nature on March 17 with a number of edits that “were made to strengthen the natural origin narrative,” The Epoch Times report said.
The most often publicly cited passage from the March 17 version of the paper, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” doesn’t appear in the Feb. 16 version.
INFORMATION WORLD WAR: . . . . How We Win . . . . Executive Intelligence Brief
