For years, Americans were told the lab-leak theory was dismissed by science itself, settled by “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the March 2020 paper cited by every fact-checker and health official who wanted the question closed for good. My investigation has now shown, document by document, that the people who peddled that certainty never believed it themselves.
Start with the authors. Newly released Slack messages show Kristian Andersen privately put the odds of a lab origin at 30%. Eddie Holmes said 20, then walked it back to 10. Andersen told colleagues about the “smoking(ish) guns” that left him “not comfortable” with his own conclusions. These scientists publicly ruled out a lab leak, but behind closed doors manipulated the narrative, hoping to stop the evidence building against their public assertions.
They weren’t managing it alone. The same authors were in direct contact with the intelligence community and NIH leadership throughout the pandemic. Andersen expected to “have a handler” from within the intelligence community. Holmes cited a source in China he called “my spy.” After the DARPA DEFUSE proposal leaked, the plan describing how to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses, the group discussed the need to “stay off email” and curate their correspondence “for the FOI records,” while Holmes promised to “chat to the intelligence folk.” The authors even said they needed to “get something back to Tony’s team at NIH.”
That’s not a coincidence. I have released records showing Dr. Fauci’s ties to the national security apparatus going back to 2003, when he reviewed a National Intelligence Council paper on SARS threats. On Jan. 31, 2020, weeks before Proximal Origin was even published, Fauci told Andersen directly to take his furin cleavage site concerns to the FBI, and in the U.K., to MI5. He personally coordinated Andersen and Holmes’ next moves while the public was told the question was closed. Later documents show Fauci received Top Secret/SCI intelligence briefings on origins for years afterward, arranged through the White House Situation Room.
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