 Most Americans have come around to believing that COVID-19 originated in a lab and not at a wet market in Wuhan, as China's CDC claimed in March of 2020. The former director of the CDC has come around to believing that a lab origin is more likely as has the former head of the Lancet Medical Journal's COVID-19 commission. But I chaired the commission for the Lancet for two years on COVID. I'm pretty convinced it came out of the U.S. lab, biotechnology, not out of nature. Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory up until the summer of 2021, when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article and a viral rant by John Stewart, The disease is the same name as the lab, pushed it into the mainstream. Up until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins said it wasn't even worth considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab. He tells National Geographic everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species. Fauci added he does not believe another theory that the virus occurred naturally but was accidentally released into the public from a lab in China. More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci Collins and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab leak origin far more seriously than they were letting on. Top phyrologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and I mean freaking out basically. Health reporter Emily Kopp works at the non-profit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which revealed an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. They've also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private. I think this is a really important question and a really central part of this entire story that maybe is not talked about enough. The fact that so many mainstream publications have completely overlooked really key pieces of evidence in this story and my theory and I think about this a lot is essentially that you know health editors, the people who are making decisions about what to cover and what not to cover at major news organizations at least when it comes to the health beat are friends with Anthony Fauci. They've known him for decades in some cases and it's probably very challenging to examine the possibility that research funded by Fauci's Institute might have had unintentional consequences and so essentially I think to put it very starkly we see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over you know providing the truth to their readers and I think readers deserve to understand the full scope of possibilities when it comes to the origins of the pandemic. COP has assembled a comprehensive timeline that lays out substantial evidence that Fauci, Collins and a number of influential scientists misled the public. Whether or not the lab leak theory is correct it's now clear that these public officials concealed their conflicts of interest with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and minimized their own roles in providing the government funding for the unsupervised gain of function research that may have led to the pandemic. Among other things COP's research has revealed that virologist Christian Anderson wrote privately to Fauci that he and three other scientists thought that the virus that causes COVID-19 looked unnatural and inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. Just four days later after participating in a series of teleconferences with Fauci and Collins Anderson called the lab leak theory crackpot. Other emails revealed that Fauci knew that his agency was funding gain of function research with SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan by late January of 2020, yet he publicly denied it for Congress 18 months later. Will you today finally take some responsibility for funding gain of function research in Wuhan? Senator, with all due respect I disagree with so many of the things that you've said. First of all, gain of function is a very nebulous term. COP works for the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, which is devoting significant resources to its biohazards project with the mission of investigating the origins of COVID-19, the risks of gain of function research, and mishaps at biolabs where pathogens of pandemic potential are stored and manipulated. At a certain point I realized that this is, I mean, I think one of the most important health stories of our lifetime, how this devastating earth shattering pandemic that has affected billions of us and unfortunately killed millions of people started. And I knew that U.S. Right to Know, this nonprofit was submitting a lot of freedom of information at requests and had found some pretty startling information. The first thing we should talk about is a paper called The Proximal Origins of COVID-19, which in the introduction to your timeline you call one of the most influential scientific articles in history. What makes you say that? This paper has been cited in thousands of news articles, hundreds of Wikipedia pages, and really shaped the discussion about the origins of COVID for a long time and continues to. The idea that a lab leak could have resulted in the pandemic, the idea that that is a total conspiracy theory really originates with that paper. What argument was that paper making and what effect did that argument have on kind of the course of coverage of the lab leak theory? The central premise is that SARS-CoV-2 could not have been engineered. They also said this novel virus doesn't look like anything that we've seen in the scientific literature. So it's unlikely that scientists would have used novel methods and completely unknown virus to create this new virus. There are a few problems with that though, which is that we now know that two of the virologists who helped write the paper were deeply familiar with work going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with its American partner EcoHealth Alliance, because they were directly collaborating with either the EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The other virologists who also helped write the paper were also aware of a very similar virus called RITG-13, were aware of gain of function work going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had expressed among themselves serious concerns about aspects of the genome that looked unusual and looked prime to infect human cells. I think it would be useful to dig a little bit into some of the specific conversations that we now know were happening in those earliest days as the people at NIH, like Fauci and Collins, were trying to figure out where this might have come from. One of the key dates here is January 27th when Fauci learned that the NIH had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That's fairly early. He knew there was a connection. Two days later, Christian Anderson found a paper describing gain of function research at that facility. By January 29th, they know that NIH has funded research at the Wuhan facility and that there has been gain of function research enhancing the transmissibility of viruses at that facility. A bunch of virologists and Fauci and Francis Collins start frantically emailing and scheduling phone calls. Just describe what many of the virologists in this inner circle were saying about the virus at that time amongst themselves. The striking thing is when you put these emails back to back, you see this panic that was going on in late January and early February as Christian Anderson and Eddie Holmes, two top virologists, giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically. We know from these emails that their first conclusion was essentially, I think Eddie Holmes said to Christian Anderson, something like, holy shit, this is bad. It's clear they were deeply concerned. The term that they used to Fauci at first in late January was that the virus seemed inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. In other words, it seemed engineered. Four days later, Christian Anderson is speaking to scientists working with the national academies who are putting together a letter for the White House around what sort of data is necessary in order to investigate the origins of the pandemic, and he uses the same phrase but inverted. He says, a phrase I like to use with these lab leak cranks is consistent with natural evolution. So essentially, you are doing a 180 change. There's this four day period where they go from saying inconsistent with expectations with evolutionary theory to consistent with natural evolution, and that's the thrust of this proximal origins paper. When you look at the paper, it seems to be saying that some of these unusual aspects of the virus, the receptor binding domain that makes it more infectious to humans, it wouldn't have been engineered that way. They wouldn't predict that that is what a person would go in to insert. It just doesn't make much sense. As you said, there was not a clear backbone virus that they would have built upon. Is it possible that just in those four days, taking a closer look, they saw something, they had their initial reaction where they're freaking out and then they look closer and they see some of these details and it changes their mind and that's the scientific process? Yeah. No, I think that's a great question. We know that Anthony Fauci was looped into these conversations very early and Francis Collins was looped into these conversations very early. And at the same time they were speaking with these virologists, they were concerned about whether there were connections between NIH and the WIV. And they learned, indeed there was a connection through this intermediary called TECO Health Alliance. So we can't overlook that the fact that these very powerful grant makers at NIH were participating in these calls and were concerned that they could be linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So that's one piece. Another piece is that at least one virologist, Eddie Holmes, as he's having these discussions, also did not disclose that not only had he worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but he had worked on RATG-13, this virus that is 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. And then I think a final piece is looking closely at what exactly they're arguing in proximal origin. So essentially they're saying that if you were to engineer a bio weapon, say from a coronavirus, you would not engineer it to be like SARS-CoV-2. It is not optimally designed. But that's a pretty high bar. There are experiments you can do to evaluate, say, the potential that a coronavirus could evolve into a human coronavirus that does not involve making it sort of optimal at infecting people in the way that you would design a bio weapon. And saying that this doesn't look like anything that we've seen conducted in experiments before, I don't think is a very credible argument if you're familiar with the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been sampling novel bat coronaviruses for years and messing with their spike proteins in the lab. There clearly was some awareness. What you're getting at here in terms of the high bar of genetic engineering in going in and inserting very precise modifications is one thing. Another method that we now is becoming more commonly known, this gain of function idea where you're just kind of passing the virus through mice that have human like cells in their lungs and getting it more and more infectious that way. I mean, one of the interesting little details is that in one of Fauci's emails, he seems to be asking about serial passage through transgenic mice, and there's just like a bunch of question marks after it. Does that indicate to you that this was a possibility that may have originally been in the proximal origins paper that they cut out later? Because it's just odd that it's in the email, but that conversation is never resumed until months later. This secret group passed back and forth multiple versions of this preprint that went on to be published in Nature Medicine, and NIH refuses to release them. We're currently challenging their redactions to our FOIA now, but it's curious why they wouldn't simply let the public into the early discussions about how they arrive to this conclusion. I was just mentioning there's this organization called EcoHealth Alliance, which has already been mentioned and is the kind of go between NIH or the intermediary, between them and the Wuhan lab. So NIH would give grants to EcoHealth and they would subcontract out to the lab, and there's one grant they gave called Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence. Why is that particular grant of note or even a problem for Fauci now that we have more details and can see the bigger picture? Yeah, so that grant has gotten a lot of attention because EcoHealth has repeatedly failed to produce legally obligated progress reports regarding the research that was performed under that grant, and we also know from the progress reports that exist that some of the experiments violated NIH's own regulations around gain of function research. And basically for some reason, NIH carved out this exception to its own gain of function regulations for EcoHealth Alliance. And one of the experiments conducted under this grant found that by splicing a spike protein from one coronavirus into another, that coronavirus grew to have 10,000 times the viral load that it originally did. The source of a lot of the pushback here, it's justifiably that we still don't have that smoking gun. There's no known virus in the Wuhan lab that could have been the backbone for SARS-CoV-2. They have found bats in Laos that are carrying the closest known relative to the virus, which has similar characteristics that allow it to bind to an enzyme that's in the human lungs, although there it is still missing what's called the Furin cleavage site, which is like kind of what's really special about SARS-CoV-2 apparently. But did the Laos discovery shift how you think about the evidence at all one way or another? The lead scientist who made that discovery is also continues to be open to either a lab origin or a wildlife trade origin. The discovery of similar viruses to SARS-CoV-2 and Laos does not nix the possibility of a lab origin simply because we know that EcoHealth Alliance was doing viral sampling in the same areas. We also know that we don't have access to every single virus that was in the Wuhan lab. The database is not public. Right, right. Yeah, that's a key source of intrigue is this Wuhan Institute of Virology coronavirus database that appeared to go dark in September 2019. There are also real questions about whether EcoHealth Alliance has published all of the data it has access to, which is I think really scandalous because EcoHealth Alliance is a U.S. nonprofit and accepts, you know, our public tax dollars. Emails between U.S. scientists and those working in the Wuhan lab confirm that many viral sequences remained unpublished as of 2021. In February of 2022, The New York Times published an article citing new research supporting the original theory that the virus originated at the Wuhan market. But after peer review, those findings are far less conclusive. First of all, one of the studies cited by the Times identified raccoon dogs as the likely animal host. But raccoon dogs were sold in relatively small quantities at the Wuhan market. There's no evidence that they are particularly susceptible to the early strain of the virus. And there are no natural infections of a raccoon dog documented by any strain of SARS-CoV-2 anywhere in the world, according to one critique by another team of scientists. In the published version of the pro-market spread article, the authors abandoned the claim of dispositive evidence for a Wuhan market origin, substituting a weaker claim that animals at the market were a clear conduit for the virus, though they concede that there's no direct evidence of a market animal infected with it. In contrast, there was strong evidence that the 2002 SARS outbreak was transmitted to humans by animals. More recently, a pre-print study published by three biologists claimed they found a genetic fingerprint indicating strong evidence of synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2. Christian Anderson, who did not reply to our emails requesting comment, dismissed that paper as bullshit that fails kindergarten molecular biology. A Senate committee report released by Republicans last week concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was most likely the result of a research-related incident, citing gaps like the failure to identify the original host reservoir, intermediate host species, and the lack of evidence showing transmission from animals to humans. A pro-publica Vanity Fair investigation drawing on materials from that report uncovered internal communications that seem to indicate Chinese state officials went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to investigate an acute safety emergency in November 2019. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins are both stepping down. There's a possible, maybe even likely, change in the political landscape coming. If Republicans take one or both chambers of Congress and decide to hold hearings on this question, what are some of the most important known unknowns to borrow an unfortunate phrase that you'd like to get more information about? Most important and I think most immediate one is probably, again, looking at the credibility of the scientists who have been driving the narrative around the origins of COVID for years now and whether leaders of NIH had an influence there. I think that a lot of that has been fairly well established at this point, that there is some level of conflict of interest just from what we know already. Given that we can question the credibility of some of these people, including the very top with Anthony Fauci, what kind of information do you think would help get to the actual truth here? Yeah, as far as the sort of trickier thing of solving the origins of the pandemic, I think it gets more complicated, but that is not to say I think it's impossible. As I said, I think EcoHealth Alliance could have data that it has not published and if that data collection was funded with public taxpayer dollars, we have a right to see it. That I think is a key lead. A second key lead to follow I think is just looking at the genome itself. Does it bear markers of engineering and are the techniques that might have been used to engineer it? Can those be found in the scientific literature produced by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its partners? Were those virologists in communication with the Wuhan Institute of Virology about those methods? Some of these scientists with credibility issues, again, we're working directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I'm particularly interested in Eddie Holmes given that a bunch of spike proteins and SARS-related coronaviruses were uploaded to a public database and then deleted quickly after connecting him to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I'm really curious if he's told us everything he knows. There's been a lot of pushback from virologists against this theory because they say without evidence it's going to lead to a crackdown on valuable research that could actually prevent pandemics. You'd be creating regulations that are a solution looking for a problem is how Felicia Goodrum, who's the President of the American Society for Virology, put it. Another virologist named Peter Hotez has said that the GOP-led congressional hearings would be a disaster, an attack on the fabric of science in America. How concerned are you about those issues that this will ultimately have a chilling effect on science? I want to be very conscientious about that. I don't want to do any kind of reporting that could endanger people or halt the development of critical medical counter measures. I will say I'm irked by the fact that a very small number of very powerful scientists are sort of dressing up their lack of accountability. Anthony Fauci is a powerful individual. And accountability for a small number of scientists who have misled the public is not the same as an attack on the scientists who have done incredible work to mitigate this horrible pandemic. And so I think it's kind of offensive that a small number of powerful individuals are escaping accountability that way. U.S. right to know, I think, is an organization that has a different viewpoint on a lot of things than does an organization like Reason, which is a generally pro-technology libertarian leaning organization. We spent many years writing defenses of things like GMOs and genetic engineering, whereas U.S. right to know has spent a lot of resources criticizing many aspects of those things. But nonetheless, I think that on this issue of government-funded laboratory manipulation of viruses, much of which has been purposely obscured from public view, I think I share with you a broad agreement that it needs to be scrutinized and there needs to be accountability if there is unacceptable, risky research undertaken on the taxpayer dime. And the reality is that U.S. right to know has put a lot of resources and work into obtaining the public records, reading and analyzing and summarizing them. You've got the receipts. I should clarify, U.S. right to know is not opposed to GMOs, but we've traditionally done reporting that sheds light on whether GMOs result in the overuse of pesticides that can have negative externalities. And unfortunately, the agrochemical industry doesn't like that sort of reporting. Again, that reporting also relies on FOIA. And so you see a lot out there about us being anti-science or anti-GMO. But really what it is is, you know, pro-technology by examining those negative externalities. And our biohazards project is not opposed to synthetic biology or virology as a whole. It's simply asking, are we applying appropriate checks in order to make sure that that research, that can be really critical and lead to medical countermeasures, is being done safely in a way that doesn't jeopardize public health? And, you know, do the public really have a voice in those conversations about what sort of risks are unacceptable when you're talking about, you know, messing with viruses in the lab? Research that results in new types of coronaviruses continues in labs both in the US and abroad with a recent experiment out of Boston University resulting in a virus that combines the deadly ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2 with the transmissible and immune-invasive Omicron variant. The new chimeric virus killed 80% of mice infected in the lab. In September, the NIH awarded a new grant for studying bat-borne coronaviruses to EcoHealth Alliance, the group whose president, Peter Dajak, orchestrated an anti-lab leak letter without disclosing his conflicts and which still hasn't turned over all the records related to its work in the Wuhan lab. Even though we don't know the answers to these questions yet, you know, hopefully we will get them one day. But even what we do know is concerning in terms of what is being done with these viruses, it's ostensibly to try to predict and prevent pandemics. Obviously it didn't work in this case, even if that was the purpose. And again, you know, as a generally pro-technology libertarian, it makes me nervous to talk about banning certain lines of research or inquiry. But this does seem like something that is worth a look. Do you think that it is getting that sort of look? Does it look like there's going to be a serious look at gain-of-function research or a permanent moratorium on it? Or are we just going, does it look like the status quo is just going to maintain going forward? It's hard to say for me. And again, I don't think this is anti-technology. I think it's more incorporating the public's voice into conversations about what sort of risks are unacceptable and how we can achieve scientific progress while also not jeopardizing public safety. It seems to me like the status quo is more or less continuing unabated. We do see some words of caution from the NSAVB, which is this advisory committee that advises the U.S. government on these questions. And we've recently seen an initiative led by Alina Chan at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to sort of examine what risks are unacceptable in virology research. But again, I went to a biodefense conference yesterday and there was very little discussion about biosafety. In President Biden's most recent budget, he allocated a billion dollars to biosafety. But if you take a closer look at the budget, the biosafety funding is to build a new BSL4, maximum biosecurity lab. So I think a lot of the discussion about increased attention on gain of function research, jeopardizing experiments is another method to avoid accountability and oversight. I don't think that experiments are actually slowing and I think they might actually be accelerating.