Two world-renowned virologists appeared on Capitol Hill Tuesday and delivered a sharp defense of their findings that the coronavirus pandemic was natural in origin, telling skeptical Republicans that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci exerted no influence on a scientific paper they wrote to that effect.
The article is at the heart of Republicans’ unsubstantiated claims that Dr. Faucis and Dr. Francis S. Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, tried to suppress the idea that a lab leak caused the pandemic. The virologists who testified, Kristian G. Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert F. Garry Jr. of Tulane University School of Medicine, were two of the paper’s five authors.
Tuesday’s hearing before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic produced no new evidence for the Republicans’ claims. The hearing was titled “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up” — a pun on the title of the paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine.
“The claim that Dr. Fauci prompted the drafting of ‘Proximal Origin’ to refute the lab leak is not true,” said Dr. Fauci. Andersen.
The Republican accusations center on a series of email exchanges including Dr. Fauci, who ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time; Dr. Collins; and dr. Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation that funds health research. Dr. Farrar is now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist.
Republicans have used the emails to suggest that after initially voicing the idea that it may have been developed in a lab, scientists studying the origins of the virus changed their minds because of input from Dr. Faucis and Dr. 1, 2020, conference call with authors of the proximal origin study.
The scientists said their views have changed after days of intensive work, which included studying features of the virus that were also identified in related coronaviruses in other species and consulting virologists more experienced in studying coronaviruses.
Republicans have repeatedly claimed that Dr. Fauci convened the Feb. 1 call, urging publication of the paper as a way to quell public discussion about a possible lab leak. But dr. Andersen and Dr. Garry both testified that Dr. Farrar had summoned the call. And dr. Andersen said Dr. in fact encouraged Fauci to raise any concerns about a lab leak.
“In particular, I remember him saying if you think it came from a lab, you should write this down as a peer-reviewed paper,” said Dr. Andersen in a transcribed interview with the subcommittee, recounting a phone conversation between the two on January 31, 2020.
Dr. Farrar, who was not credited as a co-author on the study, has come under scrutiny for suggesting in a mid-February 2020 email that the authors change a sentence saying it was “unlikely” that the virus had surfaced through laboratory manipulation. to someone who said it was “unlikely” that the virus had originated that way. A WHO spokesman on Tuesday declined questions about Dr. Farar to answer.
In an email after the hearing, Dr. Fauci that the idea that he had attempted to disprove the lab leak theory was “categorically false”. He added: “This was confirmed several times at the hearing by two highly respected scientists who testified to this under oath.”
Sometimes the hearing took on the air of competitive science classes. Dr. Andersen often began his answers with the phrase, “I think it’s important to understand…” Republican members of the panel unsuccessfully tried to lecture the virologists, sometimes making outright false claims.
“I’m making a scientific point here,” the subcommittee’s chair, Representative Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican and podiatrist, said at one point.
After the hearing, Mr. Wenstrup shook Dr. Andersen hand and said he hoped Dr. Andersen felt the hearing was professional. Dr. Andersen said he thought so. But beneath the courtesy, the tension between the Republicans and the scientists was palpable.
Data related to the clustering of human cases around a market in Wuhan, China; the genetic diversity of viruses there; and the presence of raccoon dog DNA in the same place as the virus’s genetic material have strengthened many scientists’ view that the virus arose from China’s illegal wildlife trade.
But Republicans repeatedly suggested Tuesday that because so much is unknown about the work of Chinese researchers, a lab leak was indeed possible. They theorized that U.S. officials wanted to downplay that possibility because they wanted to avoid being blamed for funding Chinese research, and that scientists wanted to avoid alienating their Chinese counterparts.
In particular, they cited a February 2020 Slack post by one of the final authors of the proximal origin study, Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.
“Given the shit show that would happen if someone seriously accused the Chinese of even an accidental release,” he wrote, “my feeling is we have to say that since there is no evidence of a specific engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape, so we are content to attribute it to natural processes.”
When asked about the comment, Dr. Rambaut in an email on Tuesday that he expressed reluctance to speculate that the coronavirus had escaped from a lab because there were no signs it had ever been in a lab.
“We had no evidence from the genome that it was anything other than a virus of nature,” he said, adding, “Don’t go accusing people of things when there’s no evidence.”
