Influential paper which dismissed Covid lab leak went ‘too far’, claims one of the researchers

One of the authors of an influential scientific paper believed to have labeled the Covid lable hypothesis a fringe conspiracy theory admitted today that they went “too far”.

Professor Robert Garry, a respected microbiologist who works at Tulane University in New Orleans, is one of five named in a March 2020 article titled “The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2.”

This controversial newspaper is accused of trying to suppress the idea that Covid may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan and instead evolved naturally from an animal.

The letter, published in the journal Nature Medicine, concluded: “We do not believe that any scenario based on laboratory evidence is plausible.”

Now Dr Garry has told the BBC that this statement was never intended to dismiss all sorts of possible lab leaks.

Speak against Fever: the hunt for the origins of Covidan eight-part BBC Radio 4 series, he said they were trying to dismiss the idea that the virus was deliberately created as a biological weapon.

“At that point, we were still largely under the influence, when that particular sentence was written, with the idea that maybe this was a bioengineered virus or maybe a weapon that was accidentally released,” he said.

But under pressure from John Sudworth, the BBC’s former Beijing Correspondent, about how the paper’s main conclusion covered lab leaks of all kinds, such as that from a disease research facility, Professor Garry admitted the wording was wrong.

“Maybe we went a little too far there,” he said.

His comments mark a shift in his opinion.

In March earlier this year, he said “no lab leak scenario” was supported by data.

“It’s time to nail up the coffin of all the lab conspiracy theories and give this long-dead corpse a proper burial,” he said at the time.

He’s not the first “Proximal Origin” author to recently reexamine the conclusion of their influential paper.

Another, Professor Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University in New York, has also said he now has his doubts.

On another episode of Fever, he said that while he sticks to the idea that Covid wasn’t intentionally created in a lab and natural origins remained the most likely scenario, it wasn’t the only plausible one.

While most lab leak scenarios for the origins of Covid center around the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is known to work on coronaviruses found in bats, Professor Lipkin has a different hypothesis.

He pointed to another lab, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, just a few hundred meters from Huanan market, where the first cases of Covid were detected, as a possible source.

This lab was known to be involved in collecting thousands of blood and fecal samples from wild bats, with staff working there not always wearing the recommended level of personal protective equipment.

Professor Lipkin said Covid ‘has originated outside the market and amplified in the market’ as a result.

Another author of Proximal Origin is Dr. Kristian Andersen, a Danish biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Emails between him and Dr Anthony Fauci, who led the response to the pandemic in the US, discussing how the virus may have evolved early in the pandemic emerged later in 2021.

Dr. Fauci has denied influencing the paper in any way.

And dr. Garry, while writing to Proximal Origin, said stopping the debate over a lab leak “has never been considered.”

The lab leak theory, once dismissed as an outright conspiracy, has grown in popularity in the years since the virus first caused a global pandemic.

And last week it was revealed that China’s own “bat woman” Dr. Shi Zhengli, a leading virologist at WIV, at one point feared Covid might have leaked from her secret lab.

Other insiders central to Beijing’s response to the pandemic have also admitted that the country has been quietly exploring the possibility of the virus emerging from one of its labs.

Such investigations took place despite President Xi Jinping’s communist government repeatedly denying the hypothesis, labeling it a smear campaign by “anti-Chinese” forces and insisting that the virus emerged naturally instead.

In 2020, the overwhelming opinion, shared by the world’s leading experts, was that Covid naturally crossed over from animals infected with a bat coronavirus to humans.

But the consensus on how the pandemic started three years ago is slowly starting to shift.

Even some US intelligence officials have supported it, with FBI Director Christopher Wray stating in February that the virus “most likely” came from a laboratory incident in Wuhan.

However, most experts argue that Covid most likely arose naturally and was passed from animals to humans – what is known as zoonosis.

Such theories have largely pointed to the Huanan seafood wholesale market in Wuhan, where numerous species of live animals were kept and sold, as the potential place where such an infection could have occurred.

And in February 2021, an investigation into the origins of Covid by the World Health Organization said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus leaked from a laboratory.

But plans for a second phase of the investigation, which would include audits of laboratories in the Wuhan area, were rejected by the Chinese government.

No concrete evidence has ever been found to support either argument, leading experts to fear the truth behind Covid’s origins may never be discovered.

In addition to establishing a historical fact, experts want to discover how Covid originated to help prevent other similar pathogens from becoming pandemics in the future.