Anthony Fauci’s former boss admitted in Congress that the Covid lab leak theory was credible — despite previously calling it a “highly destructive conspiracy.”
Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, testified Friday in a closed-door session with the House of Representatives coronavirus subcommittee about his role in the response to the U.S. pandemic.
Dr. Collins was involved in suppressing the theory that Covid likely escaped from a Chinese biolab, a theory that involved the sprawling agency he led. It was previously revealed that the NIH oversaw the funding of risky gain-of-function research to make viruses more transmissible and/or more deadly.
In a major reversal, House Republicans leading the hearing revealed that Dr. Collins, 73, told them the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy theory.
Dr. Collins is pictured at a 2021 hearing before Congress. Dr. As head of the National Institutes of Health, Collins served as Dr. Fauci
In an email to the publisher of Nature Medicine, the journal that published the Proximal Origins article, co-author Dr. Kristian Andersen wrote that Drs. Collins and Fauci “encouraged” the article
His answers were similar to those of Dr. Fauci, who endured 14 hours of questioning during a marathon last week when he finally acknowledged that the lab leak theory — that Covid escaped from a Chinese biolab — should not have been dismissed so easily.
Republicans also said that Dr.
Dr. Collins was Fauci’s boss during his tenure as head of the NIH from 2009 to 2021.
The holy doctors are said to have pushed for the publication of an influential scientific paper that shaped the narrative that Covid originated in nature, while discrediting the theory that gain of function was the cause.
The focus of the questions related to the March 2020 article “Proximal Origins,” in which scientists said the theory that gain-of-function research caused the release of a genetically modified coronavirus from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “unlikely.”
Ohio Republican Brad Wenstrup, head of the House Covid subcommittee, said: “Dr. Collins acknowledged that Dr. Fauci had invited him to attend the infamous February 1, 2020 conference call that led to the publication ‘Proximal Origin’.
“This testimony directly contradicts Dr. Fauci and raises further concerns about the U.S. government’s role in suppressing and vilifying the lab leak hypothesis.”
He added that Dr. Collins said the lab leak hypothesis was not a conspiracy.
Dr. Collins participated in a confidential conference call with Dr. Fauci four years ago, prior to the publication of the 2020 article, which would set the tone for public perception of the pandemic’s origins for years to come.
Republicans said both used their influence to pressure researchers to throw out the lab leak theory in favor of a theory of natural origins.
Dr. Fauci, Collins and other authors of the Proximal Origins paper have denied that top doctors strong-armed researchers into publishing one theory over another, although bombshell emails made public by Republicans last spring show revealed that Dr. Kristian Andersen, a co-author of the paper, wrote: ‘(This article was) in response to Jeremy (Farrar), Tony Fauci and Francis Collins.’
Dr. Collins is said to have blurred the definition of high-risk gain-of-function research, with Dr. Fauci denied playing any role in the funding as head of an NIH subagency.
Dr. Collins tried to silence the authors of a petition criticizing blanket lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic. Those authors instead called for selectively isolating people most at risk of becoming seriously ill
An earlier investigation completed by Republicans in the House of Representatives revealed an email Dr. Collins sent to Dr. Fauci two months after the “Proximal Origins” article was published, which stated, ” I was hoping that the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SA RS-CoV-2 would be put to rest. this…I wonder if the NIH can do anything to stop this very destructive conspiracy…Is there anything else we can do?”
During his closed-door testimony, Dr. Collins also stood by his previous statements denouncing the Great Barrington Declaration.
This petition criticized the government’s efforts to shut down the economy, including schools, and called for isolating those people most at risk of serious illness, such as the elderly.
Collins sent an email to Dr. Fauci in October 2020 saying that the ideas of “fringe” epidemiologists who wrote the statement required a “swift and devastating publicized takedown.”
It has since emerged that the widespread lockdowns that dominated most of 2020 have wreaked havoc on people’s mental health, especially children, who were unable to attend school in person, participate in extracurricular activities such as sports teams, and get much-needed time with peers were allowed to spend.
Lockdowns also lead to the coddling of our immune system, which is usually ready to fight pathogens simply by being exposed to various germs in the environment.
But without that basic level of immunity, cases of a range of respiratory viruses, colds, flu and even measles skyrocketed.
In addition to imposing lockdowns, the government endorsed ‘social distancing’ by keeping a distance of one and a half meters from others. But Dr. Collins, like Dr. Fauci, said this rule was not backed by science.
Dr. Collins also imitated Dr. Fauci’s murky definition of gain-of-function research “in an attempt to conceal the NIH’s involvement in funding the dangerous research in Wuhan,” according to Rep. Wenstrup.
Dr. Fauci was also accused last week of “playing semantics” during his closed-door testimony when he walked back previous claims that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had never allocated government money to functional research.
He had insisted to senators last summer that his former department “has never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and does not now.”
Still, emails dated February 1, 2020 showed Fauci acknowledging that “Wuhan University scientists are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapt to human infections , and that the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”
A transcript of Dr.’s testimony Collins is expected to be made public, although it is unclear when.
Dr. Fauci’s personal questioning before the same committee last week “revealed drastic and systemic deficiencies in America’s public health systems.”