This is great news. But America and the world can’t celebrate unreservedly — because Fauci himself is unlikely to face criminal jeopardy, owing to a sweeping preemptive pardon granted him by President Joe Biden. Yet that doesn’t rule out other forms of accountability for Fauci, such as civil torts. A deeper reckoning, moreover, may shed light on the creepy, long-running nexus between biological research and America’s national-security state.

Last week, Dr. David Morens — a senior adviser to Fauci during the Covid years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health — pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with two other people to hide evidence and defy public-records laws. The evidence in question: emails between Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report from the House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research involves combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids, justified on the grounds of better understanding future infectious diseases. At least one US intelligence agency — the CIA — has already concluded that the novel coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese lab doing just such work. And it is also reasonable to at least suspect that the US government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance was part of intelligence efforts to keep tabs on Chinese research. 

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators agreed “in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.” This was done, as the conspirators themselves made clear, to evade the transparency requirements of the Federal Records Act and the possibility of future exposure under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

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Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China. One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the Covid-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019.

Many of the incriminating communications have been posted online by the oversight committee of the US House of Representatives. Numerous emails implicate Fauci himself in the effort to evade public-records and transparency laws. For example, an email from Morens to a group of fellow scientists, including Daszak, dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Another email, from May 13, 2021, to the same group of scientists discusses having a friendly journalist “interview Tony [Fauci] directly and connect him to our ‘secret’ back channel. He emailed Tony a few days ago.” This suggests rather routine illegal use of private communication systems to coordinate official pandemic messaging, an effort in which Fauci himself was involved.

Daszak — widely suspected but not confirmed to be one of the unnamed conspirators — appears in many of the emails in which avoiding transparency is mentioned. An email dated April 21, 2021, from Daszak to a group of five other government-employed or -connected scientists, reads in part: “Please feel free to share any docs that I’ve sent to you, with Tony [Fauci]. Hopefully you can do that in a way that avoids [the Freedom of Information Act], and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.”

In another email, Morens, referring to Fauci, tells Daszak; “If he needs further info, it might be best to connect you two, in an off-the-record manner. Would that be OK? We are getting FOIA’d nonstop, so it’s most important that Tony [Fauci] not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.” Daszak responded: “Totally agree. Tell him I’m happy to speak with him at any time and will do so in a way that’s not FOIA-ble.” 

In an email from November 18, 2021, Morens says: “Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak], and I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc [carbon copy] to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.” There are many more statements of the kind in the public record, thanks to House investigators. 

The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod. 

Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are important in themselves and also because of the larger dynamics they reveal in the history of Covid’s origins. According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature. 

Parallel to PREDICT, Fauci’s NIAID also wrote a grant for $8 million directly to EcoHealth Alliance so that it could help fund research into bat coronaviruses being conducted by Shi Zhengli, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute. This research seems to have included gain-of-function enhancements on some of the bat viruses that may have made them more dangerous to people.

To be charitable, if collecting intelligence on China’s infectious disease research was the plan, the US government did manage to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was then one of China’s top virology labs. Less charitably, the government did so by using US taxpayer money to fund dangerous research in a sprawling and poorly run lab. While the Wuhan Institute of Virology did have Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in 2019, it also had numerous less secure facilities in the same building; some of the bat-virus research is alleged to have occurred in these lower-safety level labs.

In this light, the pandemic can be seen as the ultimate iatrogenic disaster. In an effort to combat pandemics, a secret arm of the government may well have funded research that inadvertently produced the very thing it was trying to prevent: a massive, deadly, economy-crashing pandemic.

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that the Trump administration, and especially health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., are now deeply ambivalent about the nature of the government’s likely efforts to keep track of other countries’ bioweapon research. On the one hand, if such spywork is funding dangerous research in order to get inside foreign laboratories, it can lead to unintended consequences … like a global pandemic. On the other, rival states and private actors do, in fact, conduct dangerous biological research that the US government might want to be apprised of. 

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A better way to mitigate the whole problem would be to refurbish the international treaty against biological weapons. That treaty, which outlaws offensive-oriented biological research and was highly effective in an earlier age, has a gaping loophole that allows high-tech biological research to continue as long as it is done in the name of medicine, public health, and biodefense. In other words, the great powers are still making the active ingredients in would-be weapons, but they are not making or testing delivery systems, nor do they deploy pathogens to the battlefield. However, as highly dangerous biological research advances, those old constraints become less important.

To understand how and why, it helps to revisit history. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the US government, along with most of its large allies and peer competitors, maintained offensive-oriented biological-weapons programs. During the pandemic, liberal journalists went out of their way to scoff at any mention of “bioweapons,” as if such a thing had never existed. But it did, and it is all a matter of public record.

However, by the late 1960s, American military leaders had turned against these so-called germ bombs, seeing biological warfare as dangerously unpredictable and dangerously accessible. In fact, the US brass referred to biological warfare as “the poor man’s nuke.” A number of accidents, including the mass poisoning of a herd of sheep in the American West, had led to public outcry from not only hippies, but heartland squares as well.

When Richard Nixon arrived at the White House in January 1969, he was met by large and persistent peace vigils demanding an end to US biological-warfare programs. Ten months later, in November 1969, Nixon announced the “unprecedented” unilateral end of America’s biological-weapons program. Quickly thereafter, the United States launched international negotiations aimed at ending bioweapons programs everywhere. In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was agreed to. All signatory states were compelled to end their offensive research and to destroy their offensive biological weapon stockpiles by March 1975.

The treaty has mostly been a success. But there was that one loophole. States could continue doing research on dangerous pathogens as long as this was for the creation of “defensive medical countermeasures.” For a long time, this loophole meant little, in part because the barriers to such research were so high. However, by the early aughts, with the advent of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, dangerous tampering with pathogens became much easier and more common.

As more parties began tampering with pathogens, intelligence agencies around the world became increasingly eager to understand what their adversaries were doing. It is this drive that may have led to America’s probable efforts to access the premier virology lab of Washington’s main rival, China.

Diplomacy brought an end to offensive-bioweapons research among the major powers of the planet. But it left open the defense loophole. Real accountability, and a real reckoning with Covid, could, among other things, clear the path for diplomacy between the world’s great powers to amend the 1972 convention, so that the treaty effectively regulates the dangerous and increasingly accessible technologies of the 21st century.

The need to update the 1972 treaty has grown particularly acute in just the last year. Aided by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology is developing faster than ever, and in very dangerous ways. In July, researchers at the University of Minnesota created the first ever artificial life form, a one-celled organism, capable of limited division and replication, called the SpudCell. It is, as yet, unable to evolve or divide over many generations, which is why scientists don’t consider it fully alive. But that could change.

Less complicated and far more dangerous was news in early August that scientists had created a series of viruses that had been designed by AI. Hopes for medical breakthroughs were raised, but so were safety concerns about new synthetic diseases running out of control.

As Dr. Huff, the EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower, told me over the phone: “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain of function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”

We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.

It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.

The alternative may well be masks, lockdowns, censorship, online schooling, shuttered churches, vaccine passports, and exhortations to snitch on neighbors who fail to comply — in short, mass hysteria and authoritarian overreach all over again. 

Six years after a contagion that killed millions and wrecked the global economy, one of the great unanswered questions of Covid is, how did it begin? Today, an overwhelming majority of Americans reject what in 2020 was more or less the official (but outlandish) story: namely, that the novel coronavirus sprang from a wet market in Wuhan, China, and somehow jumped from bats — or pangolins? — to humans. 

This zoonotic theory of Covid’s origins still enjoys the backing of some scientists, but it is bedeviled by questions proponents can’t seem to shake off. For one thing, what was the intermediate animal that supposedly facilitated transmission? Who was Patient Zero? And how was it that the epicenter of the pandemic just happened to be located in Wuhan — one of a few virology labs in China authorized for research on dangerous coronaviruses?

That latter question points to a different hypothesis for Covid’s origins: that it resulted from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers had been conducting cutting edge “gain-of-function” research, combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids for the purpose of better understanding future infectious diseases. The lab-leak theory has been endorsed by at least one agency in the US Intelligence Community — the CIA.

Yet Americans and the wider world may never know the full truth unless these questions are subjected to a deep and rigorous examination — and a Fauci trial, conducted to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” may be the only means left for this. 

The justice system already appears to be tending in this direction. The Department of Justice this week charged David Morens — a former senior adviser to Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The government accuses Morens of conspiring against the United States and destroying records related to Covid’s onset, among other crimes (Morens is presumed innocent until proved guilty).

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The Morens indictment mentions “co-conspirators.” Americans must know: was his then-boss, Fauci, one of them? What we already know makes it implausible that he wasn’t. That makes a formal indictment all the more urgent for truth and accountability.

Since the early days of Covid, much of the scientific establishment has been working to discredit the lab-leak theory. As head of NIAID during the pandemic and the face of the government’s response, Fauci was a key player in this effort. Early on, he dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” the notion that Covid might have been created in a lab and leaked by accident. Yet there are reasons to suspect that NIAID under the leadership of Fauci funded the research that may have created Covid.

The case against Fauci, if the Justice Department brings one in the coming days, will likely revolve around charges that he perjured himself in testimony before Congress about this question of research funding and Covid’s origins. At a Senate committee hearing in May 2021, Fauci categorically stated in a tense exchange with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that the NIH and NIAID did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan. 

“You are entirely and completely incorrect,” Fauci snapped at Paul. “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” At a follow-up hearing in July 2021, Fauci got into it again with the Kentucky senator, saying he didn’t retract his May statement about gain-of-function funding. At one point, he jabbed a finger at Paul and shouted, “If anybody’s lying here, senator, it is you!”

But this week’s indictment of Morens for concealing federal records related to the pandemic has revived the debate about Fauci and created new pressure on the Trump DOJ to revisit Fauci’s truthfulness before Congress. 

The records in question have to do with precisely what Fauci has repeatedly denied: gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — funded by an NIH grant. According to the indictment, Morens pledged to help “Co-Conspirator 1,” described in the indictment as the head of a US-based nonprofit, restore a canceled NIH grant for “Company #1.” The canceled grant was titled, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence, and it was canceled amid allegations that Covid came from the Wuhan institute.

The descriptions of Co-Conspirator 1 and Company #1 point directly to Peter Daszak, former head of the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted a 2014 NIH grant to the Wuhan lab for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. (Neither Daszak nor EcoHealth Alliance are named in the indictment, but reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere imply that they are indeed the person and entity referred to in the indictment). 

What’s more, the indictment alleges that these co-conspirators gave Morens “illegal gratuities” and wine for his “behind-the-scenes shenanigans.” As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it in a statement: “Morens … allegedly identified an official act that he could perform to ‘deserve’ the gift, which was a scientific commentary in a prominent medical journal advocating that Covid-19 had natural origins.”

To put the dots together: The government’s case against Morens suggests that the NIH did approve a grant that funded precisely the kind of research that could have created Covid, in the very city where Covid first appeared. Once the pandemic broke out and EcoHealth Alliance lost its NIH funding, Morens allegedly tried to help restore this funding in his official capacity as a senior NIH official, but concealed his efforts to do so. It follows that Fauci’s statements before Congress categorically denying such funding were false.

The indictment also corroborates a statement by NIH principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak, who at a 2024 House committee hearing admitted that the US government funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Asked directly by then-Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) whether NIH funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab through EcoHealth Alliance, Tabak said: “It depends on your definition of gain-of-function research. If you’re speaking about the generic term, yes, we did.”

Splitting hairs over what exactly constitutes gain-of-function research, or what the accepted definition of the term is, was a recurring feature of Fauci’s sparring in Senate hearings with Paul and other lawmakers during the pandemic. At a Senate hearing in November 2021, Paul brought up the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted to the Wuhan lab through its 2014 NIH grant. Fauci responded by calling Paul’s line of questioning an “egregious misrepresentation,” and insisting that his characterization of the research didn’t meet the NIH’s definition of gain of function, which was formalized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in January of 2017.

Yet Fauci’s own past statements uphold Paul’s definition of gain of function. In a June 2021 letter, Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan — then the Republican ranking members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Committee on the Judiciary, respectively — asked Fauci to reconcile his past statements with his May 2021 assertion under oath that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. 

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The letter quoted Fauci at a 2012 conference on gain-of-function research at which he said: “what historically investigators have done is to actually create gain of function by making mutations, passage adoption, or other genetic techniques, such as reverse genetics.” The letter then quoted the 2014 NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which allowed it to “test predictions of [coronavirus]…transmission…using reverse genetics…” In other words, NIH was contracting research that fit Fauci’s own definition of gain of function. 

“Using your own definition,” wrote Comer and Jordan, “it appears the NIH funded gain-of-function research at the [Wuhan Institute of Virology].” They closed their letter by asking Fauci to “explain the apparent discrepancy in your recent testimony.”

Fauci, who once claimed to personally embody science, has been widely criticized for playing fast and loose with the facts. In addition to his shifting statements about masking and social distancing protocols during the pandemic, he was secretly involved in a widely cited March 2020 paper published in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine on the “proximal origins” of Covid. The paper was designed specifically to discredit the idea of a lab leak. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors stated. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Fauci mentioned this paper to White House reporters in April 2020 as evidence against the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin — without revealing that he had been involved in its creation, as emails released in a congressional inquiry eventually revealed. RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Thacker uncovered that Fauci admitted during a multiday deposition by the House Oversight Committee in 2024 that he had indeed read multiple drafts of the paper, and even emailed with the authors about it. Yet Fauci had previously told The New York Times that he wasn’t sure if he ever got around to reading the paper.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as water under the bridge. The pandemic is over, Fauci is out of the government. In the words of that infamous 2022 essay in The Atlantic, can’t we just declare a “pandemic amnesty” and move on?

In a word, no. As RealClear’s Thacker has noted elsewhere, while “dissembling to the media is not a crime, lying to Congress is illegal.” More than any other single person, Fauci was in a position to shed light on the origins of Covid at the moment the pandemic arrived on American shores. It might have required coming clean about what the NIH and NIAID had been funding in China on his watch, and it might have even required him to resign in disgrace over the scandal such an admission would cause.

But it would have been the right thing to do. In addition to helping government officials and medical providers better understand what we were dealing with, possibly even saving American lives, it would have opened up space for a reckoning about what US tax dollars had been paying for overseas. Later, there might have been a chance at accountability for those responsible for funding reckless gain-of-function research.

 Instead, Fauci dissembled about what he knew, the government’s role, and the part he himself played in all of it. There is still a chance to hold him at least partially accountable. But time is running out.

Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.

This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.

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Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.

“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.

It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed its “evidence” — as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.

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It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.

As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.

Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.

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The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” he said.

The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.

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Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.

Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.

The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”

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Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.

Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told those politicians that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.