Top U.S. health officials, including Anthony Fauci, scrambled in late January 2020 to respond to public reporting of a potential connection between COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
The insight into their response comes from examining over 3,000 pages of emails belonging to Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which were released under the Freedom of Information Act and provide a detailed timeline of events.
The emails suggest the officials were concerned about previous U.S. involvement with the lab, and that they had knowledge of public statements made by the Wuhan lab’s director about U.S. funding being used for controversial research conducted there.
Following the officials’ conversations, public discussion of the source being a potential lab leak was actively suppressed by social media platforms, health officials, and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Jan. 31, 2020
Fauci received an email at 8:43 p.m. (p. 3229) by an associate, Greg Folkers of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the federal agency responsible for public health research. The email contained no text and held only a single, lengthy article that had been published in the magazine Science that evening.
The article, authored by Jon Cohen, was one of the earliest stories that described how scientists were working frantically on “viral genomes” in order to “understand the origin of 2019-nCoV.”
The article focused on the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan seafood market, and the author took pains to discount the lab leak theory, noting that the viral sequences “knock down the idea the pathogen came from a virology institute in Wuhan.”
However, the author did note that “concerns about the institute predate this outbreak,” and also detailed how a scientist “in 2015 criticized an experiment in which modifications were made to a SARS-like virus circulating in Chinese bats to see whether it had the potential to cause disease in humans.”
The experiment cited in the Science article was more fully detailed in a Nov. 9, 2015, article in the journal Nature about gain-of-function experiments—a process whereby viruses are deliberately made more virulent in order to predict emerging diseases—that were being conducted at the Wuhan lab using “chimeric viruses” in mice.
The article’s authors, including the director of the Wuhan lab, Shi Zhingli, noted that their research was initiated before the U.S. government introduced a moratorium on gain-of-function research. They added that their paper “has been reviewed by the funding agency,” and, crucially, that “continuation of these studies was requested, and this has been approved by the NIH.”
BY JEFF CARLSON AND HANS MAHNCKE
