Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted) — page 153

dposite Given your recent mentions of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 I thought you might be interested to hear the bizarre backstory of the paper "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9). In summary, four of the authors managed to organize a conference call with Anthony Fauci and others, after quietly raising the alarm (or "spreading the rumor", as Jeremy Farrar apparently put it) that the virus WAS in fact human engineered. On the call were two world-class virologists who actually work on coronaviruses, who set them straight in great detail. That seemed to be the end of the affair. But, incredibly, Andersen et al. turned around and submitted the Proximal paper to Nature with the exact opposite claim, i.e., that the virus was NOT human engineered. They used (without acknowledgment, of course) all the arguments provided by the coronavirologists on the initial call in which they had tried to raise the human-engineered alarm. I don't think it would be too hard to verify all this, if you feel like digging a little. If you're wondering if this could all possibly be true: ask yourself how this group of authors, none of whom work on coronaviruses, could have such detailed arguments about why SARS-CoV-2 was not human-engineered. The answer is that they couldn't (and didn't) - they were schooled by the coronavirus experts on the call. For the phone conference, Anthony Fauci called in Jeremy Farrar (Director of the Wellcome Trust). Farrar asked the coronavirus experts to join the call to listen to the claims. The call took place on a Saturday in early February (either the 1st or 8th, I'm not sure but I could probably find out). On the call making the claim were: Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Edward C. Holmes, Robert F. Garry, but not Ian Lipkin. The coronavirus experts listened for a while and both quickly concluded that the reasoning was completely flawed, that the non-coronavirus virologists had no idea what they were talking about, and that the human-engineered claim was totally wrong. One of the coronavirus experts was entertaining guests that day and told the people on the conference call that they wanted to give their opinion and then go back to the guests. So they told them it was nonsense, gave them a list of reasons why, and got off the call. The other coronavirus expert stayed on the call, gave a similar opinion and the morning afterwards sent a detailed list of the reasons why the claim was certainly wrong. After the paper with the exact opposite claim was received at Nature, senior editor, Clare Thomas sent it out for review to some of the best people in the world... Not surprisingly, this happened to include a very close colleague of one of the experts who had been on the conference call. You can perhaps imagine the shock. Thomas was quickly appraised of the situation and Nature rejected the paper. It was then sent to Nature Medicine, where it was soon published. One author on the paper was not on the conference call: Ian Lipkin. It's not clear how much of the back-story he is aware of. It might be worth giving him a call to ask, in case you feel like investigating. If his co-authors left him in the dark as to what actually happened and he's worried about the possible fallout he may want to help. I apologize for mailing you without revealing my name (at least for now). I work in the field and have heard this story from two people who were on the initial call with Fauci. I'm not keen to be personally involved, but I find the situation so outrageous, hypocritical, and shameless that I also find I can't keep silent. It doesn't change anything with respect to knowledgeable thinking about the origin of the virus, of course, but it's a pretty ugly situation that I (obviously) think should be exposed. ----- EMAIL REPLY DRAFT ----- Hi Jon, Here are the facts: