Slack / Private Message Drop — page 1

Chairman Rand Paul, M.D. U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY & GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS NEWLY RELEASED DOCUMENTS SHOW PROXIMAL ORIGIN AUTHORS PRIVATELY DOUBTED THEIR OWN PAPER AND GRAPPLED WITH DEFUSE PROPOSAL What is the Proximal Origin Paper? The paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, seeking to clarify the origins of the ongoing pandemic. That paper, now one of the most cited academic papers in history, asserted that "any type of labbased scenario" wasn't "plausible." ACKNOWLEDGED AUTHORS: Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, lan Lipkin, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry UNACKNOWLEDGED AUTHORS: Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, Jeremy Farrar The Proximal Origin authors privately put the odds of a lab origin as high as 30%, months after telling the public it wasn't plausible. In June 2020, Andersen and Holmes closed a discussion by exchanging confidence intervals for a bat versus lab origin. Andersen assessed 70/30 bat/lab. Holmes put it at 80/20, then 90/10. These were private assessments, exchanged months after the paper told the public a lab origin was not plausible. Kristian Andersen walked back the paper's central conclusion and conceded the paper's arguments were failing. In June 2020, Andersen wrote: "Our paper was pretty strong in saying 'there's no way', but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage." The paper argued manipulation was implausible, but after German scientists built a reverse-genetics system for SARS-CoV-2 in under two weeks, Andersen wrote "clearly it's not that hard." He also admitted the paper misstated a fact about the bat-coronavirus culturing at the center of the origins question: "We describe this in the paper and say that this work is performed 'all of the world', but that isn't true - it has exclusively been going on at WIV." What is the DARPA DEFUSE Proposal? DEFUSE was a 2018 grant proposal, submitted by Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance with Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric of University of North Carolina, that proposed inserting furin cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses. The furin cleavage site is a feature in SARS-CoV-2's spike protein that enhances how efficiently the virus enters human cells, and its presence became one of the central reasons many scientists suspected the virus had been engineered. In September 2021, the DEFUSE proposal was made public after a whistleblower complaint was leaked. DEFUSE TEAM: Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Zhengli Shi, Linfa Wang, Tonie Rocke, Jerome Unidad The leaked DARPA DEFUSE proposal triggered alarm among the Proximal Origin authors. When the proposal surfaced, its overlap with the defining characteristic of SARS-CoV-2 was not lost on the Proximal Origin authors. Andrew Rambaut wrote: "it really isn't beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff. We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence." Andersen replied: "that's the problem. There's a big difference between 'the lab was working on bat CoVs' to 'the lab was modifying bat CoVs using features we see being unique to SC2,'" Faced with the DEFUSE problem, the authors quickly took actions to coverup the coverup. As they reopened their analysis, the authors discussed the discoverability of their own communications. Rambaut: "And stay off email," then, moments later, "Or carefully curate some emails for the FOI records." Rambaut also proposed a call to discuss "what our strategy should be so we don't get associated with these fuckers," referring to what he called "the Baric/Daszak shitshow." Andersen agreed, adding: "I also need to get something back to Tony's team at NIH."