New Fauci emails show Christian Drosten, other Corona astrologers debating whether and how to address the laboratory origins hypothesis

Drosten: "Didn't we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it?"

In February 2020, virologists were beginning to worry that discussion about the origins of SARS-2 was getting out of hand. Four of them – Edward Holmes, Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut and Robert Garry – decided to write a short statement on the matter, in the hopes of regaining control of the debate. Jeremy Farrar, chairman of the international vaccination cabal known as the Wellcome Trust, coordinated their work and sent a draft to various virological villains, among them Anthony Fauci and Christian Drosten, for comment. A later version of the statement appeared in Nature a month later as “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”.

New emails discussing the genesis of this statement came to light yesterday, as a result of another successful FOIA request for Anthony Fauci’s emails, and it contains some interesting moments.

The draft statement itself (at p. 67 here) is mostly unremarkable and not all that different from the Nature piece. It insists, in bold on the first page, that “Analysis of the virus genome sequences clearly demonstrates that the virus is not a laboratory construct or experimentally manipulated virus.” At least some of its authors, though, especially Edward Holmes, were willing to entertain the lab leak hypothesis, and the consequence was this paragraph considering the possibility that SARS-2 had been enhanced by repeated passage in cell cultures or animals:

Christian Drosten, after reading the draft, complained immediately that he thought he and his colleagues had already agreed “to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it”:

From this we learn, first, that Drosten had been party to prior discussions among his colleagues, where they had discussed messaging strategies relating to “a certain theory”; and, second, that Drosten apparently had no real understanding of the reasoning behind or the case for laboratory origins, and this as late as 9 February.

Edward Holmes (who Farrar elsewhere says is leaning “60-40” for the laboratory origins of SARS-2) has to bring him up to date:

Jeremy Farrar also chimes in:

Then Holmes’s co-author, Kristian Andersen (who has since become a hardcore if disingenuous natural origins advocate), contributes these very interesting remarks:

Among other things, it’s telling to see how eager all these virologists were for those fishy pangolin sequences, which Chinese scientists released just as discussions of laboratory origins were gaining ground.

There’s surely more lurking in this email dump, but I have (alas, alas) a conference coming up, and thereafter it’ll take me a few days to get through it.