NYT Two virologists testified that they remained convinced that the coronavirus was natural in origin and that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci did not exert influence over a study they wrote.
Two world-renowned virologists appeared on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and delivered a pointed defense of their findings that the coronavirus pandemic was natural in origin, and told skeptical Republicans that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci did not exert influence over a scientific paper they wrote to that effect.
The paper is at the heart of Republicans’ unproven assertions that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Francis S. Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, tried to tamp down the idea that a lab leak caused the pandemic. The virologists who testified, Kristian G. Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert F. Garry Jr. of Tulane University School of Medicine, were two of the paper’s five authors.
Tuesday’s hearing, before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, did not produce new evidence advancing the Republicans’ claims. The hearing was titled “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up” — a play on the title of the paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which was published in the journal Nature Medicine in March 2020.
“The claim that Dr. Fauci prompted the drafting of ‘Proximal Origin’ to disprove the lab leak is not true,” Dr. Andersen said. The Republican accusations center on a series of email exchanges that included Dr. Fauci, who at the time led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Dr. Collins; and Dr. Jeremy Farrar, then the director of the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation that funds health research. Dr. Farrar is now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist. Republicans have used the emails to suggest that scientists studying the origins of the virus, after originally voicing the idea that it might have been engineered in a laboratory, changed their mind because of input from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins, including during a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call that included authors of the proximal origin study.