'The Bethesda Boys'
Covering up plausible Covid-19 origin theories has irreparably damaged the credibility of the scientific community
On April 17, 2020, Dr. Fauci cited scientific literature titled The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 from the White House podium when prompted by a reporter’s question during a Press Conference. He was asked to address concerns that the virus may have been man-made and possibly originated from a lab in China.
He responded as such,
There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. So, I mean, the paper will be available - I don't have the authors right now, but we can make that available to you.
In my previous coverage of the cover-up, we learned that the above statement was untrue.
An investigation by a congressional subcommittee showed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that an effort to cover up COVID-19’s origins was undertaken by a team of international researchers headed by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and Dr. Farrar.
In this report by the Select Subcommittee on the Corona Virus Pandemic, we discovered that the likelihood of a lab leak was actually higher than the alternatives. In fact, many of the scientists on the conference call held on February 1st, 2020, expressed concerns over certain characteristics of the gene sequencing of SARS-CoV-2.
Email communications, slack messages, and testimony from parties involved gave insight into the intent and possible motives for the lies and misinformation spread by these scientific and governmental elites.
Here is a recap of the individuals included in the conference call. These individuals were in some way, shape, or form involved in the drafting and publishing of this paper.
Kristian Andersen
Bob Garry
Christian Drosten
Tony Fauci
Mike Ferguson
Ron Fouchier
Eddie Holmes
Marion Koopmans
Stefan Pohlmann
Andrew Rambaut
Paul Schreier
Patrick Vallance
Francis Collins
Lawrence Tabak
Discovery of lab leak potentiality, the ensuing panic, and plans to draft scientific literature
According to Dr. Jeremy Farrar, initial discussions over the sequence of COVID-19 began around January 8th or 9th.
Farrar soon suggested that the virus looked like it had been engineered in a lab to infect human cells.
"That got my mind racing. This was a brand-new virus that seemingly sprang from nowhere. Except that this pathogen had surfaced in Wuhan, a city with a BSL-4 virology lab which is home to an almost unrivaled collection of bat viruses.”
He wasn’t the only person to voice such concerns. Dr Andersen was also worried that the virus was engineered in the WIV. He pointed to two specific traits:
The receptor binding domain (RBD)
the furin cleavage site
He contacted Dr. Holmes, who testified that Anderson said, “Eddie, can we talk? I need to be pulled off a ledge here.”
In this discussion, Andersen noted that he had discovered a paper that purported to have inserted furin cleavage sites in SARS. The panic really set in. As recounted by Dr. Farrar, this paper was a "how-to-manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory." Dr. Holmes replied to Andersen, saying, "fuck, this is bad," and "Oh my god, what worse words than that.”
Holmes then proceeded to inform Farrar of Andersen’s concerns, which resulted in Fauci being notified.
After Farrar made Fauci aware, they began to organize a conference call to discuss the issue. As testified by Andersen in interviews with the committee, Fauci had prompted him to draft a peer-reviewed paper on January 31, stating, "he specifically mentioned that if I believed this was a lab leak, I should consider writing a peer-reviewed paper on it."
However, this was not what Andersen and Dr. Gary had originally told the committee. At first, they downplayed Fauci’s influence over the conference call, suggesting it was simply a scientific discussion between the primary participants listed on the call roster.
Fauci coordinated a conference call to discuss the plausibility of a lab leak with a group of eleven scientists from across the globe. The implications of such an occurrence clearly weighed on them, and Fauci twice prompted the drafting of a paper to discuss lab leak.
The first draft was completed within one hour of the conference call’s conclusion, and within days, a draft the team felt confident submitting was sent up the chain. Following this call, there was a discussion over the possible consequences of a lab leak, which shaped the draft.
On February 4th, this draft version was sent to Collins and then shared with Fauci. Within an hour, they replied, expressing concerns over including serial passage in a lab. Farrar then passed the message onto Holmes.
Questions were then raised to other authors by Holmes, off of feedback from Collins and Fauci, as to whether there would be noticeable differences in the characteristics of the virus had the mutation occurred in animals in a lab versus a prolonged adaptation in the wild.
Both Garry and Andersen testified that an email mentioning “The Bethesda Boys” was referring to “Fauci and Collins” and “the NIH folks.” This shows it was understood Fauci and Collins were leading the effort—further evidence that they had a significant influence on the paper.
On February 7th, Farrar notified the authors that he would send this draft to the rest of the conference call attendees, and on February 8th, this draft was sent to the original group of conference call attendees. It’s worth noting that Farrar led the drafting process and “at least undirected edit” to the paper.
Despite this, he was never credited for his contributions to the drafting or publication of the paper.
Within hours, Fauci, who had already expressed concern over a serial passage in a lab (lab leak theory), asked the entire group if there would be any noticeable difference between a virus mutating in a lab or in the wild—remember he had already asked the authors prior to this.
Dr. Garry then responded, "It's possible to fairly rapidly select for more pathogenic variants in the laboratory.”
Thus confirming Dr. Fauci's fear of a potential lab leak. Not only was Fauci acting genuinely concerned, but many members of this group felt the same.
Enter Dr. Lipkin…
Using a highly respected researcher to bring validity to an invalid scientific paper
Dr. Lipkin was the only credited author who had no involvement with the conference call on February 1st. He was not sent any version of the draft until February 10th, two days after it was shared with the entire team. In this email Holmes sent Lipkin, he mentioned talking to Farrar about getting him more directly involved.
However, Lipkin had been in communication with Holmes, prior to the 10th, over his concerns with the furin cleavage site. Holmes had emailed Andrew Rambaut to inform him Lipkin said, “high ups were also concerned.”
Dr. Rambaut was found communicating over a private Slack channel with Drs. Andersen, Holmes, and Garry. He wrote,
"given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process.”
Andersen then responded,
“Yup, I totally agree that that's a very reasonable conclusion. Although I hate when politics is injected into science - but its impossible not to, especially given the circumstances”
Further evidence that politics was the driving force, not truth.
Andersen also wrote,
“…having all of these discussions is really critical to countering ALL the friggin' bullshit coming out and at the end of the day, that's probably the most important things that'll come out of this.”
This shows how early in the pandemic, top international scientists were concerned with “bullshit” and conspiracy theories being spread, as well as inquiries into a possible lab leak from the media. They needed to discredit this to cover their asses.
Their concern was a likely motive for bringing Dr. Lipkin on. He testified that he believed he was brought on due to his expertise. On February 11th, Lipkin followed up with Homles to comment on Proximal Origins. Lipkin told Holmes that it offered plausible arguments against genetic engineering but didn’t rule out “inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in the culture at the institute in Wuhan.”
He also said,
“Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases, we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.”
Thanks to an exclusive report titled ‘First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources’ by Public, we have insight into who were the first individuals to become ill with COVID-19 like symptoms. In this report, they named three researchers who were engaged in gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
Knowing full well that this type of research was being conducted, it’s not a stretch to speculate that adding Dr. Lipkin to the paper would help to quell any “conspiracy theories” that claimed the leak happened at the WIV or that it had been engineered in a lab. As a matter of fact, we know for certain this was the intent based on communications presented by the Subcommittee.
In light of Lipkin’s expert opinion on the draft, Holmes argued they needed to add him as an author. Aside from his experience, they argued he would also “bring a lot of gravitas.” Lastly, they cited “Safety in Numbers” as a good reason to add him.
Now, who gave Holmes the directive to add Lipkin?
The evidence points to the likelihood that either Fauci, Collins, or Farrar would have given the directive. Andersen testified that Dr. Farrar was the “Father Figure” of Proximal Origin.
It would be beneficial to cite Lipkin, “a well-known infectious disease expert with experience in GOF research,” considering Farrar’s “one edit” on February 17th was to change “unlikely” to “improbable” that Covid emerged through lab manipulations of SARS viruses.
It would help support the core arguments presented in the paper. The memo summarizes the three arguments presented by Proximal Origin, which you can see in the image below. It also asserts these arguments are “flawed and rest on unsupported assumptions.”
The presence of a non-optimal RBD and that RBD appearing in other viral sequences — particularly pangolins.
The presence of furin cleavage sites in other coronaviruses
The concept is that any laboratory manipulation would have used an already published viral backbone.
It would have helped to cast doubt on China’s potential role in the outbreak by having Chinese experts help find answers to COVID’s origins and backing statements that “the science” doesn’t point to lab leak, creating this perception that Proximal Origins was sound science.
Publishing The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2
When it came to publishing this paper, it was found that Nature rejected the original draft submitted for publishing.
On February 20, 2020, Nature officially denied Proximal Origin for publication. Ms. Thomas (Senior Editor at Nature) stated, "We've now obtained two ref reports on the paper (appended below), and I've had the opportunity to discuss them with our chief editor Magdalena Skipper. In the light of the advice received I am afraid we have decided that we cannot offer to publish in Nature."
As stated by Ms. Thomas, the primary reason for denial was that, "one of our referees raised concerns (also emphasized to the editors) about whether such a piece would feed or quash the conspiracy theories."
So, the editing of the paper took place after rejection. Despite the apparent consensus around its likelihood, the paper added a critical line to downplay the laboratory-based scenario.
After being questioned by interviewers as to how the line was added to the paper, Dr. Andersen stated,
“That's based on our edits to the paper. Again, as the editor at Nature Medicine states, is that he thought that the paper had grown significantly since the one he had seen from Nature. We had to shorten it. You need to trim this back down, more or less, to the size of the Nature version while retaining the major changes in response to the reviewers. And some of the responses to the reviewers was that the reviewer felt that we could be more specific on, for example, that lab origins were less likely than we initially entertained, and I agreed with that. I think we all agree with that, and those were changes that we incorporated. So that includes that we don't believe that any type of lab origin is plausible. It's something that was added in response to the reviewers, our own thinking of the topic, and then getting it published in Nature Medicine, as opposed to Nature.”
But none of the communications between this team of researchers point to any consensus that a lab origin was “less likely” than initially entertained. In fact, it’s clear that it was very likely.
After an anonymous whistleblower had alleged that this paper plagiarized arguments of others included on the February 1st conference call, Mr. Cohen, a reporter for Science magazine, forwarded the claims to Dr. Andersen and Dr. Holmes.
Subsequently, they forwarded their draft to Dr. Fauci and Dr. Farrar for approval. They expressed concerns about confirming that the February 1st call took place. "We need to reply back to Jon, which would include confirming that this meeting did indeed take place with you and Jeremy present. Please let me know if you have any comments or concerns in this regard."
In response to Dr. Andersen, Dr. Farrar replies, "Can we get the sequence of events right and agreed before a substantive reply goes back to Jon?"
Dr. Holmes then responded with a revised draft and wrote, "For Tony's benefit a revised draft of the email to Jon is pasted below."
Not only did we discover that the intent of the paper was to downplay the lab leak theory, but we also discovered that it was a main concern of the authors to protect Dr. Fauci.
After publishing, the authors promoted the literature independently.
On March 26, 2020, Dr. Collins wrote a blog for the NIH regarding Proximal Origin. In it, he wrote, "A new study debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally." Dr. Collins concluded, "Either way, this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19.” NIH wished to use Proximal Origin to downplay the possibility COVID was the result of a lab leak.
On April 16, 2020, more than two months after the original February 1 conference call and a month after Proximal Origin was published, Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that Proximal Origin did not successfully squash the lab leak theory. He stated, "I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this…”
Then Dr. Collins asked Dr. Fauci,
"Wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy ... Anything more we can do?"
Dr. Collins clearly insinuated that the NIH had previously taken steps to "put down" the lab leak theory.
The next day, on April 17, 2020, Dr. Fauci cited Proximal Origin from the White House podium.
How can we ‘Trust the science’ going forward?
It has become apparent that when there is an interest in obscuring the truth, science does not always prevail. Some of the world's most highly regarded and decorated scientists could collude with government officials and science journals to publish literature that flies in the face of science. This occurrence is an example of why the public holds such distrust towards our institutions.
How can anyone be expected to “trust the experts” or “trust the science” when we know that science sometimes lies?
The actions of Dr. Fauci and others involved will impact the public’s trust in these institutions for years to come. Some will still put more faith in them than not. Many will never trust them again. I, for one, now have a significant level of skepticism.
It’s only fair and reasonable to sympathize with those questioning our institutions' official declarations and conclusions. If anything, we owe it to those who bring such skepticism to the table, as it has led to some groundbreaking discoveries that bring into question the legitimacy of the peer-review process and what standards of vetting go into ensuring sound science is being published. Scientific literature is the basis for many legislative proposals. We need to ensure accountability and oversight so that bad actors cannot influence policy based on bunk science.