Edited and approved messaging before it was released

Bob Unruh
WND News Center

A lot of things about COVID-19 that the American public was told now are being shown to be questionable – at best.

There’s the effectiveness of the shots, for one thing. Then there were the claims that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were unwise choices. And masks. And school closures. And more.

Now a U.S. House committee is accusing Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s COVID adviser who pushed a lot of those ideologies, of “prompting” a new scientific paper that purported to “disprove” the lab-leak theory.

It is now widely accepted by scientists and even government agencies that a likely source of the pandemic that killed millions around the globe and cost the American economy literally trillions of dollars was a leak from the Wuhan, China, lab where work was being done on bat coronaviruses.

Now Just the News reports Fauci “reportedly pushed against the lab leak theory despite learning in February 2020 that COVID-19 may have originated in a lab leak in Wuhan, China, the House committee also found.”

The report also noted Republicans on the House Coronavirus Pandemic Select Subcommittee on Sunday “said there is evidence that suggests Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of paper to ‘disprove’ the theory that the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab leak.”

The report explained, “The evidence available to the Select Subcommittee suggests that Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘prompted’ Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research (Scripps), to write Proximal Origin and that the goal was to ‘disprove’ any lab leak theory.”

The March 2020 “paper” was headlined, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.”

That piece of work claimed evidence suggested COVID “is not a purposefully manipulated virus” and the authors claimed they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The subcommittee said before the paper was published, Fauci “edited and approved it,” according to Just the News.

Fauci, who at the time was head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases but since has quit, repeatedly opposed the idea that the coronavirus came out of the Chinese lab. The House committee, however, found that it may even have been genetically manipulated before its release.

New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, who has followed the debate over COVID-19’s source, said that House committee actually shows Fauci “commissioned … and had final approval on,” the so-called scientific paper.

“Eight weeks later, Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors,” she reported.

He, at the time, claimed “There was a study recently where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at 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, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.”

Devine reported the paper was written “four days after Fauci, and his NIH boss Dr. Francis Collins, held a call with the four authors to discuss reports that COVID-19 may have leaked from the Wuhan lab and ‘may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.'”

The House committee confirmed that the paper’s co-author, Kristian Andersen, admitted Fauci “prompted” the paper “with the goal to ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory.”

China has denied the lab theory evidence.