Politicians, scientists spar over alleged NIH cover-up using #COVID-19_origin paper
▻https://www.science.org/content/article/politicians-scientists-spar-over-alleged-nih-cover-up-using-covid-19-origin
Two scientists who are co-authors of a 3-year-old article on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic faced down Republican lawmakers today in what might be the most in-depth discussion ever of a scientific paper in the halls of the U.S. Congress. At a House subcommittee hearing, the Republicans asserted that top officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) prompted the researchers to write the paper to try and “kill” the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
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The paper, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, was published in Nature Medicine on 17 March 2020 and argued that SARS-CoV-2 had most likely evolved naturally, rather than being engineered by scientists. It has become central to the assertions of many lab-leak proponents that NIH funded risky coronavirus experiments, which, in turn, led to the pandemic. In this scenario, high-ranking agency officials, such as Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Francis Collins, NIH’s director, tried to suppress any scientific discussion that could expose this.
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The hearing held by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic focused largely on how the two scientist witnesses over a short period of time went from thinking the virus appeared to be lab-made to ruling out that hypothesis. “We’re examining whether government officials, regardless of who they are, unfairly, perhaps biasedly, tipped the scales toward a preferred origin theory,” said subcommittee chair Representative Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) at the start of the hearing.
Andersen and Garry spent much of their time explaining the scientific process to the committee. “I think it’s important that we take a step back and focus on what’s possible versus what is probable,” said Andersen, who decried that he and his co-authors were “pawns in a political game” staged by the subcommittee. “We concluded that the virus very likely emerged as the result of a zoonosis, that is, a spillover from an animal host. This remains the only scientifically supported theory for how the virus emerged. If convincing new evidence were to be discovered, suggesting otherwise, we would, of course, revise our conclusions. This is science.”