By: Hans Mahncke | The Federalist
The greatest threat to public trust comes when powerful people and institutions use their authority to suppress the truth.
The latest revelations from Sen. Rand Paul’s investigation into the origin of COVID expose what may be one of the most consequential scientific deceptions in history.
The 1,123 pages of private Slack messages exchanged among the authors of the highly influential “Proximal Origin” paper reveal that the scientists who publicly declared that a laboratory origin of Covid was not plausible privately held a very different view. They repeatedly acknowledged that a laboratory origin remained possible, discussed flaws in their own arguments, and struggled to defend the natural origin theory.
In the first batch of Slack messages between the authors, which was released by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2023, Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, the lead author of “Proximal Origin,” privately described the possibility of a laboratory origin as “friggin’ likely.” In another exchange, he wrote, “The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory,” and elsewhere another author acknowledged that Covid “easily could have” leaked from a laboratory. Yet only weeks later, on March 17, 2020, they published “Proximal Origin,” declaring that a laboratory-based scenario was not plausible.
When those earlier messages became public, Andersen offered a simple explanation. He argued that his initial doubts had been resolved before publication and that the messages merely reflected a normal scientific process of considering possibilities before reaching a conclusion.
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