Rand Paul Releases Messages Raising New COVID Origin Questions
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has released internal Slack messages that appear to show the authors of a major COVID-19 origin paper privately questioning conclusions they later presented publicly.
The messages were exchanged by Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, the authors of The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. The paper was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 and became one of the most widely cited arguments against the possibility that the virus originated in a laboratory.
Paul said the newly released records raise serious questions about whether the authors overstated their confidence.
“The idea that it came from a lab is implausible, and, yet, privately they’re saying the opposite. … This level of dishonesty, I think, needs to be exposed,” Paul told Fox News. “These are people who get large, multimillion-dollar grants from our country, and we shouldn’t be giving money to people who lied to us.”
The messages do not prove that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. They do, however, appear to show that some of the paper’s authors considered that possibility more seriously in private than their public conclusions suggested.
- Andersen reportedly assigned a 30% probability to a laboratory origin.
- Holmes initially estimated the possibility at 20% before later lowering it to 10%.
- The authors debated the furin cleavage site, a genetic feature central to the lab-origin discussion.
In a June 2020 message, Andersen wrote, “The part I’m really struggling with is that, at the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other — and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there.”
He continued, “That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”
According to a news release from Paul’s office, Andersen also referred to “some smoking(ish) guns” and said he was “not comfortable” with the evidence. The messages also reportedly show discussions involving U.S. intelligence officials and leadership at the National Institutes of Health as the authors defended their public position.
The records include disputes involving Ralph Baric, a prominent coronavirus researcher. The authors acknowledged his expertise but expressed concern about what they saw as professional rivalry. They also suspected Baric could have been an anonymous source, nicknamed “Deep Throat,” who provided confidential peer-review information to a journalist.
A World Health Organization scientific advisory group later concluded that the pandemic was caused by “zoonotic spillover,” meaning the virus moved from animals to humans either directly from bats or through an intermediate host. The question remains politically and scientifically contested.
Paul has also released documents indicating that Customs and Border Protection agents prepared to question British zoologist Peter Daszak after his return from the WHO’s origins investigation. The FBI reportedly intervened and told the agents to stand down.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is expected to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee about the origins of the virus after Paul issued a subpoena. Fauci has faced accusations from critics who say he helped shape or suppress intelligence about the pandemic’s origins. Those allegations remain disputed, but the newly released messages are likely to renew scrutiny of the early scientific response.