Newly released messages among the authors of a widely cited paper regarding the origins of COVID-19 privately raised doubts that the virus originated from bats, as their paper stated.Sen.Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Tuesday released the internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" — Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut."The idea that it came from lab is implausible and yet privately they're saying the opposite is 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 paper was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, and was widely cited by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2.However, the released messages appear to show that its authors were less certain than their public conclusions suggested.LEGACY MEDIA IGNORES MASSIVE ANTHONY FAUCI DOCUMENT RELEASE ALLEGING HE MISLED CONGRESS ON COVID ORIGINSSen.
Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Tuesday released the internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc, File)Some raised concerns that the virus originated in a lab. Andersen assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin while Holmes gave an estimate of 20%, though he later revised that to 10%.Either way, both figures contrast with the paper's public assertion that the virus had not been manipulated."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," Andersen wrote on June 11, 2020, according to the documents.
"That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out.Our paper was pret...