Farzan didn’t think the site was the product of “directed engineering,” but found that the changes would be “highly compatible with the idea of continued passage of the virus in tissue culture.”Īccording to the transcribed notes, Garry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, said on the call that he had aligned the SARS-CoV-2 genome with that of RaTG13, a 96-percent similar virus isolated from bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was long regarded as the new virus’s closest known relative - though a closer one has since been identified. Farzan, a Scripps professor who studied the spike protein on the 2003 SARS virus, “is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explain that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely),” Farrar’s note reads, referring to a spike protein feature that aids interaction with furin, a common enzyme in human lung cells. On February 2, Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert and the director of Wellcome, sent around notes, including to Fauci and Collins, summarizing what some of the scientists had said on the call. The newly released notes from the call, however, suggest that the scientists Fauci consulted initially considered that possibility to be much more serious than the paper let on. The authors acknowledged a third scenario, “selection during passage,” but they discussed it briefly and presented it as by far the least plausible. The paper has since been accessed more than 5.6 million times, with over 2,000 citations. Not long after the call, Andersen was the lead author on a paper in Nature Medicine titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The paper proposed “two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.” For the scientists and pundits who sought to discount the emerging lab-leak hypothesis, it offered the authoritative proof they needed. “It was a very productive back-and-forth conversation where some on the call felt it could possibly be an engineered virus,” Fauci told Alison Young, writing for USA Today, in June 2021. The day before the call, Scripps Research infectious disease expert Kristian Andersen had warned Fauci that the virus may have been engineered in a lab, noting that he and several other high-profile scientists “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.” The scientists agreed to have a conference call the next day. The less lurid but seemingly more plausible version is the idea of evolution through serial passage, in which scientists allow a virus to jump between host species or cell cultures, spurring new mutations. This version forms the basis of accusations that the virus was intentionally created as a bioweapon - which practically every credible scientist has dismissed as an illogical conspiracy, but was quickly embraced by former President Donald Trump and much of the American right wing, souring scientists, liberals, and the mainstream on the possibility of lab origin. The one that gained notoriety early in the pandemic is genetic engineering, where scientists insert and delete nucleotides in the virus’s genetic code, in this case viral RNA, to turn it into something new. The two methods represent two different ideas behind the so-called lab-leak hypothesis. The information released Tuesday for the first time reveals the content of notes taken on the February 1 call. Oversight Committee staff were able to view the full emails “in camera,” which means they could physically look at them and take notes but couldn’t take copies with them. The communications contained extensive notes summarizing what was said during the call, but their substance was hidden at the time. The redacted emails included the agenda for a February 1, 2020, telephone conference between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci his then-boss, former National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins and several of the world’s leading virologists. The letter, signed by James Comer, R-Ky., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was followed by pages of notes on emails that were first obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post, but were heavily redacted when published in June 2021. government officials wrestling with whether the novel coronavirus may have leaked out of a lab they were funding, acknowledging that it may have, and then keeping the discussion from spilling out into public view. On Tuesday, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a letter that paints a damning picture of U.S.
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