Still searching for COVID-19 origins five years after ‘Proximal Origin’ paper tried to end debate

Half a decade after the start of a global pandemic, the Trump Administration has begun a renewed push to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID-19, with more and more evidence — including by non-U.S. intelligence agencies — indicating that it came from the Wuhan lab.

Exactly five years ago today, an influential scientific Proximal Origin paper was published pushing back on the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Emails show Dr. Anthony Fauci, the now-former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “prompted” the writing of that influential article.

The World Health Organization estimates there have been more than 7.1 million reported COVID-19 deaths over the past five years — including more than 1.2 million in the United States. Even the death toll is a subject of controversy and disagreement across the political spectrum.

The hunt for COVID-19’s conclusive origins continues, but more and more evidence has stacked up indicating that the pandemic more than likely emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). China has remained intransigent on helping with answers on the virus’s origins, and the Biden Administration largely failed to find or reveal new information. Under Trump, the CIA finally joined the longstanding position of the FBI and the more recent addition of the Energy Department in pointing the finger at the Wuhan lab.

The Origin of “Proximal Origin”: prompted by Fauci

Scientists who consulted with the U.S. government early in the pandemic in 2020 believed it was possible or even likely that COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan, yet emails indicate Fauci and then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins worked to shut the hypothesis down.

Messages released by congressional Republicans include notes from a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call in which at least eleven scientists theorized about the virus’s origin, with many leaning toward the lab leak theory. House Republicans said in 2022 that “only three days” after the conference call, “four participants” in the call authored the Proximal Origin paper “and sent a draft to” Fauci and Collins, and that “the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval” prior to its publication in Nature in March 2020.

The Proximal Origin article was written by five scientists: Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert Garry. Andersen, a Scripps Research professor, wrote to Nature magazine in February 2020 that he and other scientists had been “prompted” by Fauci, Collins, and Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

The widely cited article published in Nature magazine in March 2020 was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and contended that suspicious binding receptors in SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged through “natural selection” and not through a lab leak, casting doubt on the possibility that COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan lab. The scientists wrote that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that “it is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.”

Multiple scientists who signed onto the letter had received millions of dollars in NIH funding.

"The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely"

Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust, sent an email to Collins and Fauci on Feb. 2, 2020, indicating that multiple scientists believed the lab leak hypothesis was viable. Garry, a professor at Tulane University, apparently said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for the key amino acids and nucleotides to have been present in a virus that could cause such a pandemic.

But Collins sent an email that day, saying he was “coming around to the view that a natural origin is more likely” and alluding to the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.”

Farrar wrote a few days later that there “remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals.” He said he believed there was a 50% chance SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab, while Holmes — a British virologist — believed there was a 60% chance.

Collins seemed stunned the Wuhan lab would conduct risky experiments at a low-level biosafety level two laboratory, asking, “Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?” Farrar then referred to it as the “Wild West.”

A trove of leaked Slack messages also show some of the men who would sign onto the Nature article privately believed a lab leak was possible or even likely, according to U.S. Right to Know. Andersen named the Slack channel “Project Wuhan Engineering” in February 2020 and said that “the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Andersen wrote on Slack in early February 2020 that “the main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely — it’s not some fringe theory,” according to The Times, and noted that the furin cleavage site “is very hard to explain.” Rambaut worried that the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the outbreak “smells fishy.” Holmes said that “I am disturbed” by the Wuhan wet market being cleaned and scrubbed before it could be swabbed properly, calling it “at the very least a big bloody cock-up.”

An email from Collins to Fauci and others in April 2020 also showed Collins trying to push back against reporting from Fox News which cited multiple sources saying the virus came from the lab. Collins wrote that he was “wondering if there is something NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy, with what seems to be growing momentum." Fauci dismissed the lab leak as “a shiny object that will go away in time.”

Deflecting attention from the Wuhan lab 

SARS-CoV-2 — the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic — first emerged in China’s megacity of Wuhan, which was home to the world’s biggest research lab focused on SARS-like viruses. The Wuhan lab conducted risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.

Peter Daszak, the leader of the EcoHealth Alliance, steered large sums of U.S. taxpayer dollars from NIH funding to the Wuhan lab for bat virus research, a Government Accountability Office study showed. Science magazine noted that Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its leader Shi Zhengli, sometimes referred to as the “bat woman."

Daszak helped organize a February 2020 letter in The Lancet which praised China’s response and called the lab leak a conspiracy theory: “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin … Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear.”

Despite this, Fauci tried to argue to the BBC in 2022 that letter did not dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.

EcoHealth Alliance had proposed the creation at the Wuhan lab of a virus with features — such as a furin cleavage site — strikingly similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2. It was revealed by The Intercept that EcoHealth had sought funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for this project in 2018, but when the funding was rejected it appears the Wuhan lab moved forward anyway, just a year ahead of the first emergence of COVID-19.

Scientists who say they believe in the natural origin hypothesis have continued to point to wildlife as the potential transmission link between bats and humans, but have not turned up any hard evidence. This concept of origination has failed to satisfy many, especially those who have been saying since at least 2021 that data from China could not be relied upon. 

Peter Ben Embarek, who led the WHO mission to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the pandemic, told a Danish outlet in 2021 the scientists in China "didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that." Embarek said his Chinese counterparts relented in allowing a mention of the lab leak in the report, but only “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”

Intelligence agencies inch toward lab leak

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said during her Senate confirmation in January that many senators had “expressed bipartisan frustration about recent intelligence failures and the lack of responsiveness to your requests for information” including related to “failures to identify the source of the COVID.”

The CIA, under new Director John Ratcliffe, is walking a fine line. CBS News reported that the "CIA now says COVID most likely originated from a lab leak but has 'low confidence' in its assessment." He revealed in January that "CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin” and at the same time, "that CIA continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible."

Ratcliffe had testified to Congress in 2023 that the CIA and other spy agencies had enough evidence to get off the fence and to join the FBI and Energy Department in concluding that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated at the Wuhan lab, and hinted that the U.S. intelligence community was holding back because of the significant ramifications such public conclusions would have for the U.S.-China relationship. Ratcliffe argued at the time that “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense."

A host of U.S. intelligence agencies remain on the sidelines in the coronavirus origins debate.

The German Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, reportedly concluded that it was very likely that the pandemic emerged as an accidental lab release from the Wuhan lab, according to German news reports last week, but the BND was blocked from sharing their conclusions with the world.

Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, told Just the News: "All informed persons—without exception—knew by early 2020 that SARS-CoV-2 likely entered humans through a research-related incident in Wuhan. But most chose to lie or stay silent. It is now clear that this included not only the scientific establishment...but also the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Germany (which withheld information from the public and policy makers)."

Gain-of-function

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, subpoenaed 14 governmental agencies — including the NIH — in late January “in connection with the origins of COVID-19 and taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research.” Paul said one of the questions he wanted answered was “who at NIH directed funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

Fauci has insisted for years that NIH grants did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. Dr. Fauci has also repeatedly defended U.S. funding going to bat coronavirus research in China. Later, Paul sent a criminal referral to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in the summer of 2021, insisting that the Justice Department consider prosecuting Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress. Garland sat on the request, and later Fauci was granted a full pardon by then-President Joe Biden in January.

Then-candidate Donald Trump said he would consider banning dangerous gain-of-function viral research in an October 2024 interview with Just the News on “John Solomon Reports.”

Trump said that “I think that's something we would certainly discuss. … They were paying money to China. … Now, I shut it down just saying, ‘Why are we paying money to China? Who would have known that they were doing Wuhan?’ But I did say Wuhan, that's where it came from… I had no doubt about it.”

Trump has not yet issued any new restrictions on gain-of-function since returning to office in January.

State Department and others begin to take interest

Fauci was an influential force during the first Trump Administration, but other Trump officials began shining the spotlight on the Wuhan lab in the pandemic’s early months. That spotlight eventually led to Fauci.

State Department cables from 2020 show the U.S. government’s early concerns about the deep ties and research collaboration between the Wuhan lab and the Chinese military. Near the start of the pandemic, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, then led by acting director Ric Grenell, said in April 2020 that “the IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump, said in early 2021 that COVID-19 likely originated through an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab.

Another document supporting the lab theory was in a Trump State Department fact sheet released in late January 2021, just before Biden took office. The fact sheet contended that Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)” and that the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.” 

The fact sheet also said the lab “engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military.”

The WHO in 2021: "a lab leak was extremely unlikely"

The WHO has so far flailed at providing answers related to the origins of COVID-19 when pressed for more detail.

The WHO-China COVID-19 origins joint study report in March 2021 contended that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and that a jump from animals to animals to humans was most likely. The report was widely considered a failure, partly due to the lack of access to key data and Chinese influence over the investigation. The meeting minutes from discussions between Wuhan lab scientists and the WHO-China team revealed that lab leak concerns were dismissed as “rumors,” “myths,” and “conspiracy theories.”

Matt Pottinger, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, called the WHO-China inquiry a “Potemkin exercise.” Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken also cast doubt on the WHO-China report by saying that “we’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.”

EcoHealth Alliance's Daszak defended China’s coronavirus response while being interviewed by Chinese state-run outlets and criticized the Biden administration for being skeptical of the WHO-China report. He also defended the Wuhan lab’s actions and said it was the fault of “anti-China political rhetoric” by Trump and others which resulted in the CCP blocking investigations into the origins of COVID-19.

Embarek admitted in February 2021 that “we didn’t do an audit of any of these labs, so we don’t really have hard facts or detailed data on the work done” at the Wuhan lab. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of WHO, was also forced to admit in March 2021 that the WHO-China team had not fully investigated the lab leak possibility and insisted that “all hypotheses remain on the table.”

Trump had withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO in 2020 over its pandemic-related failures, and he withdrew from the UN agency again in January of this year after Biden had made the move to rejoin the WHO in early 2021. Trump said at the start of his new term that the U.S. was leaving the WHO "due to the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan" and "its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states."

No sunlight under Biden and an about face for legacy media

By most accounts, the Biden Administration largely failed to shed further light on the origins of COVID-19. Then-President Biden signed into law the “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023” and claimed that “my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible.” Little key information was released during his presidency, and reports have emerged that important findings were suppressed.

Then-DNI Avril Haines released an assessment in August 2021 stating that at least one U.S. agency — revealed later to be the FBI — had “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 came from the lab, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray later confirmed that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab. ODNI released in October 2021 a declassified version of the FBI’s arguments in a section titled “The Case for the Laboratory-Associated Incident Hypothesis.” 

It was also revealed in 2023 that the Energy Department — home to advanced research facilities such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories — also believed with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab.

Although it had consistently backed Fauci and the "wet market" origin -- calling anything else a conspiracy theory, The New York Times published an opinion piece on Sunday marking the fifth year anniversary by doing a U-turn, saying "We were badly misled." The column went on to say that "We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story."

Congress not as timid

A number of Republican-led congressional committees have conducted investigations which concluded COVID-19 emerged from the Wuhan lab. The House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released a report in the summer of 2021 which found that “the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory” in late 2019.

Senate Health Committee Republicans assessed in spring of 2023 that “the preponderance of circumstantial evidence” supports the hypothesis that “an unintentional research-related incident” at the Wuhan lab led to the pandemic.

The Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus also concluded in December that “COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan” and warned that “the Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.”

Just last month, scientists at the Wuhan lab, including the "bat woman" Shi Zhengli, published an article in Cell magazine showing they were still conducting risky bat coronavirus research with the potential for infecting humans, writing that the coronaviruses they were working with at the lab had “infected human ACE2-expressing cell lines and human respiratory and enteric organoids.”

One of the scientists who had signed onto the infamous Nature article of March 2020 co-authored an article for the New York Times earlier this month warning about the risky nature of the Wuhan lab’s ongoing experiments. W. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiology professor at Columbia University, wrote in early March that the Wuhan lab was conducting these experiments in a low-biosecurity facility “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.”

The CCP’s ongoing gaslighting campaign

The Chinese government still denies the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab and has tried to cast doubt on the idea that it even originated in China. The CCP is also continuing to deflect from the Wuhan lab leak possibility by pushing a  theory that COVID-19 originated with the U.S. military base.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded to the CIA’s new assessment in January by arguing that “the U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others” and attempting to point the finger at “relevant U.S. biological labs.” China responded to the new revelations about German intelligence last week by pointing to the flawed WHO-China assessment from 2021 and by claiming that “we firmly oppose all forms of political manipulation.” 

But as the evidence continues to point to COVID-19’s origins at the Wuhan lab, China’s propaganda efforts will likely continue to falter.