"We Just Need to Re-Convince Ourselves It's Coincidence"
Newly released Slack messages show the scientists who dismissed a COVID lab leak spent years privately doubting their own paper — Proximal Origin
“[I]t is very striking that a bat-derived CoV with an FCS turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with FCSs in bat-derived CoVs”
Eddie Holmes (co-author of Proximal Origin in March 2020) on 21 September 2021
In early February 2020, four virologists — Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Robert Garry, and Andrew Rambaut — told each other and Anthony Fauci — then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and member of President Trump’s just-created Coronavirus Task force — privately that a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 looked plausible.
Weeks later the same group published a paper — “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” hereafter Proximal Origin — declaring flatly that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
That paper became the authoritative justification for treating the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory and settled science. Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins promoted Proximal Origin from the White House to quash debate over COVID_19 origins, without ever disclosing that they helped set the paper in motion.
Here at THB, I’ve previously discussed the email trail that shows this gap between private doubt and public certainty forming in the first two weeks of February 2020, before anyone drafted the paper.
What happened after publication remained murkier — did the authors’ doubts fade as real evidence came in, or persist while the group kept defending the paper in public?
This week, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) released two new batches of the group’s Slack messages — first batch (AM drop) and a second batch (PM drop} — spanning April 2020 through September 2021, with incredible details of how doubt never faded for the Proximal Origin gang, despite their public expressions to the contrary.
Whatever the origins of COVID-19, we know with certainty that there was a concerted effort to cover-up the possibility that COVID-19 may have emerged from a research-related incident. Let’s dive in . . .
A quick primer for anyone catching up
SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein contains a furin cleavage site, a short genetic insertion that helps the virus enter human cells. No other close relative found in nature carries one at that exact spot, which made it a focal point of the origins debate from the start.
Scientists on both sides agree the insertion looks unusual: they disagree about whether evolution might produce it, or if instead it required a lab to intervene.
Proximal Origin argued for the former and dismissed the latter.
Who’s who in today’s post
Kristian Andersen — Immunologist at Scripps Research; lead author of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and the most active voice in the Slack channel on the technical furin-site evidence.
Eddie Holmes — Evolutionary virologist at the University of Sydney; co-author of Proximal Origin.
Robert Garry — Virologist at Tulane University; co-author of Proximal Origin.
Andrew Rambaut — Evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh; co-author of Proximal Origin.
Anthony Fauci — Then-director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top White House COVID-19 advisor; helped convene the February 1, 2020 call that led to the paper.
Francis Collins — Then-director of the National Institutes of Health; also on the February 1, 2020 call, and later promoted the published paper without disclosing his role in setting it in motion.
Ralph Baric — Coronavirus researcher at the University of North Carolina and a leading figure in gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses; a recurring subject of the authors’ private discussions, including in the DEFUSE grant.
Peter Daszak — President of EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that funded and coordinated bat-coronavirus research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including the 2018 DEFUSE proposal.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) — U.S. senator and chairman of the Senate committee that released the Slack messages this week.
“[Baric] would be really in the cross-hairs without [Proximal Origin]”
The details discussed below come from this week’s Slack release, and add significant new context and details.
In a May 1, 2020 exchange, Andersen tells Holmes about a conversation he had with Ralph Baric, who then ran one of the world’s most prominent coronavirus labs at the University of North Carolina. Baric’s group specializes in the exact kind of research at the center of the origins debate: taking coronaviruses found in bats and modifying them in the lab to test whether they can infect human cells.
On what Andersen calls a “White House committee call” in “early January” 2020 — one of the government-convened scientific advisory calls set up in the earliest days of the outbreak, before most of the world grasped its scale — Andersen had predicted two things about the new virus: that its receptor-binding domain (the part of the spike protein that grips onto human cells) would bind unusually well to human receptors, and that its furin cleavage site would turn out biologically active.
Baric brushed him off. Andersen recounts it this way: “He essentially said that was all bullshit and I couldn’t possibly know” (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 1, 2020). Four months later, after research had confirmed both predictions, Andersen commented to Holmes about Baric’s dismissal: “Well.”
That exchange quickly shifted from Andersen’s victory lap to comments far more significant: Holmes tells Andersen that Proximal Origin “did him a MASSIVE favour” — “him” meaning Baric — and adds:
“He would be really in the cross-hairs without it” (Holmes, Slack messages, PM drop, May 1, 2020).
Andersen agrees, and mentions that a co-author on one of Baric’s papers — a 2015 study Baric ran with the Wuhan Institute of Virology that spliced a bat-virus spike protein onto a lab-adapted coronavirus backbone specifically to test its ability to infect human cells (Menachery et al., Nature Medicine, 2015) — had emailed him the day before to thank him for writing Proximal Origin (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 1, 2020).
In other words, the authors understood in real time that their published conclusion — that no lab could plausibly have made this virus — doubled as protection for a specific colleague whose own published techniques might have otherwise come under greater scrutiny. Further, the authors were being lauded by colleagues who might have been in “the cross-hairs” for writing the paper.
Five days later, on May 6, 2020, the group faced a version of that same scrutiny itself. Holmes learned that The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper, intended to publish a story claiming he worked “in the pay of China” (Holmes, Slack messages, PM drop, May 6, 2020) — implying a financial motive behind his public dismissal of the lab-leak theory. Holmes told the others he’d received no such money. But he added a line that undercuts the group’s public position more than it defends him:
“the irony is that we were some of the very first people to actually raise the lab escape issue, although I obviously can’t say that” (Holmes, Slack messages, PM drop, May 6, 2020).
Andersen followed with agreement on that point:
“we were the first to take this seriously — and so we did. And our conclusions are solid and, importantly, stick 100% to the science” (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 6, 2020).
In public they were taking credit for dismissing the notion that COVID-19 may have come from a research-related incident, while in private they were taking credit for being among the first to assert its plausibility.
May–June 2020, just after Proximal Origin, doubt continues
By May 12, 2020, eight weeks after publication, Holmes asks Andersen and Garry for their
“latest thinking about whether any lab manipulation would involve cell culture or live animal passage” (Holmes, Slack messages, PM drop, May 12, 2020).
Andersen answers:
“I’m starting to worry about cell culture again because of some of the things we’re noticing in the cell culture sequencing experiments” (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 12, 2020).
He lists three concerns:
the furin site repeatedly appears and disappears depending on tissue-culture conditions;
a bovine coronavirus picked up an identical-length furin insertion through tissue culture alone;
and SARS-CoV-2 itself kept acquiring similar short insertions elsewhere in the spike, but only in culture (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 12, 2020).
A month later, on June 11, the doubt sharpens. Andersen tells the group:
“some smoking(ish) guns starting to appear that I’m not comfortable with,” and points out that the furin insertion sits exactly where earlier lab experiments on a related coronavirus inserted one experimentally (Andersen, Slack messages, AM drop, June 11, 2020).
In the same message he goes further (emphasis in original):
“we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other... we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there. That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out” (Andersen, Slack messages, AM drop, June 11, 2020).
Then, about Proximal Origin’s central conclusion:
“Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’ — I have less confidence in that statement at this stage” (Andersen, Slack messages, AM drop, June 11, 2020).
The lead author of the world’s most influential lab-leak rebuttal privately walked back its headline claim, just three months after publication, while the paper was being used in public to argue that the COVID-19 origin was settled science.
The same thread has Andersen noting that the paper mistakenly described risky low-containment coronavirus culturing as happening “all over the world,” when in actual fact it concentrated almost exclusively at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (Andersen, Slack messages, AM drop, June 11, 2020).
By the end of the conversation the four scientists traded private odds on lab origin:
Holmes at 80/20 against,
Andersen at 70/30,
Holmes later revising to 90/10 (Andersen and Holmes, Slack messages, AM drop, June 11, 2020).
Months after publicly ruling out a lab origin, the authors debated it privately as a real and significant possibility.
Other scientists raised the same red flags
The new messages also show the group fielding legitimate technical pushback from outside their circle — echoing comments they had made amongst themselves — and dismissed those critiques rather than engaging.
On May 22, 2020, a BBC correspondent forwards a detailed critique from an anonymous molecular biologist:
“It is the acquisition en masse of these 4 key new residues and nothing in flanking sequences that raises the distinct impression that someone deliberately inserted these 4 residues in one step... there is absolutely none — all the residues on each side are identical — this is what is so concerning.” (unnamed critic, quoted in Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 22, 2020).
He asks whether investigators should independently examine WIV’s records. Andersen’s private reply: “’Molecular biologist’ — my arse... I think we know who this is,” (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 22, 2020). He decides it doesn’t deserve an answer.
Three days later a second scientist raises a parallel, more technical point:
“The furin cleavage site insert has the unusual codon usage for the RR dimer of CGG-CGG... most laboratory use optimized codon primers and kits use CGG routinely; including in primers in published papers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” (unnamed critic, quoted in Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 25, 2020).
Andersen calls part of it “pure bs” and moves on (Andersen, Slack messages, PM drop, May 25, 2020). Both comments anticipate arguments the group makes to each other in private within weeks.
September 2021: reverse-engineering the DEFUSE proposal
More consequential material comes from September 2021, after DRASTIC and The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal — DEFUSE — that EcoHealth Alliance submitted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Ralph Baric’s UNC lab. The proposal, written before the pandemic, expressed an intent to insert furin cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses.
Holmes’s reaction, on September 21, does not mince words:
“We still have no evidence for SC2 in that lab and they must have sequenced it first. But it is very striking that a bat-derived CoV with an FCS turns up in a city that was on a grant proposing to muck around with FCSs in bat-derived CoVs” (Holmes, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021).
Holmes calls the central coincidence of the whole lab-leak hypothesis “very striking” in private, eighteen months after publicly ruling one out.
Once DEFUSE became public, Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and Rambaut reconvened to check whether its methods could explain SARS-CoV-2’s furin site.
In the messages, Andersen lays out a formal work plan to explore that possibility: spike-protein alignments, flagging the grant’s described sites, codon-usage analysis to determine whether the insertion looks designed or natural (Andersen, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021).
He and Rambaut debate cloning strategy and which codons a lab would plausibly pick if engineering the site deliberately (Andersen and Rambaut, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021).
Nearly a year and a half after publishing a paper ruling a lab origin implausible, its authors privately ran a forensic check on whether people they knew, using a grant they knew about, had built the virus.
The clearest sign of what drove this exercise comes from Rambaut himself, at the start of that morning’s exchange:
“It really isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff. We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence” (Rambaut, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021).
This doesn’t sound like a scientist following evidence wherever it leads.
What follows undercuts one of the strongest public claims against a lab origin. Proximal Origin and its authors have repeatedly pointed to the furin insertion sitting “out of frame” as evidence against deliberate design — a lab-made insertion, the argument goes, would look cleaner.
A quick note on the jargon — "out of frame” — courtesy of Claude AI:
“Genes get read three letters at a time, and each of those triplets spells out one building block of the protein. Insert a new stretch of genetic code and it can either drop in cleanly, lining up with those existing three-letter groupings, or it can land awkwardly across one of those boundaries, leaving a small, untidy seam. A natural insertion, arriving through recombination or a copying error, has no reason to respect that boundary — a messy seam fits the natural story fine. A deliberately engineered insertion, built with standard lab tools, would typically get designed to avoid that seam, since a clean insertion is the simpler thing to build. That gap is part of why the furin site's "out of frame" placement became one of the technical arguments for a natural origin: it looks like something evolution left behind, not something assembled on purpose.”
In this exchange, Rambaut and Andersen work through how a lab could produce exactly that messy, “natural-looking” signature on purpose. Rambaut poses a key question:
“Key question is — would anyone chose to put the FCS we see in SC2 in and put it out of frame”? (Rambaut, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021),
He then provides one answer:
“The alternative is that it was inserted in frame and then mutated to make it look out of frame” (Rambaut, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021).
Andersen adds a second, more technical route:
“if the use restriction enzymes and there would be an easy way to insert an FCS with PCR utilizing REs already present in the sequence, then it could be a way to do it. Not the optimal way, for sure, but sometimes ease trumps perfection” (Andersen, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021).
None of this shows SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab.
But it does show that the Proximal Origin authors, eighteen months after publication, treated “out of frame” — one of the specific technical points used publicly to rule out engineering — as something a real lab could plausibly produce using ordinary methods.
Right after Andersen proposes an investigation to explore if the virus’ furin site matched what DEFUSE’s methods would have produced, Rambaut writes:
“And stay off email.”
Then:
“Or carefully curate some emails for the FOI records” (Rambaut, Slack messages, AM drop, September 21, 2021)
These suggest intent to keep their discussions out of any official record, using Slack and Zoom instead of email because email carries more exposure to public-records requests.
What Andersen told Congress was completely different
Andersen later testified under oath before the U.S. Congress. At the July 11, 2023 House Select Subcommittee hearing, he told members:
“By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin, however, I no longer believed that a ‘culturing’ scenario was plausible” (Andersen testimony, House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, July 11, 2023).
He described the zoonosis conclusion as something that
“has only been further supported by additional evidence and studies” ever since, and added that “currently, no such evidence exists” that would justify revisiting that conclusion (Andersen testimony, House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, July 11, 2023).
We now know that these statements fail to accurately convey the doubt in Proximal Origin that he had expressed to his co-authors after it was published.
Why this matters
We already knew that Proximal Origin’s conclusions didn’t match what its authors privately believed when they wrote it. These two new batches of Slack messages reveal that after the paper was published, the authors still did not believe what they had written.
When outside scientists raised the same concerns through legitimate channels, the group mocked them in private and ignored them in public, even though their critiques anticipated arguments the group made to itself. And when the group finally investigated whether their own colleagues’ grant-funded research could explain the virus’s key feature, one author’s instinct led him to keep that investigation off any record public-records law could reach.
None of this proves SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab. It does show that the public, and eventually Congress, were badly misled by a small group of scientists in coordination with officials of the U.S. government.
The effect was to reduce the chances that there would have been any high-level investigation of COVID-19 origins — as there should have been — compromising our ability to ever know the details of what might have been one of the most significant failures of science institutions in history.
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Why do these discussions remind me of other discussions betweeen Michael Mann and Phil Jones and other climate scientists about issues that were considered to be "settled science"?
The emails would seem to justify a charge of lying to Congress, at the least.