Prominent scientists have demanded that an early, extremely influential publication on the origins of COVID-19, which discounted the lab leak explanation and was endorsed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, be completely retracted.
Despite the private reservations of the scientist that a lab leak was actually possible or even “likely,” “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which was originally published in March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine, stated that COVID did not originate in a lab.
The report was co-authored by five eminent experts. “Our analyses clearly establish that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t a laboratory creation or an intentionally manipulated virus,” the authors concluded. “We do not consider any laboratory-based scenario to have been plausible.”
However, emails from the beginning of 2020 that were discovered earlier this year reveal that Fauci and the authors of the study had this suspicion all along and thought the virus may have come from a lab breach.
A total of 47 scientists along with other STEM professionals demanded the retraction of the research in an open letter to the Nature Medicine publication.
The signers stated, “As professionals in the fields of STEM and STEM policy, we call upon Nature Medicine to release an expression of editorial concern about the paper and to initiate a procedure of withdrawal or the retraction of the paper.”
One of the signatories, Richard H. Ebright, a Board of Governors instructor of chemistry in addition to chemical biology at Rutgers University, called the work “scientific fraud.”
The article “falsely claimed science proved COVID-19 didn’t have a lab origin,” Ebright stated in a tweet. “Recently released messages from the authors demonstrate that they did not accept the paper’s conclusions and demonstrate that the paper was the result of scientific misconduct and fraud.”
The letter requesting a retraction was also signed by Neil Harrison, an instructor of anesthesiology along with molecular pharmacology at Columbia University.
The authors’ private correspondence reveals they were aware of this at the time. Harrison stated there is “no evidence” supporting the assertions that this virus had a natural origin or that the pandemic had started out of a seafood market.
“Scientists in the clinical and related sciences have criticized these articles practically from the start and have received barrages of criticism. The first retraction call has been made, but Harrison predicted that it won’t be the last.”
While I am neither a scientist nor medical expert, not a virologist or microbiologist, I do have common sense. ALL of the normal suspects from pangolin to bat have been rejected as the source for COVID. And with the Wuhan Laboratory of Virology across the street from the “wet market”, common sense would have each of us select Occam’s Razor for our answer.
Thank you for coming forward with the truth! Something we all suspected all along. Thank you for for having the the good conscious and ethics to do this.