The National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Oct. 6 hosted a scientist who is a close ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and coauthored a 2020 paper that said COVID-19 did not come from a laboratory.
Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, told NIH researchers during the talk that COVID-19 likely came from an animal, possibly raccoon dogs, at a wet market in Wuhan, China.
He pointed to research he and others conducted, including work by Tulane University professor Robert Garry and British scientist Andrew Rambaut, as well as photographs taken by Edward Holmes, an Australian researcher, according to slides Andersen released after the talk. The talk itself has not been made public.
“I had a fun time presenting on five+ years of collaborative research and got a lot of great questions!” Andersen wrote in a post on Bluesky. He said he gave the presentation remotely.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH’s director, wrote in a post on X that the NIH has adopted an updated framework “to embed principles of academic freedom within our Intramural Research Program” and that inviting Andersen “reaffirms this commitment to academic freedom.”
Andersen, Garry, Rambaut, and two other researchers wrote in a March 2020 paper that their analyses of genomic data “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” SARS-CoV-2 is a name for the virus that causes COVID-19.
Internal messages later obtained and made public by members of Congress and others showed the authors acknowledging it was possible COVID-19 came from the high-level laboratory in Wuhan, the city where the first COVID-19 cases appeared in 2019.
“I’m not fully convinced that no culture was involved,” Andersen, who later received new grants from Fauci’s agency, wrote on Slack to the other authors on April 16, 2020. “I’m worried that we can’t fully disprove culture,” he also said, adding that “we also can’t fully rule out engineering.”
Andersen also told investigators that Fauci, who headed an NIH institute at the time, prompted the paper, while Dr. Francis Collins, then head of the NIH, said in an email that he and Fauci helped with the publication. Fauci promoted the paper from the White House podium without disclosing any involvement.
Bhattacharya on Tuesday said, “The paper was cited extensively by members of the media, social media companies, and government officials to refute or suppress lab-origin hypotheses and to discredit anyone who publicly dissented from the dominant natural-origins narrative.”
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei Province, China, on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
The White House has said that COVID-19 likely came from the lab in Wuhan.
Bhattacharya noted that Andersen said in private in April 2020 that a lab-based scenario was possible. He also said he is aware that no hypothesis about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has been conclusively proven.
“When it comes to open scientific questions like this, our ability to pursue truth depends on our freedom to explore various hypotheses, weigh all available evidence, and deliberate openly,” he wrote. “This freedom was denied to many scientists during the pandemic. I am pleased that all NIH scientists and their guests—no matter what they think about the origins of SARS-CoV-2—enjoy it now.”
The invitation drew criticism from some, including Richard Ebright, who runs a laboratory at Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology.
“Platforming exposed science fraudster Kristian Andersen to promote science fraud, and doing to placate NIH intramural staffers who support science fraud and science fraudsters, demonstrates cowardice, not courage,” he told Bhattacharya in a post on X.
Bryce Nickels, another scientist, said that the NIH’s core mission is to seek fundamental knowledge.
“For over 6 years, Andersen and his Proximal Origin co-authors have done the opposite—presenting an open question (whether COVID came from nature or a lab) as settled and attacking those who challenged that conclusion,” Nickels wrote in a post on X. “This decision means the NIH Director believes the ‘academic freedom’ of individuals who block the search for knowledge takes priority over NIH’s actual mission of seeking knowledge.”
The NIH did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Others said they supported inviting Andersen to speak.
“First, Jay himself was a victim of being silenced & denigrated by the people currently in his role. Rather than repeat that atrocity, he is being professional,” Bill Gurley, founder and president of the P3 Institute, said in a post on social media. “Second, we should always applaud more discussion, more debate, & more conversation. That is how we will find our way to root-cause.”