Then-National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, acknowledged that he secretly assisted with a paper stating the virus that causes COVID-19 “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” according to a newly released missive.
“This is work that Tony, Jeremy, Larry, and I helped with, but are appropriately not mentioned explicitly in the paper,” Collins said in the March 6, 2020, email to NIH officials, which was released by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on June 11.
Tony refers to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases through late 2022. Jeremy refers to Jeremy Farrar, at the time the director of the Wellcome Trust. Larry refers to Dr. Lawrence Tabak, an NIH official.
Collins noted the conclusion that stated, “The analysis of public genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered.” SARS-CoV-2 is the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
The first COVID-19 cases appeared in Wuhan, China, in 2019, near a laboratory that was conducting enhanced experiments on coronaviruses funded by the NIH.
Collins was responding to an email from Kristian Andersen, one of the authors of the paper, which was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Andersen and other scientists said in the paper, published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, that they analyzed data and concluded that it came from nature.
To date, no natural source has been identified for the virus. The Trump administration maintains the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
The paper did not mention any contributions from Collins, Fauci, Tabak, or Farrar, who made at least one critical change to the document, according to emails released by lawmakers in 2023. It thanked American virologist Michael Farzan “for discussions” and the Wellcome Trust “for support.” Nature did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. Collins did not respond to a request for comment.
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that his role “was for information, not for me to edit,” that he never edited or suggested edits to the paper, and that, to his knowledge, neither did Fauci or Farrar. He also said he is not a virology expert.
Change in Stance
Early drafts of the paper had the authors stating that it was possible that the virus came from a lab. In private messages, since made public, the authors also said that characteristics of the virus indicated it was manmade. They have defended the changes in their stances as being driven by evidence.
In the newly released emails, Andersen, who has said that the paper was “prompted” by Collins, Fauci, and Farrar, had written to the trio.
“Thank you again for your advice and leadership as we have been working through the SARS-CoV-2 ‘origins’ paper,” he said.
He told them he welcomed comments, suggestions, and questions about the paper, which had just been accepted for publication.
Collins said in a previously released email to Fauci, Tabak, and others in April 2020 that he was wondering whether the NIH could “help put down this very destructive conspiracy,” linking to an article alleging the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan.
“I hoped the Nature Medicine article on the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 would settle this,” he said. “But probably didn’t get much visibility. Anything more we can do?”
Collins told lawmakers in 2024 that in the email, “I meant that we should do what we can to get the truth out there, as opposed to statements that were reckless and speculative that were not based on evidence.” He said that the possibility that the virus came from the lab, whether it originated there or not, was not a conspiracy theory.
Fauci Shared Another Paper
Fauci, who has denied allegations that Proximal Origins was written to disprove the lab origin theory, met on multiple occasions with intelligence officials in 2020 and 2021. James Erdman III, a CIA operations officer, told Paul and other senators in May that Fauci provided a list of experts to whom the intelligence community (IC) should talk, and that the list included the Proximal Origins authors.
“Dr. Anthony Fauci influenced the IC’s analytic process and COVID origin’s findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated Subject Matter Experts (SME), public health officials, and scientists,” Erdman said.
Fauci has not returned emails seeking comment on Erdman’s testimony and the missives Paul just released.
One of those emails showed Fauci wrote to Beth Cameron, a National Security Council official, on July 8, 2021, a day after he took part in a council briefing.
“The article accessible from the link in the subject line above just came out as a ‘preprint’ yesterday. It is from a group of highly qualified virologists,” Fauci wrote. “Please show it to your team. It summarizes what I said yesterday.”
The article, titled “The Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” included Farrar and Anderson as coauthors. The authors said that there was “currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin” while there was evidence supporting links to animal markets in Wuhan.
Fauci “was pushing the natural-origin story while secretly getting classified briefings on the actual origins,” Paul wrote in a post on X. “The American people were told one story. These documents—and a CIA officer’s sworn testimony—tell another,” he added in a follow-up post.