Immediately, the Proximal Origin paper was put to use to shut down debate. ABC: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 is not a laboratory construct.” Vice News: “Once and for all, the new coronavirus was not made in a lab.”
Leaked messages now show that the Proximal Origin paper itself was the product of something like a conspiracy and was intended to mislead the public about the origins of Covid. FOIA requests of their emails and chat messages show that all of the authors of the paper expressed the exact opposite views of the conclusions in the paper. “60-40 lab,” Dr. Edward Holmes said. “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario,” wrote Robert Garry.
“In the lab it would be easy,” Garry also surmised in February. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the gain of function research we know is happening.” Andersen: “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely because they were already doing this work.”
