Top scientists call for withdrawal of landmark Fauci-backed COVID-19 origins paper

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

• By Ezra Levant

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Top researchers are launching a clarion call for the complete withdrawal of a pivotal early report on COVID-19 origins. This critical study, once lauded by Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, is now under scrutiny for its alleged undermining of the lab leak hypothesis.

The esteemed publication “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”, which appeared in Nature Medicine in March 2020, strongly asserted that COVID-19 did not originate from a laboratory. Yet, behind the scenes, the authors privately harbored reservations, considering a laboratory leak as not just possible, but also “likely.”

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” wrote the five prominent scientists who authored the paper. “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

However, in a revelation earlier this year, emails from the dawn of 2020 exposed that both Dr. Fauci and the authors of the controversial paper harbored lingering doubts. They suspected, all along, that the insidious virus could indeed have escaped from a lab, the Daily Wire reported.

A collective of 47 esteemed scientists and professionals from the STEM field have banded together, penning an open letter to Nature Medicine to retract the paper.

“We, as STEM and STEM-policy professionals, call upon Nature Medicine to publish an expression of editorial concern for the paper and to begin a process of withdrawal or retraction of the paper,” the signers wrote.

Brandishing the paper as “scientific fraud,” one of the signatories, Richard H. Ebright — who holds a distinguished position as the board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University — voiced his stringent criticism.

The paper “falsely claimed science showed COVID-19 did not have a lab origin,” Ebright wrote in a tweet. “Newly released messages from the authors show they did not believe the conclusions of the paper and show the paper is the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct.”

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1682786904159182848

Also endorsing the call for retraction by adding his signature to the letter is Neil Harrison, a distinguished professor of anesthesiology and molecular pharmacology at the prestigious Columbia University.

According to Harrison, the assertions that the virus had natural origins or that the pandemic sprung from a seafood market are utterly baseless. He further stressed that the authors' private correspondences indicate that they were aware of this lack of evidence during the publication of their paper.

“Scientists in the clinical and contiguous sciences have argued against these papers almost from the beginning, and have been subjected to volleys of abuse. This is the first retraction call but it won’t be the last,” Harrison stated.

The open letter demanding the retraction has garnered the support of several high-profile figures in the scientific community. These include a molecular biologist from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a pediatrics and genetics professor at Harvard with extensive research in vaccines, an epidemiology professor from the University of Ottawa, a professor specializing in biochemistry and molecular biology at Pennsylvania State University, an epidemiologist and health professor at the University of California, Irvine, a professor of molecular immunology at the University of Oxford, and a host of others.