The House Oversight Committee under James Comer keeps having softballs served up to them and they keep knocking them out of the park. The latest incident took place today when the committee called Danish virologist Dr. Kristian Andersen to testify. He was one of the authors of a March 2020 paper that sought to show that the origins of the COVID virus were “natural” and all of the people suspecting that it leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology were just conspiracy theorists. As you will recall, many prominent medical professionals were censored and silenced for suggesting otherwise.
We now know that the prevailing wisdom is that the lab leak theory (as it came to be known) is almost certainly the correct one. And there is more than a little evidence to suggest that there were political considerations behind the pushback that the lab leak theory received. When Dr. Andersen was initially asked, he flatly denied that there were any such political considerations and that the theory was simply considered to be “not plausible.” But then Comer unveiled a series of Slack messages between him and a colleague shortly before their paper “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published. Suddenly, the story changed. (National Review)
During a Tuesday House Oversight Committee hearing, Representative James Comer (R., Ky.) confronted a leading virologist with internal messages which suggest that the preeminent scientific paper used to justify hostility to the lab-leak theory was influenced by political considerations.
Dr. Kristian Andersen — a Danish virologist who co-authored a highly influential paper published in March 2020 that argued the lab-leak theory was not “plausible” — appeared before Comer’s committee Tuesday to address allegations that Dr. Anthony Fauci and his NIH colleagues improperly influenced the paper’s findings.
After denying that his findings were influenced by political considerations, such as the desire not to alienate the Chinese Communist Party, Andersen was confronted with a slack exchange he had with a colleague shortly before the paper was published. The exchange, which House Republicans obtained as part of an investigation into Covid’s origins, seems to suggest political dynamics were taken into consideration before “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” was published.
That had to be an awkward moment. In the Slack exchange, Dr. Andrew Rambaut wrote to his colleagues about “the sh** show” that would ensue if anyone even suggested that the Chinese had released the virus even accidentally. As a result, he suggested that “we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape.”
Somewhat hilariously, Andersen responded by saying, “I hate when politics is injected into science – but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.” He agreed with the decision. The problem is, for someone who “hates it” when politics is “injected into science,” that’s exactly what they were doing. There may not have been clear evidence of a “specifically engineered virus” at that time, but there was obviously no way to rule it out. So what other reason would there be to reject what turned out to be the correct answer?
The aforementioned Dr. Rambaut, the one who pitched using that excuse, refused the request to appear to testify, as did others involved in the development of the paper. That paper would go on to be the fundamental pillar upon which the government and the media propped up the “bat stew” theory and attacked anyone who suggested otherwise. But in the background, Dr. Fauci and the NIH had been funding virus research at the lab in Wuhan without letting the public know.
How many lies were told? How many times was the public deceived while being scolded about “following The Science?” And those aren’t even the biggest questions. Why has nobody even been brought out to apologize? How did all of these people keep their jobs? Everyone is pretending that none of this ever happened and moving on to the next national or global emergency that will require more extraordinary powers to be seized by the federal government and various world organizations. (Most likely the “climate emergency.”) Don’t be fooled again, people.
