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Origin of Covid-19: 5 minutes to understand why the controversy is rebounding in the United States

2022-01-15T14:29:18.074Z


The Republican Party on Jan. 11 revealed new, hitherto censored emails from the U.S. health agency about the pandemic.


While being heard by the US Senate, infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci is once again the subject of a discredit campaign.

On January 11, the Republican Party brought several missing pieces to the "Fauci Emails" affair, born last June.

At the time, CNN, the Washington Post and Buzzfeed legally obtained access to the emails of the US presidential medical adviser between January and June 2020, the first six months of the COVID-19 crisis. Covid-19 in the United States.

The publication of these thousands of emails highlighted the trial and error of scientists, but also the interest that Anthony Fauci, among others, had in the hypothesis of a leak of SARS-CoV-2 from a laboratory.

The conspiratorial machine was racing.

Seven months later, the Republican Party is fueling distrust of him by publishing nine new emails, so far redacted.

Some sentences still are.

What are these documents?

The online file contains nine emails, sent or received by officials of the US National Institute of Health (NIH), the main medical research agency.

The majority of those emails involve Anthony Fauci, medical adviser to the President of the United States and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NAID), tropical medicine researcher Jeremy Farrar, and geneticist Francis Collins.

🚨BREAKING🚨



We've released never before seen emails showing Dr. Fauci may have concealed information about #COVID19 originating from the Wuhan lab & intentionally downplayed the lab leak theory.

@RepJamesComer & @Jim_Jordan want Fauci under oath.

Time for answers.

1/2👇 pic.twitter.com/p8aIBJ3nom

— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) January 11, 2022

The exchanges date back to early February 2020, just after a videoconference meeting between international experts, on February 1, on the emergence of this mysterious coronavirus.

Under the US Freedom of Information Act, the Republican Party was able to obtain them legally.

What do these exchanges reveal?

These emails indicate that from the start, scientists took seriously the hypothesis of the leak of Covid-19 from a laboratory in Wuhan, and the possibility that the virus was intentionally genetically manipulated.

“Accidental release or natural event?

For me, it's 70-30 or 60-40, ”wrote one of the participants at the February 1 conference, virologist Michael Farzan.

The Republican Party is thus questioning the lack of transparency towards public opinion and the White House.

Between them, the experts have explored all avenues.

But publicly, they preferred to support one and stifle the other, with the backing of scientific publications.

Several specialists whose names appear in the emails will co-author in Nature Medicine, in March 2020, an article stating that "it is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulations of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses" .

Why did you ignore their doubts?

The reasons that lead Dr. Ron Fouchier to be intimately convinced of the natural origin of Covid-19 are based on both scientific and political arguments. The Dutch virologist, himself behind the creation of a mutant virus, fears that the theory of the escape from the laboratory "causes harm to scientific research". The stakes are also political: some experts fear a war between the two superpowers.

According to the Republican thesis, Anthony Fauci would have dismissed this track due to a conflict of interest. In the introduction to the dossier, the authors explain that the NIH is funding work by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), via the NGO EcoHealth Alliance, to study bat coronaviruses. Since then, the NIH has demanded explanations from EcoHealth Alliance on the security of the Wuhan laboratory, deemed to be faulty, specifies Le Monde.

Anthony Fauci's camp refutes this accusation.

In a book, Jeremy Farrar describes a collective change of mind, reports the national daily.

He confirms that several scientists present on February 1, 2020 were initially leaning towards a virus that came out of a laboratory, but that the discussions led to a general consensus towards zoonosis (diseases transmissible from animals to humans).

“We were among the first to take a connection with the laboratory very seriously.

Nevertheless, we found no evidence.

This is still true today,” explained immunologist Kristian G. Andersen in March 2021.

What consequences?

“The NIH's continued stonewalling is likely to cause irreparable damage to the credibility of these agencies, says the Republican Party, which is calling for an investigation into whether the panel of experts convened on February 1 alerted the White House to their concerns. . “Although Dr. Fauci repeatedly asserted the opposite, he was in fact aware of the monetary relationship between NIAID, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH), EcoHealth Alliance Inc. (EcoHealth) and the WIV . »

Today, these emails prove nothing, except that the scientists wondered.

From now on, human intervention is no longer excluded, but the question is still debated in the scientific world.

Dr. Andrew Rambaut also concludes one of his emails with a wise admission of ignorance: “I think that the only people with sufficient information are the teams working in Wuhan.

»

Read alsoOrigin of Covid-19: how the theory of a laboratory accident came back to the fore

In addition, studies have recently demonstrated that a new strain of coronavirus close to SARS-CoV-2, discovered in Laos, can infect human cells.

A thesis that lends weight to that of natural transmission.

Source: leparis

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