On Jan. 19, joint reporting from The Intercept and The Nation made public a collection of newly unredacted emails between Anthony Fauci, recently retired National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and a select few virologists, in which the group discusses the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab – specifically, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The hook in the reporting by investigative journalist Jimmy Tobias, beyond its illuminating document cache, is his observation that three of those virologists went on to publish a March 21, 2020, paper in Nature Medicine entitled “The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2,” in which the authors asserted “We do not believe that any laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” The emails unearthed by Tobias, however, show a far more conflicted view behind the scenes, with one of the paper’s primary authors writing in an email to the group on Feb. 8, 2020: “I believe that publishing something that is open-ended could backfire at this stage.”
