The U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will hold a hearing Tuesday on “Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up.” The recent Federal District Court injunction against government censorship of social media increases this hearing’s significance.
The hearing will not decide if a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) started the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The hearing will examine the backstory of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” In this paper, five leading virologists concluded, “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
“Proximal Origin” was one of the most cited scientific papers of 2020. Dr. Anthony Fauci and many others dismissed the lab leak hypothesis for almost two years by referencing this paper.
One potential response could be that real time prognostication is frequently wrong. Law professor Richard Epstein in March 2020 predicted no more than 50,000 deaths worldwide from SARS-CoV-2, which was off by two orders of magnitude.
But thanks to numerous Freedom of Information requests, we know that three “Proximal Origin” authors thought that the lab leak was a 50-50 proposition or better.
The WIV was collecting coronaviruses from bats across China to identify potentially deadly viruses before they might begin infecting humans. This research necessarily made a leak a possibility, made more likely since much of WIV’s coronavirus research was being done in a Level 2 Biosecurity lab rather than a Level 4 area.
But it gets worse. The authors were aware of a furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, never previously observed in any coronavirus. This was the key to infection: “without this feature, SARS-CoV-2 would not have posed a pandemic threat.”
WIV and EcoHealth Alliance had sought funding from DARPA to insert a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. This proposal was not funded but the research might still have been conducted, making a lab leak a leading candidate when such a coronavirus emerged in Wuhan.
Four of the five authors of Proximal Origins were on a phone call on Feb. 1, 2020, with Dr. Fauci, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, and Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar. Somehow none of their concerns made it into the paper. As Roger Pielke Jr. summarizes the case: “a group of scientists, ‘prompted’ by government officials and ‘shepherded’ by Farrar … chose to misrepresent in a ‘scientific’ article published in a major journal what they knew and believed, as expressed in private emails.”
The case sheds light on government censorship of social media. The expert assessment justified deplatforming lab leak proponents from Twitter and Facebook. Censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story proceeded similarly, with 51 intelligence experts claiming the story was Russian disinformation.
Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi dub what their excellent reporting, beginning with the Twitter files, has uncovered the “Censorship Industrial Complex.” A lawsuit by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri led to last week’s injunction from Federal Judge Terry Doughty, who wrote, “If the allegations made by the Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Americans must push back against this censorship. I will consider only the tiny sliver posed by “Proximal Origin.” Here’s a potential response: permanently ban the paper’s authors from future federal research funding. We the people and taxpayers invest in research to make our lives better. Only scientists adhering to the highest standards can advance knowledge. Scientists willing to lie in such a publication have zero credibility to conduct honest research.
The “Proximal Origin” authors are not the only blameworthy parties here. Dr. Fauci, who was funding research at WIV through NIAID, appears particularly culpable. I would support punishment for this, but Dr. Fauci has since retired.
The federal government justifies social media censorship to combat misinformation. We still do not know whether COVID-19 emerged from the WIV. But discrediting the lab leak hypothesis represents pure government misinformation.
Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H.
Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
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