They Told the Public a COVID Lab Leak Was Implausible — Privately, They Put the Odds at Nearly One in Three.
On July 22, 2026, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released internal Slack messages exchanged among the four scientists who wrote “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — the March 2020 paper that public officials and reporters cited for years as the definitive case against a Wuhan lab origin. The messages show something the published paper never did: real, numbered odds.
Kristian Andersen, the Scripps Research virologist who led the paper, privately put the chance of a lab origin at 30 percent. Eddie Holmes, of the University of Sydney, started at 20 percent and later revised it down to 10. Both numbers are in the authors’ own written words, from the same weeks they were drafting a paper that told the public there was no way the virus had come from a lab at all.
The release lands a week before Dr. Anthony Fauci, once the government’s most trusted voice on the pandemic, is scheduled to testify under subpoena before Paul’s committee on July 29 — the latest chapter in a document trail that now spans a 2023 congressional hearing, a federal audit, a finalized funding ban for the nonprofit that channeled U.S. tax dollars to the Wuhan lab, a second scientist now fighting his own proposed ban, and, as of this week, the “Proximal Origin” authors’ own private messages.
- 30% — the private probability Kristian Andersen assigned to a lab origin, per Slack messages Sen. Rand Paul released July 22, 2026 — Senate HSGAC
- 20% → 10% — Eddie Holmes's private lab-origin estimate, revised downward — while the published paper ruled a lab scenario out entirely
- $94,300,000 — total federal funding EcoHealth Alliance received from FY2008 through FY2024 — Fox News Digital / USAspending.gov
- 5 years — the federal debarment HHS finalized against EcoHealth Alliance and Dr. Peter Daszak in January 2025
On Slack, while drafting “Proximal Origin,” Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry (Tulane), Edward Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut (University of Edinburgh) debated the furin cleavage site — a genetic feature of SARS-CoV-2 absent from its closest known bat relatives. Andersen told colleagues some “smoking(ish) guns” had emerged that left him “not comfortable” and with “less confidence… at this stage.” The released messages show the group discussing the need to “stay off email” and “carefully curate” correspondence “for the FOI records,” while working to “get something back to Tony [Fauci]’s team at NIH” — and coordinating directly with the U.S. intelligence community, then running its own 90-day review of the virus’s origin.
Paul framed the release bluntly.
1/ NEW: I'm releasing Slack messages from the authors of "Proximal Origin," the paper used to shut down the lab-leak question in early 2020. Their private conversations tell a very different story than their public paper.
The private hedging traces back to February 1, 2020, when Sir Jeremy Farrar — then director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, later WHO chief scientist — organized a call with Fauci, then-NIH Director Francis Collins, and the future “Proximal Origin” authors. Days earlier, Andersen had written the group that “Eddie, Bob, Mike [Farzan] and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” some features “(potentially) look engineered.” Farrar later disclosed, in his 2021 book “Spike,” that he emailed Fauci: “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release I am honestly at 50” — and that outside virologists he’d consulted put the odds at 80 percent.
None of that hedging survived into print. “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, told readers flatly that “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” Fauci cited the paper repeatedly at White House briefings as independent proof the virus arose naturally — without disclosing that he had helped set its authors in motion weeks earlier, or that Collins had emailed him on February 2 warning that without a fast, unified scientific rebuttal, “the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”
A separate 2022 Vanity Fair investigation by reporter Katherine Eban found Andersen pushing back on a different scientist’s work the same way. Evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom, after noticing early Wuhan virus sequences had vanished from a public database, wrote a preprint on the deletions. Andersen called it “deeply troubling” and suggested it be revised so as to “leave no record this had been done,” according to Bloom’s colleague Sergei Pond, who witnessed the exchange. Andersen and Garry dispute that account.
The furin cleavage site wasn’t a hypothetical to everyone in this story. In 2018, Peter Daszak, working with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, submitted a proposal called DEFUSE to the Pentagon’s DARPA, requesting funds to “introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” into bat coronaviruses — the same feature SARS-CoV-2 turned out to have. DARPA rejected it, and it stayed secret until a 2021 leak to the research group DRASTIC. Per RealClearInvestigations’ reporting, a slide about a possible Wuhan lab accident that Baric included in a private January 2020 intelligence briefing did not appear in his public congressional briefing a month later.
Baric’s own funding has since come under the same scrutiny as Daszak’s. On May 6, 2026, HHS sent him a formal notice of suspension and proposed debarment, alleging his account of a virus experiment was “deceptive” for omitting that a modified spike protein showed a “gain in pathogenesis.” NIH pulled him from all grants; UNC placed him on leave. Baric hasn’t conceded the allegations — he told Science he intends to appeal, likely with the university’s legal help — and no criminal charges have been filed.
The administration’s position on the underlying dispute is stated plainly on the White House’s own “Lab Leak” page, which frames the DNI declassification and the Slack releases as vindication for the theory federal officials spent years discouraging.
NIAID’s connection to WIV ran through EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit Daszak led. Starting in 2014, NIH funded EcoHealth’s “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” grant, which subcontracted roughly $600,000 to WIV for bat-coronavirus sampling and characterization work. A January 2023 audit by the HHS Office of Inspector General found NIH “did not effectively monitor” three EcoHealth-linked grants worth about $8,000,000 combined, including $90,000 in misreported expenses, and NIH permanently terminated the WIV subaward that August after the Wuhan lab refused to turn over its laboratory notebooks.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, after reviewing more than a million pages of documents over two years, concluded Daszak had repeatedly violated his NIH grant’s terms, filed a required safety report two years late, and gave Congress false statements. HHS suspended all federal funding to EcoHealth in May 2024 and, in January 2025, formally debarred both the organization and Daszak personally for five years. EcoHealth terminated Daszak’s employment that January 6; the nonprofit is now defunct.
“We now have justice — at least for five years.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), on the EcoHealth / Daszak debarment
Currently leading it — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who released the Slack messages and subpoenaed Fauci.
Led the House probe — then-Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), who chaired the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic through its December 2024 final report before retiring from Congress in January 2025.
The dissent — Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-CA), the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, whose staff disputed the majority’s “cover-up” framing as a selective reading of routine scientific hedging.
Fauci has denied wrongdoing at every turn. Testifying publicly for the first time since leaving government, before the same House subcommittee on June 3, 2024, he said he did not orchestrate “Proximal Origin,” did not bribe its authors, and never directed NIAID staff to shape media coverage of the paper — though he acknowledged the informal February 2020 calls with Farrar and Andersen about the virus’s unusual features. Andersen and Garry have made the same argument publicly, and none of the paper’s four authors has been charged with a crime. Daszak likewise denies wrongdoing and has called the debarment proceedings “guilty until proven innocent.”
Fauci received a preemptive pardon from President Biden on January 20, 2025 — Biden said it wasn’t “an acknowledgment” of any wrongdoing — and Fauci told ABC News he had “committed no crime.” Trump later declared that pardon, along with other autopen-signed Biden pardons, “void, vacant and of no further force or effect.” None of that has stopped Paul’s committee: after Fauci declined a voluntary interview, Paul issued a subpoena on June 23, 2026, compelling him to testify July 29 on, in Paul’s words, “Did Dr. Fauci fund gain-of-function research while telling Congress he didn’t? Why were records destroyed? And why did he need a presidential pardon?”
📅REMINDER: We're 9 days out from the HSGAC hearing where Anthony Fauci will testify on Wednesday July 29 at 8:30AM ET.
Biden's autopen pardons — including the one for Fauci — are void, vacant, and of no further force or effect. He knew nothing about them.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Paraphrase of Trump's widely reported March 2025 Truth Social post disputing the validity of Biden's autopen-signed pardons, which included Fauci's.
The four scientists who told the world a COVID lab leak wasn’t plausible privately assigned it real odds — up to 30 percent — in Slack messages Sen. Rand Paul released this week. A federal audit, a House investigation, and a finalized five-year debarment have already documented how NIH-funded EcoHealth Alliance handled the Wuhan grant at the center of the dispute; a second scientist, Ralph Baric, is now fighting a debarment of his own. No one in this story has been criminally charged, and Fauci, Andersen, and the others continue to deny wrongdoing — but on July 29, under subpoena, Fauci will have to answer these questions in public, under oath, for the first time since the pardon that was supposed to end the conversation.
