Index Entries

Anthony Fauci
Sent on February 1, 2020
Twitter
Select Congressional Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Email sent from Anthony Fauci. 

To: Garrett Grigsby, Brian Harrison, and two redacted recipients.

Cc: Lawrence Kerr, Robert Kadlec, Francis Collins, and two redacted recipients.

"Folks:

The call with Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome Trust) went very well. Francis Collins joined and there were several highly credible scientists (including and in addition to the two that I spoke with last night) on the call with expertise in evolutionary biology. One point to make clear, and this was brought up on the Task Force call. Most of the rumors that are going around related to the paper by an Indian group saying that there are HIV gene sequences inserted in the 2019-nCoV virus. All of the scientists on our call felt that this was not credible and they dismissed it as they the two [sic] did last night. That is not what they were concerned about. They were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of the nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and that there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan. Upon considerable discussion, some of the scientists felt more strongly about this possibility, but two others felt differently...."

document
COVID-19,pathogen origin