Politicians, scientists spar over alleged NIH cover-up using COVID-19 origin paper

Two scientists who are coauthors of a 3-year-old article on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic faced down Republican lawmakers today in what might be the most in-depth discussion ever of a scientific paper in the halls of the U.S. Congress. At a House subcommittee hearing , the Republicans asserted that top officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) prompted the researchers to write the paper to try and “kill” the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The scientists, two of its five co-authors, flatly rejected the allegation. And as the hearing extended over 3 hours, committee Democrats chided their colleagues on the other side of the aisle for staging a “vendetta” and “weaponization” of the origin discussion, and for slinging “baseless allegations” that amounted to a “mission to destroy two people” and “vilify” public health experts. The paper, “ The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 ,” was published in Nature Medicine on 17 March 2020, and argued that SARS-CoV-2 had most likely evolved naturally, rather than being engineered by scientists. It has become central to the assertions of many lab leak proponents that NIH funded risky coronavirus experiments, which, in turn, led to the pandemic. In this scenario, high-ranking agency officials, such Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, the NIH’s director,...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research