Former NYT science editor slams Fauci for discrediting lab leak theory

A former New York Times science editor ripped Dr. Anthony Fauci Wednesday for repeatedly seeking to discredit the so-called “lab leak theory” of COVID-19’s origin — just days after newly released emails showed the former White House chief medical adviser commissioned a paper early in the pandemic meant to disprove it.

“Fauci was probably not too pleased to hear that the virus might have escaped from research that his agency had funded,” Nicholas Wade, who also served as an editor for the journals Nature and Science, told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Wade was referring to experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with funding from the National Institutes of Health and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was routed to the Chinese institution through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.

The journalist and author pointed the finger of blame squarely at Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins, saying: “It’s hard to believe that in the twilight of their long careers they would seriously mishandle an issue as important as the origin of the COVID virus, yet that is what the evidence seems to point to.”

“The national media swallowed the natural origins story unskeptically, and once committed to it, failed to report important contrary evidence,” he added.

Dr. Kristian Andersen said Fauci and Collins had “prompted” him to write a study to debunk the lab leak theory, according to a Feb. 12, 2020, cover email submitted with an article on the subject to Nature Medicine. The article was published five days later and was cited by Fauci from the White House briefing room two months later — without revealing his own role in its creation.

In his testimony, Wade noted an email Andersen sent Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, in which Andersen warned the virus had “unusual features” that “(potentially) look engineered.”

Andersen also wrote that he and others “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

Within days, Wade said, Andersen had “repudiated” his initial position.

“Within four days, Andersen in an email on Feb. 4 repudiated, deriding the lab leak as a crackpot theory,” he said. “What made him change his mind? No new scientific evidence came to light.”

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