The Covid scientists who lied

The Daily Sceptic reports:

In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.

The article, known as ‘The Proximal Origins of Covid‘, concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.

So they said a lab leak was “not plausible” which is very strong language.

But in private they said:

Three months after the paper was published, one of the authors, Professor Kristian Andersen, of the Scripps Institute, California, wrote on Slack, the communication platform: “At the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other – and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there. …

Prof Andersen said that a lab leak was 30% likely while co-author Prof Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney put the probability at between 10 and 20%.

So in public they said a lab leak was “not plausible” while in private they said it was up to 30% probable. Disgraceful.