by Jonathan Latham PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

On July 23rd Senator Rand Paul (chair of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government affairs, HSGAC) belatedly released the transcript of a Slack messaging group comprising four of the five leading virologists who wrote the now notorious paper ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’ (Andersen et al., 2020). The four Slack authors are Kristian Andersen (Scripps), Eddie Holmes (University of Sydney), Bob Garry (Tulane University), and Andrew Rambaut (University of Edinburgh). The 1,123 page Slack text, spanning over two years worth of correspondence, can very profitably be read (and has been written up) for several reasons: More

by Jonathan Latham, PhD

On February 1st, 2020, Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), secretly convened a group of select international virologists. Their task was to decide whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus newly emerged from Wuhan, was engineered.

Some key emails from their resulting discussions have only recently become available. In one, Robert Garry, a virologist from Tulane University, wrote to his associates: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning.” Other emails show that many in the group agreed that the virus likely did not emerge naturally and most probably was altered in a lab.More

by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD

Back in March, the World Health Organisation’s report on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic coronavirus confirmed something that had long been widely presumed. Since the pandemic began, there has been an enormous virus hunt in China.

The purpose of this hunt has been to find the viruses intermediate between SARS-CoV-2 and its coronavirus relatives found in bats (Luk et al., 2019).More