Scientists Demand Retraction Of 'Scientific Fraud' Pushed By Fauci On COVID-19 Natural Origins

A group of prominent scientists has called for the full retraction of a widely distributed research paper, once praised by former NIAID Director and White House Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2," published in March 2020 which said definitively that COVID-19 did not come from a laboratory and originated in nature.

According to The Daily Wire, the paper claimed, “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

After emails dating back to 2020 were made public through Congressional investigations by House and Senate Republicans demonstrating incontrovertibly that the paper's authors suspected before and after writing the study that the virus may have come from a lab leak, 47 leading scientists and other professionals in STEM fields penned and signed an open letter to Nature Medicine demanding the published paper be retracted.

“We, as STEM and STEM-policy professionals, call upon Nature Medicine to publish an expression of editorial concern for the paper and to begin a process of withdrawal or retraction of the paper,” they wrote.

In the text of the letter the 47 professionals state, "The paper played an influential role—indeed, the central role—in communicating the false narrative that science established that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover, and not through research-related spillover."

The extent to which the COVID narrative was based on this work is truly alarming as the scientists note. They observed, "The paper has been cited more than 5,800 times, making it the 68th most cited publication in all fields in 2020, the 16th most cited publication in biology in 2020, and the 8th most cited publication on the subject of COVID-19 in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic."

The level of damage done to Americans' confidence in the scientific community by this false narrative cannot be overstated. They explain, "Email messages and Slack direct messages among authors of the paper obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in or before July 2023 (2-7), show that the authors did not believe the core conclusions of the paper at the time it was written, at the time it was submitted for publication, and at the time it was published. The authors’ statements show that the paper was, and is, a product of scientific misconduct."

The letter concludes, "It is imperative that this misleading and damaging product of scientific misconduct be removed from the scientific literature." 

One of the signers of the letter Richard Ebright, who sits on the Board of Governors as a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, called the paper "scientific fraud," on X App (formerly Twitter) posting, "The 2020 'Proximal Origin' paper falsely claimed science showed COVID-19 did not have a lab origin. Newly released messages from the authors show they did not believe the conclusions of the paper and show the paper is the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct."

Ebright added that the fraud, "will be resolved by investigation and judicial process. Which--due to the fraud perpetrated by Fauci and Fauci's marionettes---still have not started, despite three years elapsed, 20 million lives lost, and $25 trillion dollars lost.."