COVID Origins Timeline
Bush Era
Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergies and infectious diseases, speaking about bioterrorism threats at Washington University on December 19, 2002.
October 2000: Project for the New American Century releases “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” policy document.
It states that in the 21st century “combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”
Document is co-authored by John Bolton, Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliot Abrams.
June 22-23 2001: Senior policymakers run two days of a smallpox bioweapon attack simulation called Operation Dark Winter, designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies.
The conclusions of policymakers during the simulation lay the groundwork for new biowarfare-preparation proposals under a “preventive paradigm.”
September 18, 2001: Anthrax attacks begin.
Over several weeks, five people are killed and 17 are infected.
December 21, 2001: The CDC sends the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act to state legislatures for approval.
The MSEHP is drafted as a bioterrorism response plan and includes broad quarantines.
June 12, 2002: Bush signs the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act to prepare for a smallpox bioterror attack.
Requires the federal government to provide assistance to states in the event of a bioterror/public health emergency. This includes reporting systems, medical supplies, etc. Directs the FDA to fastrack products.
2002: Michael Callahan becomes the State Department’s clinical director for Cooperative Threat Reduction Programs.
Callahan is sent to former Soviet states “to form alliances with scientists at some of the most secretive bioweapons laboratories in Russia and the former Soviet states.” The goal is to convert bioweapons labs into labs that can fight diseases by anticipating threats and creating vaccines.
When Callahan returns to the US he has a job at DARPA.
Callahan will be in Wuhan at the start of the COVID outbreak in 2019.
2003: NIAID, led by Fauci, is assigned “lead responsibility… for civilian biodefense with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infectious disease…”
NIAID gets $1.7 billion budget to research and defend against bioterror.
“Because new potentially deadly pathogens, such as avian influenza, may be naturally occurring as well as deliberately introduced by terrorists, NIAID’s biodefense research is integrated into its larger emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases portfolio.”
No distinction between biodefense and scientific research.
Biodefense efforts are now under the administration of NIAID/Fauci.
No oversight.
In 2004, Project Bioshield gives $5.6 billion to pharmaceutical and biotech companies to work with the NIH on biodefense research and development.
Fauci: “I found myself again, never imagining that I would be doing this, needing to learn from people that I never thought I would be learning things from, namely bioweaponers. People who are our own bioweaponers in the US decades ago, international figures, people from other countries, the UK, and also importantly, defectors particularly from the Soviet Union who had vast experience in the ways of biowarfare.” (2002)
Fauci states that the 20-year goal of NIAID is to develop a “bug to drug” within 24 hours. If they can identify genetically engineered traits in advance, then they can have drugs ready to tackle any new bioterror threats.
April 2003: The US State Department compliance report notes, “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) continued to engage in biological activities with potential BW [bioweapon] applications, which raise concerns regarding its compliance with Article I of the BWC [Biological Weapons Convention].
“In addition, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether the PRC has eliminated its assessed historical biological warfare program, as required under Article II of the Convention.”
“PRC military medical institutions have conducted research to identify, test, and characterize diverse families of potent toxins with dual-use applications. The PRC’s annual CBMs [Confidence Building Measures] do not include information on this dual-use biological research on pathogens and marine and animal toxins conducted at PLA institutions.”
September 2003: Lab leak in Singapore at a BSL-3 lab at the National University of Singapore.
A 27-year-old student is found to be infected with SARS. Improper experimental procedures were responsible.
December 2003: Lab leak in Taiwan at a BSL-4 lab at the Taiwan Military Institute of Preventive Medical Research (IPMR) of the National Defence University.
Researcher was infected through a spill.
April 2004: Lab leak in Beijing at a BSL-3 lab.
Little information released.
April 28, 2004: The Biodefense Act outlines a response to bioterror attacks, which includes planning for coordinated communication of risk and aggressive research programs.
Biological Warfare Related Intelligence: “Among our many initiatives, we are continuing to develop more forward-looking analyses, to include Red Teaming efforts, to understand new scientific trends that may be exploited by our adversaries to develop biological weapons and to help position intelligence collectors ahead of the problem.”
Milton Leitenberg, Ambassador James Leonard, and Dr. Richard Spertzel argued that this directive goes too far, citing details reported in the Washington Post: “the US intelligence community is under orders to carry out studies examining the types of genetically engineered ‘bugs’ terrorists could be working on to mount an attack.”
July 21, 2004: Bush signs Project Bioshield into law.
2004-2007: Fauci receives a 68% pay increase from $200,000 to $335,000 a year.
2005: President George W. Bush, already concerned about a smallpox bioterror threat, reads the book The Great Influenza about the 1918 flu pandemic.
Enlists biodefense advisors to assemble a team and develop an influenza response.
2005: Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli author a paper together, establishing horseshoe bats as a reservoir for SARS-like coronaviruses.
July 5, 2005: A group led by Jack Nunberg is the first to insert a furin cleavage site into SARS-CoV-1.
2005-2012: Callahan expands DARPA’s biodefense portfolio from $61 million to $260 million per year.
Obama Era
Epidemiologist Ralph Baric in his lab at the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
September 2009: USAID gives a $75 million PREDICT grant to four groups, including EcoHealth Alliance.
Purpose of the grant is to study viral emergence.
EcoHealth Alliance got $18 million over five years and gave $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Unknown date: David Franz becomes a policy advisor for EcoHealth Alliance. Franz is a former commander at Fort Detrick, where the US’s biological defense program is. Franz was a chief inspector for three UN biological warfare inspection tours in Iraq. Franz was also part of a US-UK visit to the Soviet Union’s bioweapons labs in the 1990s.
2011: Controversy erupts over gain-of-function research after two scientists alter H5N1 (bird flu) to make it more transmissible among ferrets. The studies had NIH funding.
The purpose of this kind of virology research is to understand mammalian transmission, predict infectious diseases, and develop targets for next-generation vaccines and therapeutics.
One of the H5N1 studies is done by Ron Fouchier in Rotterdam. (Fouchier is later on the February 1, 2020 origins call/emails with Fauci and Collins.)
David A. Relman of Stanford is alarmed by the H5N1 research and notifies White House biosecurity official Lawrence Kerr, who contacts the NIH. Collins assigns the NIH’s own biosecurity board to investigate.
The NIH biosecurity board unanimously recommends that certain research methodologies not be published.
December 11, 2011: Fauci, Collins, and Nabel write “A flu virus risk worth taking” in WaPo
In this opinion piece they argue that the benefits of gain-of-function research outweigh the risks because it allows scientists and public health to get ahead of new viruses and make new vaccines.
“Identifying threatening viruses can also facilitate the early stages of manufacturing vaccines that protect against such a virus in advance of an outbreak.”
March 29-30, 2012: The NIH biosecurity board meets with Fauci and Collins.
Board members sign NDAs.
Board revises its previous recommendation and votes to publish the H5N1 research from Fouchier (12 to 6 in favor).
October 9, 2012: Fauci writes “Research on Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Influenza Virus: The Way Forward” in mBio
“Putting aside the specter of bioterrorism for the moment, consider this hypothetical scenario: an important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations. In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?”
2012-2020: At least 18 gain-of-function projects win NIH funding.
The Washington Post drew this conclusion through research and interviews.
Total cost of the projects was $48.8 million. 13 institutions were involved. Eight were approved after 2017, when Fauci and Collins weakened the federal oversight power of the “Ferrets Committee.”
2013: Shi Zhengli’s (a.k.a. “Bat Woman”) identifies a bat coronavirus virus called RaTG13, which has a genome that is 96.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2 (its origin was the rufous horseshoe bat, the same species linked to SARS-CoV-1).
RaTG13 was discovered in a Mjiang mine where several miners developed an abnormal pneumonia. WIV brought back samples from bats in the mine.
2013 - 2020: Shi’s team develops about a dozen chimeric viruses using an isolated bat virus, WIV1.
Some can infect human cells in a petri dish.
However, these are not closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
In 2013 Shi emails Ralph Baric to ask for assistance with an experiment.
May 2014: Fauci’s NIAID issues $3.7 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance to continue gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (“Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” grant)
Shi Zhengli of WIV is a key partner on the grant.
Through this grant, EcoHealth Alliance conducts risky experiments with MERS, attempting to change the receptor binding site.
The grant proposal includes a description of experiments on humanized mice that would be infected with hybrid chimeric viruses.
Grant is not halted after Obama’s moratorium.
In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance was getting $15 million/year in grants from DoD, DHS, and other agencies. It then gave small sub-grants to other virology labs and institutions.
July 2014: CDC reveals that staff in a bio-security lab were potentially exposed to anthrax. H5N1 was accidentally shipped to another lab. The NIH also discovered forgotten vials of smallpox in a cold-storage room.
In response to these mishaps, scientists sign a letter calling for an end to laboratory creation of new viral strains.
October 17, 2014: Obama freezes “gain-of-function” research.
This pauses Ralph Baric’s MERS research.
The freeze has an exception for research “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
Establishes an HHS committee that can veto NIH projects. NIH is required to sent the committee projects for review if the projects can create flu or coronavirus strains that are transmissible among mammals.
November 9, 2015: Shi Zhengli and Ralph Baric paper demonstrates that coronavirus spike protein can infect human cells.
“Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”
Wayne Marasco is also an author on this paper. He is currently a member of the FDA’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the body that evaluates company trial data and votes to recommend COVID-19 vaccines/boosters for different age groups.
2016-2019
Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, speaking at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
April 17, 2016: HHS biosecurity official Lawrence Kerr warns colleagues of an increase in risky gain-of-function experiments.
Kerr: “The continuing nature of MERS outbreaks has brought scientists back into the corona-biology world and more are using genetically-synthesized infectious viruses in their work.
April 2016: The NIH commissions a 1,016 page report from Gryphon Scientific (consulting firm).
The report warns that gain-of-function research increasing the transmissibility of coronaviruses can increase the risk of death by “several orders of magnitude.”
Jun 8, 2016: Daszak tells the NIH that EcoHealth Alliance’s hybrid viruses are not gain-of-function research.
In May 2016, NIH staff (Jenny Greer and Erik Stemmy) express concerns about EcoHealth Alliance’s hybrid “chimera” MERS and SARS viruses, noting the moratorium on this research.
NIH accepts Daszak’s arguments that the parent for proposed chimeric SARS-like viruses has not caused human infection.
This correspondence is not public but was reviewed by select congressional staff who took notes.
July 7, 2016: Greer and Stemmy agree to a research threshold with Daszak.
Daszak says they will halt research if the chimeras have enhanced viral growth 10 times that of the original viruses.
Daszak: “Dear Jenny [Greer], This is terrific! We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding paus has been lifted. Cheers, Peter”
In 2018, one chimeric virus produces a viral load 10,000 times greater than the original virus, but research was not halted. EcoHealth does not immediately report these results to the NIH.
On October 26, 2021, Daszak sends a letter to the NIH saying that EcoHealth Alliance did comply with the NIH grant, and that they did report their results to the agency in April 2018.
Daszak says the 10,000 times greater viral growth was “genome copies per gram not viral titer” and that the enhancement did not last for the entire experiment.
August 2016: The Global Virome Project is created in Bellagio Italy. It is spearheaded by EcoHealth Alliance.
USAID’s 2009 PREDICT is the precursor to GVP.
GVP’s founding is called “The Beginning of the End of the Pandemic Era.” The goal is to identify all zoonotic viruses that have a potential to spark pandemics. The project would involve collecting viruses from the wild to examine them and develop vaccines in advance of a pandemic. Wuhan was the center of the project.
2017: Ping Chen, Director of NIAID office in China: “A group called Global Virome Project will be visiting Beijing to discuss the scope of the project, which is sponsored by USAID and other organizations. They plan to have US and China be the leaders of the project. The China host is China CDC and our dear friend George Gao is China POC for this project. The purpose of the project is to identify viruses present in the wild life with potential crossing over to humans, causing human infection and disease. Following the identification of the viruses is the development of vaccines to protect human population. China has huge capacity for vaccine development (I think it has 7 national owned vaccine manufacturing facility and over 30 private vaccine making companies)... One of the partners in this project is EcoHealth Alliance. Peter Daszak from EcoHealth Alliance is one of the leaders for the GVP project and he has NIAID grant from ROB looking at the coronaviruses in Bat populations in China in collaboration with Wuhan Institute of Virology.... This grant has direct connection with the purpose of GVP.”
2017: Fauci and Collins make changes to NIH gain-of-function policy.
They remove the HHS Ferrets Committee’s power to block projects. This is the committee that was established in 2014 due Obama aides’ concerns about the NIH ferret research projects.
Committee records are not public. Names of committee members are secret.
Fauci and Collins also redefined gain-of-function to avoid committee scrutiny for new projects.
Change the requirement to share projects that involve pathogens “transmissible among mammals” to projects involving pathogens “likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations.”
Robert Kadlec and his aide Christian Hassell recall only two-three reviews being completed by the committee after 2017 (despite 8 gain-of-function projects) being approved by the NIH).
February 23, 2017: Nature reports on safety issues in a Wuhan biolab
“The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.”
November 13, 2017: Fauci argues for aggressive forms of research at the Pandemic Preparedness and Response forum.
December 19, 2017: NIH lifts funding pause on gain-of-function research.
Funding for gain-of-function research resumes under “Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight” guidelines.
EcoHealth Alliance’s experiments on humanized mice would have still been prohibited under these guidelines, but NIAID program officers allowed it in 2018.
January 2018: Shi receives two grants.
“01/01/2018 - 31/12/21: Evolution mechanisms of the adaptation of bat SARS-related coronaviruses to host receptor molecules and the risk of interspecies infection.”
“01/07/2018 - 30/06/2023: Genetic evolution and transmission mechanism of important bat-borne viruses.”
January 9, 2018: American diplomats find safety issues at the opening of WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory.
“noted that the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
March 24, 2018: EcoHealth Alliance “DEFUSE” proposal to DARPA
Grant proposal (rejected by DARPA) explains plans to create “full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses.”
“We will introduce appropriate human specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cel and HAE cultures.”
The science described involves inserting a “proteolytic cleavage site” into bat coronaviruses. The authors of the grant proposal mention interest in the furin cleavage site.
Proponents of the lab leak theory point to SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site on the spike protein. This furin cleavage site is not seen in related beta coronaviruses and enabled the virus to bind to ACE-2 receptors (receptors throughout human lungs and airways), making the virus more transmissible to humans. (This is disputed by some scientists who say that the furin cleavage site is “suboptimal.”)
April 2018: State Department cable calls WIV “the forerunner to the Global Virome Project.”
September 2018: Chinese Academy of Sciences starts a special project called “Pathogen Host Adaptation & Immune Intervention.”
September 12, 2019: WIV takes down viral sample and sequence database.
September 2019: Director of the Wuhan BSL-4 facility explains safety challenges in Chinese biosafety labs.
However, the relevant work was being done in BSL-3 and BSL-2 labs, so this issue may be unrelated.
September- October 2019: Possible circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy and Washington state.
Unexpected seroprevalence findings indicate possible September circulation in Italy, months before the first case is detected in Italy.
Unexpected seroprevalence findings indicate possible October circulation in Washington state, months before the first case is detected in the United States.
October 18, 2019: Tabletop exercise Event 201 simulates a coronavirus pandemic for “business [pharma], government, and public health leaders.”
Avril Haines and George Gao are players in the simulation.
Haines: “One of the things we want to do is work with the telecommunication companies… I believe in the idea that we shouldn’t be trying to control communication but rather flood the zone in a sense with a trusted source… in order to try to amplify the message that’s coming through… I certainly see the value in communicating constantly on these issues… Every time there is something that comes out that is in fact false information that is starting to actually hamper our ability to address the pandemic then we need to be able to respond quickly to it.”
October-November 2019: Military athletes complain of covid-19 like symptoms during World Military Games in Wuhan.
Most Military Defenses of NATO countries do not test returning military athletes for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
November 2019: Three researchers at the WIV fall ill with covid-like symptoms.
All three were connected to gain-of-function research.
November 2019: National Center for Medical Intelligence report warns about a contagion in Wuhan region.
Reported by ABC News and NBC News in April 2020.
Sources say an intelligence report was circulating at the National Center for Medical Intelligence in November. The report analyzed communications intercepts and satellite images. Sources say the report was presented to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
November 21, 2019: Daszak tweets that his team has found over 50 novel coronaviruses.
Daszak: “We’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related CoVs, ID’ing >50 novel strains, sequencing spike protein genes, ID’ing ones that bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses/humanized mice to see SARS-like signs, and showing some don’t respond to MAbs, vaccines…”
December 2019: A researcher at the University of Wisconsin is possibly exposed to H5N1.The university waits two months before reporting it to the NIH.
December 1, 2019: First COVID case according to Lancet paper.
December 8 2019: First COVID case according to WHO/China joint study.
December 16, 2019: A patient is admitted to the Wuhan Central Hospital with a lung infection and is resistant to flu drugs.
December 24-27, 2019: Patient samples from the Wuhan Central Hospital are sent out for genomic testing. By December 27, Wuhan health officials are told that a new coronavirus is causing the illness.
December 30, 2019: A cluster of 27 pneumonia patients is reported to the China National Health Commission.
Two doctors post information about a SARS-like virus and are reprimanded.
December 31, 2019: Wuhan health officials close the wet market.
Late December 2019 - early January 2020: Shi rules out possibility that her lab was responsible.
“Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. ‘That really took a load off my mind,’ she says. ‘I had not slept a wink for days.’”
2020
Virologist Shi Zhengli in her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
First Papers
January 14, 2020: Fauci meets with the National Security Council. He meets with the NSC 16 times in January and February.
Meetings include NSC Director for Countering Biological Threats Phil Ferro, Senior Director for Counterproliferation and Biodefense Anthony Ruggiero, and NSC official Lauren Fabina.
January 22, 2020: Redfield meets with NSC, including biodefense officials.
Late January, 2020: People’s Liberation Army Major General Chen Wei, China’s top biological weapons expert, is put in charge of containment and supervising the WIV. The PLA was previously involved in the construction of the WIV, leading to speculation that it houses both military and civilian scientific research.
Redfield says that military takeover of lab happened in 2019. He says this is highly unusual and was accompanied by changes to the ventilation system.
January 23, 2020: Fauci meets with biosafety expert James Le Duc, who was director of a BSL-4 lab in Texas and an advisor the WIV.
January 24, 2020: Lancet publishes a study identifying a novel coronavirus as 2019-nCoV
Paper finds that at least one third of the original 41 patients have no link to the Wuhan wet market.
January 30, 2020: Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton cites Lancet paper at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Senator Cotton: “We still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
On February 17, The New York Times and Washington Post call Cotton’s argument a “fringe theory.”
February 2020: WIV takes all of its virus databases offline.
February 2020: Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from South China University of Technology upload a research article “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus.”
“The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.... Regulations may be taken to relocate these laboratories far away from city center and other densely populated places.”
The paper appeared as a preprint online and was quickly removed. US government officials saw the paper before its removal.
February 3, 2020: Shi Zhengli publishes a paper arguing for bat origin of SARS-CoV-2 due to its similarity to RaTG13.
Shi’s team claims that RaTG13 has a genome that is 79.6% similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Later, the similarity is found to be 96.2%
Shi’s paper does not mention that samples of RaTG13 were studied at WIV by her team, or that the virus had been suspected of making miners ill in 2013. Her paper also renamed the virus, and did not include the name of the original sample, RaBtCoV/4991.
June 1, 2020: Shi Zhengli tells Scientific American that she worried the virus came from her lab: “If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, ‘Could they have come from our lab?’”
On November 17, 2020, Nature publishes an Addendum to Shi’s paper, confirming that RATG13 was the new name assigned to RaBtCoV/4991 and that the sample had been taken from the miners. Addendum revealed that samples from four sick miners were tested both before and after COVID began. The samples have not been shared with other research groups.
February 11, 2020: Fauci meets with Ralph Baric.
Slack messages between virologists who know Baric reveal that the meeting was connected to the outbreak.
Matt Frieman: “I talked to Ralph for a long time last night, He sounds beat… He said he sat in Fauci’s office talking about the outbreak and chimeras… I joked about his link to WIV, he wasnt [sic] very amused. He said that Zhi’s [sic] paper was not approved by the Chinese government and that she may be arrested for it.”
This is referring to the 2015 paper Shi wrote with Baric.
Following the Baric meeting on Fauci’s schedule he has an hour-long meeting with the National Security Council.
Fauci denies recalling meeting Baric in a November 2022 deposition.
“Proximal Origin” Paper
January 2020: CDC Director Robert Redfield has numerous conversations with Fauci, Farrar, and Tedros Ghebreyesus about exploring both the natural origin and lab origin hypotheses.
January 27, 2020: Fauci learns that the NIH was funding research at WIV.
January 31, 2020: Jeremy Farrar of Wellcome Trust emails Fauci and tells him to call Andersen; Fauci calls Andersen who warns Fauci about a possible lab origin and genetic manipulation; Fauci emails Farrar; Andersen emails Fauci
Fauci to Farrar: “I just got off the phone with Kristian Andersen and he related to me his concern about the Furine site mutation in the spike protein currently circulating 2019-nCoV. I told him that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA that would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5. It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern by experts in the field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology. In the meantime, I will alert my U.S. Government official colleagues of my conversations with you and Kristian and determine what further investigation they recommend.”
Andersen to Fauci: “The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Andersen says that he, Holmes, and Garry “find the genome inconsistent with evolutionary theory.”
February 1-2, 2020: Fauci and Collins hold a conference call with other scientists at 2pm. The meeting is called “Coronavirus sequence comparison.” The virologists were comparing SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13. Emails follow.
Redfield is not on the call.
Before the call, Fauci emails Hugh Auchincloss: “It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on… You will have tasks today that must be done.”
Later, Auchincloss informs Fauci that the coronavirus research at Wuhan had not undergone the NIH’s P3 framework.
Fauci and Collins hold a conference call Andersen, Holmes, Garry, Patrick Vallance (UK government scientific advisor), Andrew Rambaut, Ron Fouchier (who has experimented with the H5N1 influenza virus), and others.
Andersen, Holmes, and Garry, go on to be co-authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper.
After the call Farrar tells Fauci and Collins that he suspects a lab origin: “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release - I am honestly at 50!”
Michael Farzan: “A likely explanation could be something as passaging SARS-like CoVs in tissue culture on human cell lines (under BSL-2) for an extended period of time, accidentally creating a virus that would be primed for rapid transmission between humans vi gain of furin site (from tissue culture) and adaptation to human ACE2 receptor via repeated passage.
Farzan: “I think it becomes a question of…whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature—accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”
Bob Garry: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.”
Andrew Rambaut: “From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site.”
Ron Fouchier emails: “It is good that this possibility was discussed in detail with a team of experts. However, further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.”
February 4, 2020: Fauci has a conference call with four of the “Proximal Origin” authors
Authors send a draft to Fauci and Collins.
Prior to final publication Fauci receives the final draft for edits and approval.
In emails that day, Farrar, Fauci, and Collins consider whether the virus could have emerged by serial passage through genetically modified/humanized mice.
Farrar: “Being very careful in the morning wording. ‘Engineered’ probably not. Remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans.”
Collins: “Yes, I’d be interested in the proposal of accidental lab passage in animals (which ones?)”
Fauci: “?? Serial passage in ACE2-transgenic mice”
Farrar: “Exactly!”
Collins: “Surely that wouldn’t be done in a BSL-2 lab?”
Farrar: “Wild West…”
Holmes tells Collins and Fauci that he is still “60-40 lab.”
February 8, 2020: Fouchier, Garry, Fauci, and others exchange more emails about how the virus may have evolved in a lab through serial passaging.
February 8, 2020: Dr. Kristian Andersen’s email about “Proximal Origin”
Christian Drosten (whose team later develops the PCR test for SARS-CoV-2: “Can someone help me with one question: didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it?...Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”
Andersen: “Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.”
February 10, 2020: Lipkin and Holmes, authors on “Proximal Origin,” exchange emails about the paper draft and are skeptical of natural origin.
Lipkin: “It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess.”
Holmes: “Seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go. “
February 12, 2020: Andersen writes to Nature to request publication of “Proximal Origin,” says Fauci “prompted” the paper.
“Prompted by Jeremy Farrah [sic], Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, Ian Lipkin, and myself have been working through much of the (primarily) genetic data to provide agnostic and scientifically informed hypothesis around the origins of the virus.
February 13, 2020: Fauci and Collins call four authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper.
March 6, 2020: Andersen writes to Farrar, Fauci, Collins, and others that the paper has been accepted in Nature.
Fauci: “Thanks for your note. Nice job on the paper.”
March 13, 2020: Stay-home orders begin before “Proximal Origin” paper is published.
The PanCAP Adapted Government COVID-19 Response Plan issued on March 13 indicates that the National Security Council is directing policy.
March 17, 2020: “Proximal Origin” paper is published, establishing zoonotic origin.
Submitted on February 12, 2020.
When submitted, Lipkin credits Farrar with leading the paper in an email to Farrar: “Thanks for shepherding this paper. Rumors of bioweaponeering are now circulating in China.”
Farrar responds: “Yes I know and inUS - why so keen to get out ASAP. I will push nature.”
Farrar makes an edit to the draft changing the word “unlikely” in “It is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus,” to “improbable.” This edit is not credited.
Paper does not distinguish between the theory that the virus was engineered as part of a bioweapons/vaccine program and the theory that the virus was natural but escaped from the lab.
April 17, 2020: Fauci denies virus came from lab at White House press conference, citing “Proximal Origin” paper without explaining his involvement in the paper.
Unknown date: Farzan and Garry receive $9 million in NIH grants.
Lancet Letter
February 6, 2020: Peter Daszak tells Ralph Baric not to sign the letter.
In an email to Baric, Daszak wrote, “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
Baric responded, “I also think this is a good decision. Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
Daszak ends up signing the letter but Baric does not.
March 7, 2020: Lancet publishes letter from scientists condemning lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.”
Undisclosed: 26 out of 27 of the scientists had links to Wuhan researchers.
Signatories included:
Dr. Peter Daszak, who organized the letter. Daszak is the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Jeremy Farrar, Wellcome director and a member of the UK’s SAGE. He previously published work with the head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (George Gao).
April 28, 2020: Dazsak writes in an email to his team that their viral sequences should be removed from the NIH’s database.
“It’s extremely important that we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to Genbank at this point. As you may have heard, these were part of a grant just terminated by NIH. … Having them as part of PREDICT will being [sic] very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”
May 2020: George Gao says the Wuhan wet market is not the origin.
Investigations
February 3, 2020: National Academies of Science, Medicine, and Engineering hosts a call that includes Fauci, Andersen, Baric, and personnel from the FBI and Office of the Director of National Security.
March 23-25, 2020: Ralph Baric receives emails inviting him to participate in an “analytic exchange” for the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
March 26, 2020: The State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research convenes an “analytic exchange” phone call to brief the “Proximal Origin” paper to an interagency group of officials.
April 30, 2020: Office of the Director of National Intelligence puts out a statement, contradicted by President Donald Trump.
The intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
Statement went on to say that the intelligence office will continue to assess the zoonotic or lab-origin question.
A few hours later, Trump says he has seen a classified document confirming origin from WIV.
When asked what evidence he saw, Trump says, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
May 2020: Daszak explains what they “could have” done to anticipate the outbreak.
Daszak: “We found the closest relative to the current SARS-CoV-2 in a bat in China in 2013. We sequenced a bit of the genome, and then it went in the freezer; because it didn’t look like SARS, we thought it was at a lower risk of emerging. With the Global Virome Project, we could have sequenced the whole genome, discovered that it binds to human cells and upgraded the risk. And maybe then when we were designing vaccines for SARS, those could have targeted this one too, and we would have had something in the freezer ready to go if it emerged.”
May 2020: A classified study from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outlines a case for lab origin.
Summer 2020: State department officials conducting an origin investigation find the Lawrence Livermore lab study buried in the classified collections system in the summer of 2020.
Lawrence Livermore tries to prevent them from accessing the report.
Vanity Fair: “Now the officials were beginning to suspect that someone was actually hiding materials supportive of a lab-leak explanation. “Why did my contractor have to pore through documents?” DiNanno wondered. Their suspicion intensified when Department of Energy officials overseeing the Lawrence Livermore lab unsuccessfully tried to block the State Department investigators from talking to the report’s authors.”
Fall 2020: The State Department discovers that researchers at WIV got sick in late 2019 after they learn that this information is in the IC’s own classified files.
Vanity Fair: “That fall, the State Department team got a tip from a foreign source: Key information was likely sitting in the U.S. intelligence community’s own files, unanalyzed.”
December 2020: State Department employees meet to discuss WHO fact-finding mission.
Officials discuss classified documents about WIV researchers who were sick in late 2019.
Christopher Park discourages employees from pointing to the US’s role in research at WIV.
Vanity Fair: “The conversation then turned to the more sensitive question: What should the U.S. government say publicly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology? A small group within the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau had been studying the Institute for months. The group had recently acquired classified intelligence suggesting that three WIV researchers conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronavirus samples had fallen ill in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak was known to have started. As officials at the meeting discussed what they could share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research, according to documentation of the meeting obtained by Vanity Fair.”
December 2020 - January 2021: Thomas DiNanno and Chris Ford at the State Department clash over the origin investigation.
2021 - 2023
Virology researchers preparing to capture bats in a cave in southern China.
January 15, 2021: State Department releases a fact sheet of declassified intelligence.
This fact sheet includes information about WIV researchers becoming ill in autumn 2019, and about researchers’ obfuscation of their RaTG13 research. The fact sheet states that Chinese military scientists have been working with the WIV since at least 2017.
“Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
February 9, 2021: WHO investigation concludes that lab origin is “highly unlikely.”
Daszak is on the WHO team.
Chinese scientists refuse to give WHO investigation important data, such as blood samples.
April 11, 2021: Daszak writes to Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for extramural research
“I have made extensive efforts to satisfy NIH’s broad concerns. This includes serving as an expert on the WHO-China joint Mission on the Animal Origins of COVID-19, which involved 1 month on the ground in China (including 2 weeks locked in quarantine), at great personal burden and risk to me, to our organization, and to my family.”
May 11, 2021: Fauci says the Wuhan research was not gain-of-function at a Senate hearing.
Senator Rand Paul: “You don’t think concerning a bat virus spike protein that he got from the Wuhan Institute into the SARS virus is gain of function?”
Fauci: “That is not-”
Paul: “You would be in the minority because at least 200 scientists have signed a statement from the Cambridge Working Group saying that it is gain of function.”
Fauci: “Well, it is not. If you look at the grant and you look at the progress reports, it is not gain of function, despite the fact that people tweet that, they write about it-”
Fauci: “I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from. But again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen.”
June 4, 2021: Fauci says China should release the medical records of the Wuhan researchers who fell ill in autumn 2019 and the medical records of the Mjiang miners who got sick in 2013.
June 18, 2021: Evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom sends an unpublished paper to Fauci.
Bloom finds that the NIH had deleted viral sequences from its archive at the request of WIV researchers.
Bloom retrieved sequences from Google Cloud and analyzed them.
June 20, 2021: Collins arranges a Zoom meeting for himself, Fauci, Bloom, Andersen, and Garry. Bloom invites Pond and Nielsen.
Andersen said it is unethical for Bloom to analyze deleted WIV sequences.
Andersen says the preprint paper will fuel conspiracies. He suggests that he could delete it from the server or edit it. Fauci distances himself from this suggestion.
June 30, 2021: Chinese researchers re-upload deleted viral sequences.
July 20, 2021: At a Senate Hearing, Fauci says increasing transmissibility of viruses among animals is not gain-of-function research.
Senator Rand Paul: “It says that scientific research that increases the transmissibility among animals is gain of function. They took animal viruses that only occur in animals, and they increased their transmissibility to humans. How you can say that is not gain a function –”
Fauci: “It is not.”
Fauci: “This has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain of function definition. I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied, certainly not before Congress. Case closed.”
August 25, 2021: Biden receives an “inconclusive” intelligence report about COVID origins.
November 23, 2022: Fauci says he “does not recall” meeting Ralph Baric in a deposition. (They met on February 11, 2020.)
February 26, 2023: Energy Department concludes that lab origin is most likely in a “low confidence” report.
February 28, 2023: FBI director Chris Wray says covid origin is “most likely” Wuhan lab.
April 18, 2023: Former Director of National Intelligence John L. Ratcliffe testifies before the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic
“From a view inside the IC, if our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring “spillover” theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the “spillover” side would be nearly empty.”
“As a career, non-political official tasked with refereeing internal disputes over intelligence assessments, the ombudsman found that “analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the [Trump] administration’s policies, saying in effect, ‘I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.’"
“The challenges that I and other senior Trump Administration officials encountered while in office include legitimate concerns about the closely-held sources of our intelligence and the sensitive methods used to obtain it, as well as illegitimate roadblocks related to professional conflicts of interest and partisan politics.”
May 9, 2023: NIH renews $2.3 million EcoHealth Alliance grant to study bat coronaviruses.
Daszak says the grant will only be used to analyze virus samples sequences that they already have collected at the WIV and other institutes.