Newly released Slack messages show an author assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin of the disease.
By Catholics for Catholics
As it turns out, the main authors of a paper that explained the origin of COVID-19 during the initial days of the pandemic, held private doubts about the sources of the virus being from bats, according to Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky).
On Tuesday, Paul released internal Slack messages that were exchanged among the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes and Andrew Rambaut.
“The idea that it came from a lab is implausible, and, yet, privately they’re saying the opposite. … This level of dishonesty, I think, needs to be exposed,” Paul told Fox News. “These are people who get large, multimillion-dollar grants from our country, and we shouldn’t be giving money to people who lied to us.”
The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 was published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 and was widely quoted by public health officials and the media as the scientific authority for ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2, according to a story by Fox News. Still, the released messages appear to show that its authors were less certain than their public conclusions implied.
Some raised concerns that the virus originated in a lab.
COVID cronies and the Intel Community were more concerned about protecting the CCP than being honest with the American people.
— Senator Rand Paul (@SenRandPaul) July 22, 2026
They even talked about it amongst themselves on Slack. pic.twitter.com/oK0s3mwYCj
Andersen, the evolutionary biologist, assigned a 30% probability to a lab origin, while Holmes calculated it at 20%, though he later revised that to 10%. Nevertheless, both scientists contrast with the paper’s public assertion that the virus had not been manipulated.
“The part I’m really struggling with is that, 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,” Andersen wrote on June 11, 2020, according to the documents.
“That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.”
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