Scientist Opens Up About His Early Email to Fauci on Virus Origins
Among the thousands of pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails released recently by BuzzFeed News, a short note from Kristian Andersen, a virus expert at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, has garnered a lot of attention.
Posted — UpdatedAmong the thousands of pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails released recently by BuzzFeed News, a short note from Kristian Andersen, a virus expert at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, has garnered a lot of attention.
Over the past year, Andersen has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the theory that the coronavirus originated from a natural spillover from an animal to humans outside of a lab. But in the email to Fauci in January 2020, Andersen hadn’t yet come to that conclusion. He told Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.
The researchers published those results in a paper in the scientific journal Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, concluding that a laboratory origin was very unlikely. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab.
When his early email to Fauci was released, the media storm around Andersen intensified, and he deactivated his Twitter account. He answered written questions from The New York Times about the email and the fracas. The exchange has been lightly edited for length.
Those features included a structure known as the furin cleavage site that allows the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to be cleaved by furin, an enzyme found in human cells, and another structure, known as the receptor binding domain, that allowed the virus to anchor to the outside of human cells via a cell-surface protein known as ACE2.
I cautioned in that same email that we would need to look at the question much more closely and that our opinions could change within a few days based on new data and analyses — which they did.
Many of these analyses were completed in a matter of days, while we worked around the clock, which allowed us to reject our preliminary hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered, while other “lab”-based scenarios were still on the table.
Yet more extensive analyses, significant additional data and thorough investigations to compare genomic diversity more broadly across coronaviruses led to the peer-reviewed study published in Nature Medicine. For example, we looked at data from coronaviruses found in other species, such as bats and pangolins, which demonstrated that the features that first appeared unique to SARS-CoV-2 were in fact found in other, related viruses.
Overall, this is a textbook example of the scientific method where a preliminary hypothesis is rejected in favor of a competing hypothesis after more data become available and analyses are completed.
While it’s true that CGG is less common than other patterns that code for arginine, the CGG codon is found elsewhere in the SARS-CoV-2 genome and the genetic sequence[s] that include the CGG codon found in SARS-CoV-2 are also found in other coronaviruses. These findings, together with many other technical features of the site, strongly suggest that it evolved naturally and there is very little chance somebody engineered it.
Based on detailed analyses of the virus conducted to date by researchers around the world, it is extremely unlikely that the virus was engineered. The scenario in which the virus was found in nature, brought to the lab and then accidentally release[d] is similarly unlikely, based on current evidence.
I won’t speak to what government officials and other scientists did or didn’t say or think. My comments and conclusions are strictly driven by scientific inquiry, and I strongly believe that careful, well-supported public messaging around complex topics is paramount.
It can be difficult at times for the public, I think, to observe the debate and discern the likelihood of the various hypotheses. That is particularly true where science becomes politicized, and the current vilification of scientists and subject matter experts sets a dangerous precedent. We saw that with the climate change debate and now we’re seeing it with the debate around various facets of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Throughout this pandemic, I have made my best efforts to help explain what the scientific evidence is and suggests, and I have no regrets about that.
As is true for any scientific process, there are several things that would lend credence to the lab-leak hypothesis that would make me change my mind. For example, any credible evidence of SARS-CoV-2 having been at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the pandemic — whether in a freezer, in tissue culture or in animals, or epidemiological evidence of very early confirmed COVID-19 cases associated with the institute.
Other evidence, were it to emerge, could lend further weight to the natural origin hypothesis. That includes the identification of an intermediate [animal] host (if one exists). Also, now that we know that live animals were sold at markets across Wuhan, further understanding of the flow of animals and connected supply lines could lend additional credence to natural emergence.
Increasingly, however, I found that information and comments I posted were being taken out of context or misrepresented to push false narratives, in particular about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Daily attacks against scientists and the scientific method have also become common, and much of the conversation has steered far away from the science.
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