High-profile scientists caught up in the controversy over Covid’s origins have admitted the decision to play down the lab leak theory was political.
Internal Slack communications obtained by a House subcommittee investigating the early days of the pandemic showed how scientists who wrote a paper dismissing the idea of a lab accident feared retribution from the Chinese government.
Dr Andrew Rambaut, a biologist at the University of Edinburgh, was a co-author of the March 2020 Nature Medicine research article titled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’ which degenerated believers of the lab leak theory as conspiracy theorists and racists.
