“None of this is surprising — the surprising part is that ‘journalists’ and others keep falling for the same bullshit,” wrote Andersen.

But his emails and Slack messages show that there was nothing theoretical about his conspiracy to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. Andersen makes clear in his messages that the purpose of the “Proximal Origin” paper was to “disprove,” in his words, the lab leak hypothesis. It was a propaganda exercise, not a scientific one. …

The scientists were far more suspicious of a lab origin than was previously known. The clearest example of this was when Andersen said on February 1, 2020, “I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” In fact, the original name of the channel was “project-wuhan_engineering” until February 6, when Andersen changed it to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”

[Read it all. One remarkable aspect of these messages is the hints that “higher ups” were directing the messaging policy of supposedly independent scientists. The Public team also wonder when major media outlets will start taking an interest in these sequences. My guess: sometime around the twelfth of never, all due apologies to Johnny Mathis. — Ed]