Dr. Kristian Andersen, the virologist who initially told Anthony Fauci that Covid-19 appeared to have been 'engineered,' only to flip-flop 72-hours later after Fauci 'prompted' Andersen and other scientists to create a paper arguing against the lab-leak theory, told colleagues that a lab leak was 'highly likely' and 'not some fringe theory.'
Andersen notably appeared before Congress on Tuesday, where he carefully bullshitted his way through a minefield of questions from Republican lawmakers, while Democrats - apparently uninterested in anything except tribal narratives, provided cover.
In advance of Anderson's testimony, House Republicans published a cache of messages as part of a government report, however the Daily Mail has received several damning Slack messages from February 2, 2020 - the day Twitter banned Zero Hedge for suggesting a lab leak - that weren't part of that release, in which Andersen told colleagues "The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely - it's not some fringe theory."
He also admitted that he found it "strange" that Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China - located hundreds of miles from a cave where the closest strain to COVID-19 was found.
During testimony, Andersen said that 'facts' changed his opinion on the lab leak - though he couldn't point to anything specific.
The question of whether the global outbreak began with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market or leaked out of the Wuhan lab just eight miles across the Yangtze River has given rise to fierce debate. Some studies point to a natural spillover at the Huanan wildlife market. Positive swab samples of floors, cages and counters also track the virus back to stalls in the southwestern corner of the market (bottom left), where animals with the potential to harbour Covid were sold for meat or fur at the time. -Daily Mail
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is notably a 40-minute drive from the Hunan wet market in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged. The city itself is more than 800 miles from the Yunnan cave where Covid-19's closest relative was found, making natural transmission less likely.
Andersen was a co-author of the Proximal Origin report, which was published days after a conferenced call with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and others - who had been funding research to manipulate bat Covid to make it more transmissible to humans.
Fauci notably offshored banned gain-of-function research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans.
