On January 31, 2020, Danish-born and British-educated scientist Kristian Andersen emailed Dr. Tony Fauci, saying the virus looked lab-made.
According to the email (emphasis added):
“[O]ne has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered . . . . Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Ferguson] and myself all find the genome inconsistent with evolutionary theory.”
Then on February 4, 2020, after a call with Dr. Tony Fauci, British scientist Kristian Anderson wrote that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory.
Kristian Anderson, “The main crackpot theories going around at the moment related to this virus being somehow engineered… and that is demonstrably false.”
So what happened between January 31, 2020 and February 4, 2020?
Dr. Tony Fauci called Dr. Kristian Anderson and ordered him to publicly say the COVID-19 virus was NOT lab-made. And, Tony Fauci offered Andersen a sweet deal if he did so. A huge grant from the NIH!
The New York Times reported on Anderson’s early email to Dr. Fauci in an article published in June 2021.
Over the past year, Dr. 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 Dr. Fauci in January 2020, Dr. Andersen hadn’t yet come to that conclusion. He told Dr. 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. Dr. 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 Dr. Fauci was released, the media storm around Dr. 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.
As The Gateway Pundit reported in March 2023, Dr. Anderson switched his story four days after his call with Tony Fauci.
But, The New York Times conveniently omitted in their reporting that after his call with Dr. Fauci on February 1, 2020, Dr. Anderson was given a $1.88 million grant and $16.5 million in funding from NIAID, Dr. Fauci’s personal piggy bank.
Hellbound and Down 