‘Are You Both Conspiracy Theorists?’: Nicole Malliotakis Grills Scientists On Why They Did ‘180’ On Lab Leak Theory

‘Are You Both Conspiracy Theorists?’: Nicole Malliotakis Grills Scientists On Why They Did ‘180’ On Lab Leak Theory

Arjun Singh on July 11, 2023

Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of New York questioned why the authors of a controversial paper abandoned their initial belief that the virus was produced in a Chinese laboratory during a hearing on Tuesday.

In March 2020, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, two physicians, published a paper regarding the “proximal origins” of COVID-19 that concluded the virus was produced by animals’ contact with humans and not in a laboratory. However, both Andersen and Garry had earlier expressed concerns that the virus had unnatural origins, which Malliotakis highlighted during a hearing by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus regarding the paper.

“You and Garry expressed concerns about the genetic makeup of the virus just days before the initial draft of this paper came out,” Malliotakis told Andersen during the hearing, referring to email transcripts between Anderson, Garry and the paper’s other authors. “Dr. Fauci emailed you after you’d expressed concerns to him on a phone call that COVID would have been engineered,” she told Andersen.

.@RepMalliotakis questions why the “Proximal Origin” co-authors suspiciously abandoned their initial belief that COVID originated in a Chinese lab.

Within 3 days of speaking to Dr. Fauci, @K_G_Andersen shifted his support to a zoonotic origin.

Americans deserve to know why👇 pic.twitter.com/QAZwylO4f9

— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (@COVIDSelect) July 11, 2023

“Are you both conspiracy theorists?” Malliotakis asked Andersen regarding their earlier belief that the virus was unnatural, “[because] you just accused everyone who believed there was a lab leak of being a conspiracy theorist,” she added.

Andersen had identified “properties that [COVID-19] may have been genetically modified or engineered,” per the report released by the committee’s majority staff. He had also discovered a paper that was described as a “how-to-manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory,” per the report.

On Feb 1, 2020, Andersen and Garry joined Fauci and others on a conference call, following which both affixed their names to the proximal origins paper, with Andersen writing that “[o]ur main work … has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory,” in an email to a colleague, per the report.

“Within a matter of days, something changed … What happened within that three-day period between the conference call and the paper that suddenly you did a 180,” Malliotakis asked them rhetorically during the hearing. To this, Garry responded, “there was some new data that came.”

Malliotakis also recounted the testimony of Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Center for Disease Control in the Trump Administration, who told the committee in March that “it was not scientifically plausible that the virus went from a bat to humans and subsequently became one of the most infectious viruses in history.”