Overview
- Sen. Rand Paul released internal Slack messages from co‑authors of the 2020 Proximal Origin paper that show the authors privately assigned nonzero probabilities to a laboratory origin for SARS‑CoV‑2.
- Kristian Andersen and others wrote that they could not fully rule out engineering, that new leads were 'striking' or 'peculiar,' and that the published paper contained factual errors about where bat‑coronavirus work was done.
- Individual authors gave informal odds for a lab leak in private messages, with Andersen reporting a roughly 30% estimate and Eddie Holmes reporting estimates that moved from 20% down to 10%.
- A separate 2021 EcoHealth Alliance grant proposal described plans to insert a furin cleavage site into coronavirus clones and was declined by DARPA; authors said the proposal made the coincidence of the site in SARS‑CoV‑2 'very striking.'
- Nature Medicine has declined to retract or amend the Proximal Origin paper, leaving questions about journal oversight, funding transparency, and possible further congressional or institutional review.