On Feb. 19, 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a statement from a group of highly influential scientists was published in The Lancet, claiming that they stand “together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The statement was authored by Charles Calisher, along with other well-known co-authors like Peter Daszak, Jeremy Farrar, and Christian Drosten.
The Lancet Letter immediately became the media’s main reference point for pushing a natural origin narrative.
The problem is, like so much of what has surrounded the natural origin narrative, what was being said publicly by the Lancet Letter authors differed materially from what they were saying privately.
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