On February 1st, 2020, Anthony Fauci, head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), secretly convened a group of select international virologists. Their task was to decide whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus newly emerged from Wuhan, was engineered.

Some key emails from their resulting discussions have only recently become available. In one, Robert Garry, a virologist from Tulane University, wrote to his associates: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning.” Other emails show that many in the group agreed that the virus likely did not emerge naturally and most probably was altered in a lab.

Many months later, in August of 2020, Francis Collins, head of the US National Institutes of Health, emailed his predecessor, Nobel virologist Howard Varmus. Copying in Anthony Fauci, Collins wanted their opinions on a specific lab escape hypothesis, our Mojiang Miner Passage theory of the origin of the virus.