Columbia University Epidemiology professor W. Ian Lipkin has been accused of misleading the public on the origins of Covid in order to please U.S. intelligence agencies and others.
Lipkin, 70, is a Chicago native and alum of the University of Chicago Laboratory School. He is one of the authors behind the now discredited “research” paper defining the origins of Covid. Along with four other academics, Lipkin published a March 2020 paper– "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine, in which the group concluded Covid had originated from a wet market in Wuhan. That scenario has turned out to not only be untrue but, according to Slack chats released by the group of scientists, was at least in part contrived in order to please government officials, including U.S. intelligence agencies. Lipkin went on to push for lockdowns as well.
“[If] there’s a bump when people go back to work at the beginning of this week, then we’ll know we’re in trouble and then we have to back off again,” Lipkin, said at a 2020 press conference,” according to The Guardian.
Racket News and Public detailed the scheme undertaken by Lipkin and his co-authors. The newly released emails and messages reveal that top scientists misled Congress about the origins of COVID-19. Despite claiming publicly that a lab leak was not possible, one top advisor to Anthony Fauci still considered it a possibility in April 2020, and communications show they were influenced by "higher-ups" to dismiss the lab leak theory as implausible. The communications show how health officials and scientists constructed a significant media deception, with House investigators uncovering a wealth of material that challenges years of news stories on the topic. The scientists met with representatives from the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence prior to changing their analysis of Covid as well as NIH Director Francis Collins.
According to Public, the released emails and Slack messages reveal a conspiracy to discredit the lab leak hypothesis and spread disinformation, with evidence of coordination with "higher-ups" in the US and UK governments to deceive journalists and manipulate coverage of Covid-19 origins. However, one of the scientists, Dr. Kristian Andersen, denounces reporting on his messages as a "conspiracy theory," claiming it was merely private conversations between scientists.
The group initially noted the furin cleavage site – the genetically modified part of Covid that makes it contractable in humans – is abnormal and no other coronavirus in the wild has been noted to have the mutation. The furin cleavage site, a string of 12 units of RNA that makes up the virus' genetic material, was exactly the right length, according to Robert F. Garry of Tulane University. This level of precision is not seen in nature.
“I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature … it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted,” Garry said in an email, according to New York Post. Garry, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Michael Farzan at Scripps Research all agreed at the time COVID-19 had been manipulated in a lab to make it viral to humans. Garry, Lipkin, and the other authors of the Proximal Origins paper reversed their opinions on the furin cleavage site after meeting with intelligence officers and government officials.
It was not until early 2023, after the Twitter Files exposed secret machinations in the U.S. government to censor individuals surrounding Covid narratives, that the Department of Energy and the FBI noted their analysis that the virus was likely man-made, CNN Reported.
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