COVID-19 origins: the FOIA record

On January 31, 2020, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease expert at the Scripps Research Institute and one of the world's leading authorities on coronavirus genomics, sent an email to Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The email stated that Andersen and several colleagues had been examining the genetic characteristics of the emerging SARS-CoV-2 virus. He wrote that some of the features of the virus potentially look engineered. He noted that the unusual features made up a very small part of the genome so one had to look very closely to see them, and that he and several other evolutionary virologists and infectious disease experts had a hard time explaining these features through natural evolution processes.

The following day, February 1, 2020, Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins convened a conference call with at least eleven other virologists, including Andersen and other leading researchers. The agenda and participants list for this call were among the most heavily redacted portions of the FOIA email release. What congressional investigators later established through unredacted versions of related documents was that the call was convened specifically to discuss the possibility that the virus had originated from a laboratory.

On February 4, 2020, three days after the call, Andersen emailed Fauci draft language for what would become the Proximal Origin paper. By March 17, 2020, the paper was published in Nature Medicine. It concluded that based on available genomic evidence the virus was not a purposefully manipulated virus and that a laboratory origin of the virus was not plausible. Andersen, who three days before the February 1 call had privately told Fauci the virus potentially looked engineered, was a co-author of the paper stating a lab origin was not scientifically plausible.

In June 2021, BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post published approximately 3,200 pages of Fauci's emails, obtained via FOIA request. The January 31 Andersen email was among the released documents, though heavily redacted in the initial release. In January 2022, the House Oversight Committee released notes on the unredacted versions, establishing the fuller content of the February 1 call and the subsequent drafting process.

In March 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit led by British zoologist Peter Daszak, submitted a $14 million grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The proposal, titled Project DEFUSE, sought funding for a collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and several American research institutions including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The proposal described a program to collect hundreds of bat coronaviruses from high-risk cave sites in Southeast Asia, characterize their potential for infecting human cells, and conduct experiments to reduce their pandemic risk. Among the proposed experiments was the insertion of proteolytic cleavage sites, specifically furin cleavage sites, into bat SARS-related coronaviruses. The proposal also described the creation of full-length infectious clones of bat SARS-related coronaviruses and the production of chimeric viruses in humanized and, in the proposal's own terminology, batified mice.

DARPA rejected the proposal. The agency's review, documented in a grant rejection memo obtained alongside the proposal, cited gain-of-function concerns as part of its reasoning for declining to fund the work. DARPA noted that certain proposed research might not meet the definition of safe research under existing federal guidelines.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has a furin cleavage site in its spike protein. This feature had never been observed in any natural SARS-related betacoronavirus. The DARPA DEFUSE proposal, submitted in 2018, described plans to insert exactly this type of feature into bat SARS-related coronaviruses. EcoHealth Alliance's president did not dispute the proposal's authenticity when it was published. The documents were made public in September 2021 following disclosure by an anonymous whistleblower. A subsequent FOIA release by U.S. Right to Know produced 1,417 pages of early DEFUSE drafts and internal emails from U.S. Geological Survey records, confirming additional details of the planned research.

Congressional investigations have documented through released records that decisions were made during the early pandemic period about how to characterize the question of COVID-19's origins in public communications. The Fauci emails show that scientists who privately expressed concern about possible laboratory origin in early February 2020 were co-authoring papers dismissing that possibility within days of those private communications. The emails also show coordination between the paper's drafting and Fauci's office.

Separately documented through congressional investigations and reporting based on internal communications: social media platforms including Facebook suppressed discussion of the lab leak hypothesis during 2020 and 2021, characterizing it as misinformation. Facebook reversed this policy in May 2021, restoring posts that had been removed. The CDC and other government health agencies communicated publicly that the lab leak hypothesis was a fringe theory during the same period that internal government assessments were being updated to include lab leak as a possibility worth serious investigation.

What the documents establish: there was a documented divergence between private scientific and government assessments of COVID-19's possible origins and the public characterization of those questions during the period immediately following the outbreak. The extent to which this constituted coordinated messaging strategy, scientific disagreement, or institutional caution under uncertainty remains disputed and is not resolved by the released documents alone.

In March 2023, Congress passed the COVID-19 Origin Act, requiring the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information on COVID-19's origins. President Biden signed the bill on March 20. The ODNI released a declassified summary report in June 2023.

The assessment reflected the positions of eight U.S. intelligence agencies. The FBI assessed that a lab incident was the most likely origin of the pandemic, with moderate confidence. The Department of Energy, which had previously been undecided, updated its assessment to conclude a lab incident was most likely, with low confidence. Four other agencies assessed that natural origin was most likely, with low confidence. The CIA had not reached a conclusion. One additional agency also remained undecided.

The ODNI report noted that no agency had found evidence the virus was genetically engineered as a weapon. The distinction is significant: the assessments address how the virus entered the human population, not whether it was deliberately designed. A lab incident could refer to an accidental release from research that was not weapons-focused. The intelligence community has not reached consensus on origin, and the underlying intelligence assessments, technical annexes, and raw intelligence that informed the agency conclusions were not included in the declassified summary.

The documents on this page establish: scientists who privately expressed concern about COVID-19's potential lab origin publicly dismissed that possibility within days; the paper that became the foundational public document arguing against lab origin was drafted in coordination with the office that had just received the private engineering concern; a 2018 U.S. government grant proposal described inserting the exact genomic feature that makes COVID-19 unusual into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was rejected on gain-of-function grounds; the FBI assessed lab origin as most likely with moderate confidence; and the full intelligence basis for these assessments has not been publicly released.

What the documents do not establish: definitive proof of COVID-19's origin; evidence that any agency has concluded the virus was an intentional biological weapon; the specific research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019; whether EcoHealth Alliance conducted any portion of the DEFUSE proposal's planned experiments after DARPA's rejection. The origin of COVID-19 remains officially unresolved. The documents that would resolve it have not been released.