Leaked Pentagon Paper Shows Department of Defense Researchers Believed COVID-19 Virus was Engineered

An internal Pentagon paper leaked on Monday shows researchers at the Department of Defense did not support Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Proximal Origin study—used by Fauci and former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, as “proof” the SARS-CoV-2 virus did not come from a lab.

The May 26, 2020 paper called “Critical analysis of Andersen et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” dismantles the natural origin theory made in Proximal Origin and found, “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin scenario for SARS-CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”

The leaked working paper proves government officials knew there was no evidence to support the natural origin theory at the beginning of the pandemic, yet continued to perpetuate the myth that the COVID-19 virus came from nature. In addition, Pentagon officials knew of Fauci’s efforts to manipulate Americans about the origins of a virus responsible for killing millions of people.

The analysis was authored by Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy physician with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Cutlip, a research scientist with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team investigating COVID-19 ultimately leaked the paper to the public.

The authors concluded that COVID-19’s features were “consistent with another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory, by methods that leading coronavirus researchers commonly use to investigate how the viruses infect cells and cause disease, assess the potential for animal coronaviruses to jump to humans, and develop drugs and vaccines.”

One feature noted was the COVID-19 virus’s furin cleavage site—never observed in any naturally occurring betacoronaviruses—which made the virus specifically infectious to humans.

Proximal Origin claimed that since this feature had never been observed, it had to have been generated through a “natural evolutionary process.”

According to the authors, this argument was “not based on scientific analysis but on the assumption that the prior work would have been published if it had been done.” 

Fauci and others covered up the origins of COVID-19

Shortly after the pandemic began, Fauci, Collins, and at least eleven other scientists held a call to discuss COVID-19 where Drs. Fauci and Collins were warned COVID-19 “may have leaked from the WIV and may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.”

After the call, Fauci, Collins, and four participants abandoned their belief the virus originated from a Wuhan lab and authored “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2″ to deflect attention from the lab origin of COVID-19 and to shift the focus to a natural origin theory.

Before publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to and edited by Fauci, but Fauci’s role was concealed from the public. However, the discrepancies in the Proximal Origin paper were immediately apparent to reviewers at Nature, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by journalist Jimmy Tobias.

However, Jeremy Farrar, formerly with Wellcome Trust and now chief scientist of the World Health Organization, helped Fauci perpetuate the natural origin narrative. Proximal Origin was accepted for publication on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, concluding that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

More than two months after the initial conference call on April 16, 2020, Collins emailed Fauci expressing dismay that the paper did not kill the lab leak theory and asked if the NIH could do more to “put down” the lab leak hypothesis. The next day, Fauci cited the Proximal Origin paper during a White House press conference to further suppress the suspicion COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab.

Proximal Origin quickly became the media’s authority on natural origin, parroting Fauci’s claim that the paper “provided dispositive proof” that COVID-19 came from nature. It also became the most-read article on COVID-19 and one of the most-cited academic papers. Nevertheless, the Pentagon researchers clearly came to a different conclusion — a conclusion many censored scientists and physicians shared.