Emails obtained through an open records request show that several top scientists declined in an early statement about the origins of SARS-Cov-2 to acknowledge the possibility that the virus had escaped from a lab, a scenario that many disease experts still consider highly plausible.

In February of 2020, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy directed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to “rapidly examine the information and data needed to help determine the origins of the novel coronavirus that is causing a global outbreak of respiratory illness.”

At the time, the full extent of the COVID-19 pandemic was unknown, though it had spread to most major countries and had resulted in hundreds of deaths worldwide. Scientists were scrambling to determine the virus’s geographical and biological origins in an effort to get ahead of its rapid spread. 

In their response, the leaders of the several national academies told the OSTP that investigations into the virus’s origin were already underway, and that “additional genomic sequence data from geographically- and temporally-diverse viral samples are needed to determine the origin and evolution of the virus.”

Yet, in an earlier draft, attached to an email sent by National Academies Board on Health Sciences Policy Director Andrew Pope, the response letter offered a more speculative interpretation, advancing a natural-origin theory of the disease while expressly leaving open the possibility that it escaped from a lab in some form. 

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