Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to commission a paper set out to disprove the laboratory leak theory, according to a release by Republicans on the House select subcommittee investigating COVID-19 origins.
FBI Director Christopher Wray last week said that the COVID pandemic probably was the result of a laboratory leak in China.
Communications released Sunday showed Fauci, then a member of former President Donald Trump's White House Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Francis Collins, and at least 11 other scientists were informed during a Feb. 1, 2020 conference call that the COVID-19 virus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
The House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic's majority staff's release also said the group was informed the virus may have been "intentionally" manipulated.
Four of the scientists on that conference call then wrote a Feb. 4, 2020 paper titled, "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2."
The select committee's GOP members say that "the evidence available" suggests Fauci "'prompted' Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research, to write Proximal Origin and that the goal was to 'disprove' any lab leak theory."
"It remains unclear what science changed, or new evidence was discovered to change the minds of the authors of Proximal Origin between the February 1 conference call and the February 4 draft," according to the Republicans' release.
The paper's final draft was sent to Fauci and Collins for approval before final publication in the journal Nature Medicine, the House panel's release stated.
"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the scientists wrote, according to the House panel's release.
More than two months later, Collins reportedly emailed Fauci complaining that the paper did not do enough to discredit the lab theory, according to the subcommittee's release.
Fauci cited the paper when he addressed the media on April 17, 2020, and distanced himself from the authors.
"There was a study recently that we can make available to you where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human," Fauci said when asked if the virus had been intentionally manipulated.
"So, the paper will be available. I don't have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you."
The House panel's release also said evidence suggests that Dr. Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO), was involved in the proximal origin paper.