The email dated February 1, 2020 said Mr Andersen and three other respected colleagues had discovered a genome "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory".
Was Covid-19 man-made? The Fauci email exchange was triggered by a Jon Cohen piece on the possible origins of the virus and theories that it might be connected to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology. Mr. Cohen noted:
Concerns about the institute predate this outbreak. Nature ran a story in 2017 about it building a new biosafety level 4 lab and included molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, Piscataway, expressing concerns about accidental infections, which he noted repeatedly happened with lab workers handling SARS in Beijing. Ebright, who has a long history of raising red flags about studies with dangerous pathogens, also in 2015 criticized an experiment in which modifications were made to a SARS-like virus circulating in Chinese bats to see whether it had the potential to cause disease in humans… Ebright tells ScienceInsider that the 2019-nCoV data are "consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident."
Whatever issues were raised with Dr. Fauci via the February email, by March Mr. Andersen and colleagues pronounced in a paper in Nature Medicine:
Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
In addressing why his March paper expressed a certainty not featured in his February email correspondence with Dr. Fauci, Mr. Andersen of the Scripps Institute now tweets:
As I have said many times, we seriously considered a lab leak a possibility.
However, significant new data, extensive analyses, and many discussions led to the conclusions in our paper.
What the email shows, is a clear example of the scientific process.
The problem with this explanation is that it is precisely the lack of data out of China more than a year later that has so many scientists saying that a natural origin has not been confirmed—and a laboratory origin cannot be ruled out.