Thread by @aaronsibarium

SCOOP: three scientists who signed the original Lancet letter dismissing the lab leak dropped their names from a follow-up statement this week.

Asked whether they’d changed their minds about the likelihood of a lab leak, one of them replied: "NO COMMENT!" freebeacon.com/coronavirus/3-…

The new statement reasserts that there is no "scientifically validated evidence" to suggest COVID-19 escaped from a lab, and is signed by the same scientists who dismissed the lab leak in a February 2020 statement. Except for 3: William Karesh, Peter Palese, and Bernard Roizman.

Karesh is the executive vice president for health policy at EcoHealth Alliance, the group that was funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab with grants from the National Institutes for Health. EcoHealth's president, Peter Daszak, organized the original statement.

Karesh, Palese, and Roizman are all absent from the new statement, though Daszak signed both. Asked whether he'd changed his mind about the likelihood of a lab leak, Palese replied: "NO COMMENT!" Karesh and Roizman did not respond to inquiries.

The missing signatures reflect the widening cracks in the scientific consensus about COVID-19's origins. Once dismissed as a far-right conspiracy theory, the lab-leak hypothesis became mainstream in May when former NYT science reporter Nicholas Wade defended it at length.

Following Wade's piece, Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore said a lab leak was a serious hypothesis he "wouldn't rule out," while other biologists maintained that the scientific evidence supporting it was very weak.

The debate only grew more intense in June with the publication of Anthony Fauci's emails, which seemed to indicate that he and other government scientists had taken the lab leak seriously behind closed doors. The new Lancet statement responds directly to these developments.

The authors of the new Lancet statement write that "it is time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry," saying "allegations and conjecture are of no help." But the February 2020 statement had contained several allegations of its own.

"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," the original statement read. "Conspiracy theories…create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus."