More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.
“Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically,” says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory.
It’s also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed‘s Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.
“A really central part of this entire story that maybe is not talked about enough is the fact that so many mainstream publications have completely overlooked really key pieces of evidence in this story,” says Kopp. “We see a lot of health editors and health reporters prioritizing a tidy narrative about Anthony Fauci over providing the truth to their readers.”