We have now reached 3588 signatures on our petition to ban dangerous gain-of-function research! Thank you so much for supporting this critical cause!
We are writing to ask you to consider supporting a new petition we launched this week demanding retraction of “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” a fraudulent paper published in early 2020 that misled the public on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic (see below).
https://www.change.org/p/retract-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2
Last week, Congress held a hearing titled: "Investigating the Proximal Origin of a Cover Up." The hearing examined whether government officials worked together with scientists to hoodwink the public into believing that science showed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, emerged from nature and was not created in a lab.
Key to this deception was publication of a Correspondence entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." The paper assessed the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and concluded, "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus" and "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
The paper played an influential role—indeed, the central role—in communicating the false narrative that science established that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover, and not through research-related spillover.
However, email messages and Slack direct messages among authors of the paper obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) process or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in or before July 2023, show that the authors did not believe the core conclusions of the paper at the time it was written, at the time it was submitted for publication, and at the time it was published. The authors' statements show that the paper was, and is, a product of scientific misconduct. It is imperative that this misleading and damaging product of scientific misconduct be removed from the scientific literature.
Please consider signing the petition demanding this paper is retracted: https://www.change.org/p/retract-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2