"New evidence released by the Select Subcommittee today suggests that Dr. Fauci ‘prompted’ the drafting of a publication that would ‘disprove’ the lab leak theory, the authors of this paper skewed available evidence to achieve that goal," the memo says, as quoted by a US broadcaster on Sunday.
According to the memo, Fauci was warned during a February 2020 phone call with several scientists about the possibility that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Nonetheless, soon after the conference call, "Fauci ‘prompted’ Dr. Kristian Andersen, Professor, Scripps Research (Scripps), to write [an article titled ‘The] Proximal Origin [of SARS-CoV-2’] and that the goal was to ‘disprove’ any lab leak theory," the memo says.
In February, Republican lawmakers re-requested information from the Biden administration on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the select subcommittee investigation. They also renewed a request for a classified briefing on the matter from the US intelligence community.
Earlier this month, the US Senate passed a bill requiring that the Biden administration declassify intelligence about any alleged potential links between China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.