Kristian G. Andersen

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Andersen and other scientists were consulted by the NIH and NIAID about the possibility of a lab leak.[2][3][4] Andersen, in an email to Anthony Fauci in January 2020, told Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, that some features of the virus made him wonder whether it had been engineered, and noted that he and his colleagues were planning to investigate further by analyzing the virus’s genome.[5] While Andersen and his colleagues initially suspected that the virus could have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, after additional analyses and an accumulation of this scientific evidence, Andersen and his co-authors concluded that the hypothesis was unfounded.[6] In a 2022 paper, Andersen concluded that animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, were most likely to be the source of the virus.[7]