On Tuesday, July 21, 2026, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released internal Slack messages exchanged among the authors of the influential 2020 Nature Medicine paper "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" — Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Eddie Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut. These messages reveal that the authors privately entertained doubts about the virus's natural origin from bats, assigning up to a 30% probability to a lab leak, despite publicly ruling out such a possibility in their widely cited paper.

According to the released documents, Andersen wrote on June 11, 2020, "The part I’m really struggling with is that at the end of the day, we really don’t have any hard evidence one way or the other — and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can’t rule out that somebody actually put it in there." He added, "That’s obviously not to say that somebody did, but we can’t rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way,’ but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage."

Senator Paul criticized the authors' public dismissal of a lab origin, stating to Fox News, "The idea that it came from lab is implausible and yet privately they're saying the opposite is this level of dishonesty I think needs to be exposed." He further condemned the funding of researchers who he claims misled the public: "These are people who get large, multimillion-dollar grants from our country, and we shouldn't be giving money to people who lied to us."

In related revelations, new documents indicate that the FBI blocked U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from questioning Peter Daszak, former president of EcoHealth Alliance and a researcher linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and gain-of-function research. CBP agents were reportedly preparing to question and search Daszak upon his return to the U.S. from the World Health Organization’s investigation into COVID-19 origins before the FBI intervened and asked agents to stand down.

Rand Paul and GOP lawmakers have criticized the Biden administration's handling of the COVID-19 origins investigation. Anthony Fauci is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the virus's origins this month following a subpoena issued by Paul, who chairs the committee.

The "Proximal Origin" paper, published in March 2020, has been widely cited by public health officials and media as the scientific authority ruling out a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. The newly released Slack messages challenge the certainty of that conclusion.

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