Six Years Ago Today, They Chose the Lie
The February 1, 2020 teleconference that launched the greatest scientific cover-up of our time
Six years ago today — on February 1, 2020 — a group of scientists got on a phone call that would alter the trajectory of human history. Not because they discovered something. Because they decided to hide something.
Matt Ridley put it perfectly in his post yesterday, which has now been viewed over 677,000 times:
“Six years ago today, a truly shocking incident occurred that disgraces the name of science. A dozen scientists shared the view that Covid started with a laboratory experiment. So they met online to discuss how to mislead the world into thinking the opposite.”
Bryce Nickels named them: Fauci. Collins. Farrar. Holmes. Andersen. Garry. Rambaut. Fouchier. Koopmans. Drosten.
Read those names again. These weren’t fringe players. These were the people our governments, our media, and our institutions told us to trust. These were The Science™.
And on that call, they made a choice. Not a scientific choice — a political one.
The Call
Here’s what we know. By late January 2020, multiple scientists on that call privately believed the virus looked engineered. Jeremy Farrar — then head of the Wellcome Trust, now Chief Scientist at the WHO — was alarmed that the virus appeared almost designed to infect human cells. Kristian Andersen told Fauci directly that the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
They knew. They saw the same thing independent researchers saw: a novel virus that emerged in the one city on Earth that housed a BSL-4 lab doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, funded in part by American taxpayer dollars laundered through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.
So what did they do with this knowledge?
They buried it.
Within days of that February 1 call, the same scientists who privately worried about a lab origin began drafting “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” — a paper that would be published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, concluding that the virus was “not a purposefully manipulated virus.” This paper became the single most cited piece of evidence to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. It was accessed millions of times. It was cited by journalists, fact-checkers, and social media platforms as the definitive word.
It was, in essence, a lie built on a phone call.
The Consequences
Think about what followed from that one decision.
Our friend and co-founder Aaron Gin’s post caused ZeroHedge to be banned from Twitter for suggesting the virus came from a lab. Scientists who raised questions had their careers destroyed. Facebook labeled lab leak posts as “misinformation.” Google suppressed search results. YouTube removed videos. The entire machinery of institutional trust was weaponized to enforce a conclusion that the people who wrote it didn’t even believe.
And it wasn’t just censorship. It was the culture of censorship. Millions of ordinary people learned to self-censor. Doctors didn’t ask questions. Journalists didn’t investigate. If you said “lab leak” at a dinner party in 2020 or 2021, you were the crazy uncle.
We wrote about this extensively — the anatomy of the cover-up, the CIA’s belated admission, the explosive claims that the CIA tried to pay off analysts to bury the lab leak finding. We profiled Peter Daszak, the man who funneled NIH money to Wuhan and then orchestrated a Lancet letter to shut down the very questions his own funding should have raised. We exposed how Fauci and his senior advisor David Morens used private Gmail accounts to dodge FOIA requests — Morens literally bragging that he’d learned “how to make emails disappear.”
These aren’t conspiracy theories. These are congressional findings, subpoenaed documents, and sworn testimony.
The Reckoning That Never Came
Here we are, six years later. The CIA has acknowledged the lab leak as the most likely origin. The FBI said so before them. The Department of Energy concurred. The Congressional Select Subcommittee produced thousands of pages of evidence documenting what it called “the anatomy of a cover-up.”
And yet — has anyone faced consequences?
Fauci retired with honors. Collins was elevated to acting NIH director. Farrar runs science at the WHO. Andersen and Garry still hold their positions. Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance continued receiving federal grants even after being caught in non-compliance. The system didn’t just protect them — it rewarded them.
Meanwhile, the people who were right — the independent researchers, the journalists, the citizens who asked obvious questions — got censored, deplatformed, and called conspiracy theorists.
Ask yourself: in what functioning society do the people who lied get promoted and the people who told the truth get punished?
Why This Anniversary Matters
February 1, 2020 wasn’t just a phone call. It was the moment a small group of powerful scientists decided that protecting their funding, their reputations, and their geopolitical concerns was more important than telling the world the truth about a pandemic that would kill millions.
Every lockdown that followed, every school closure, every business destroyed, every career ruined for asking the wrong question — all of it traces back, in part, to the decision made on that call. Not because the lab leak would have changed the virus itself, but because the cover-up poisoned the well of public trust in science, in government, and in each other.
As we wrote in The Covid Screwtape Letters: they turned “Follow the Science” into a conversation-ender, a cudgel, a modern incantation that banishes doubt and summons obedience. They didn’t just lie about the origin of a virus. They built a new orthodoxy and excommunicated anyone who questioned it.
Six years later, 677,000 people viewed Ridley’s post in a single day. The truth has a way of surfacing. But let’s not pretend this is over. The same institutions, the same incentive structures, the same people are still in place.
The question isn’t whether they lied. We know they did.
The question is: what are we going to do about it?
If you’re new here, start with our Covid Origin Story Cover-up series and our Covid Villain Profile of Peter Daszak. Share this post — the algorithm won’t do it for you.
Appreciate that, Ferg. You're right that it goes beyond one institution. The silver lining: six years later, millions more people see it clearly. That awareness IS the foundation for fixing it.
This is exactly right. The accountability gap is the real story now. We documented 150+ studies showing the harms — and still, not a single architect of these policies has faced consequences. That has to change, and it starts with never letting people forget what happened.