Francisco de Asis

I want to hail one of the great unsung heroes of the Covid origins story: Rossana Segreto. I have no idea where she is now or what she is doing, but she was treated horrendously for being honest from the very beginning. In February 2020, before most people had even heard of the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper, she was already dismantling its arguments on a virology message board, publicly and under her own name. That took extraordinary courage, or perhaps a certain kind of innocence. But it is the kind of innocence we should cherish, because it comes from assuming that science is about truth rather than power, prestige, and protecting the right people. I thought of Rossana recently when I saw one of Kristian Andersen’s private Slack messages. A central Proximal Origin argument involved something called O-linked glycans, which Andersen claimed excluded lab origin. Rossana immediately explained why that argument did not work. As the Slack messages now show, privately Andersen too did not believe his own argument. In other words, Rossana saw the problem from the start. She said so publicly, along with many other brilliant observations, while the supposed experts misled the world. Yet they received the grants, accolades, prestige, and institutional protection, while Rossana has disappeared into obscurity. That is the unbearable unfairness of this entire story. A random postdoc in Innsbruck understood all of this in February 2020, while Fauci paraded a handpicked circle of supposedly eminent virologists before the public as if they held a monopoly on truth. In reality, they lied, protected one another, and still no one has been held to account.