During a House Select Subcommittee on the origins of the Coronavirus pandemic Tuesday, Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis of New York grilled a pair of scientists, demanding to know why they suddenly switched their positions from considering the lab leak of the virus a likelihood to it being a "conspiracy theory" just days after Anthony Fauci emailed them both.]

Malliotakis asked Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry why their paper on the "proximal origins" of COVID-19 from March 2020 dismissed the lab leak in favour of a zoonotic origin when just days before they had both suggested the virus had a unnatural origin.

Addressing Andersen, the GOP rep. noted "You and Garry expressed concerns about the genetic makeup of the virus just days before the initial draft of this paper came out," adding "Dr. Fauci emailed you after you'd expressed concerns to him on a phone call that COVID would have been engineered."