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Accusations flew from the dais to the witness table at a Senate hearing on June 18 as senators and witnesses debated the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

"The reason the American public legitimately doesn't trust scientists and federal health agencies is because of people like you," said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, to Robert Garry Jr., PhD, associate dean of the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. "You bear that responsibility for violating the public's trust from your scientific misconduct and fraud."

Garry was a co-author of a letter published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 likely occurred naturally, such as by transmission from one animal to an intermediary animal, and then to humans, rather than as a result of an accidental lab leak.

During Tuesday's hearing, Garry testified that in the letter, often referred to as the "proximal origins" paper, "we didn't put anything ... that we didn't believe was true. The conclusions of that paper have held up very well. In fact, there's been an abundance of scientific evidence that has come forward since then to support all the conclusions, everything we wrote in that paper, so there's no fraud." Head over to MedPage Today to read more about it.