Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins reportedly pressured a group of scientists to abandon a paper they were authoring on the origins of COVID-19 and the possibility that COVID-19 was “genetically manipulated” and could have leaked from the Wuhan Insitute of Virology (WIV).

“Neither Drs. Fauci or Collins edited our Proximal Origins paper in any way. The major feedback we got from the Feb 1 teleconference was: 1. Don’t try to write a paper at all — it’s unnecessary or 2. If you do write it don’t mention a lab origin as that will just add fuel to the conspiracists,” virologist Robert Garry wrote on Wednesday, according to The Intercept.

Garry was one of the 11 scientists who were present on the now-infamous Feb. 1, 2020, call with Fauci and Collins about the origins of COVID-19. After the call, a group of those experts quickly penned a paper detailing what they believed to be the origins of the virus, but, as GOP members noted in a recent letter, the federal health bureaucrats criticized the scientists, who eventually “abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak.”