On January 31, 2020, virologist Kristian Andersen emailed Fauci saying COVID-19 features 'potentially look engineered' and were 'inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.' By February 4, after a group call organized by Fauci, Andersen was calling the lab leak a 'crackpot theory.' The resulting 'Proximal Origin' paper published in Nature Medicine concluded the opposite of the scientists' initial private assessments, becoming the most-cited paper dismissing lab origins.