Lancet medical journal declined US Senate COVID origins ask

By Jennifer Rigby and Bhanvi Satija

BARCELONA, April 24 (Reuters) – Leading medical journal The Lancet will decline a request to provide evidence for a U.S. Senate inquiry into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, its editor-in-chief Richard Horton told Reuters in an interview on Friday.

“We have received a request to go and give evidence at a Senate inquiry, which we’re not going to do,” Horton told Reuters at the Reuters Pharma event in Barcelona.

Horton said that the journal would not engage “with an administration that has attacked some of the foremost scientists of our age”, citing the treatment by President Donald Trump’s administration of a former top U.S. health official, Anthony Fauci, who led the country’s COVID-19 response.

He has faced threats since then as well as the ire of Trump and fellow Republicans. Trump cancelled Fauci’s federal security protection last year. 

Horton wrote in February that the Lancet had been asked in December 2025 to provide all records relating to coronaviruses from 2018 to 2022, including emails, notes and studies. The journal Science was asked the same thing, according to a story on its website.

Horton was referring to an inquiry by U.S. Senator Rand Paul, who has been looking into U.S. funding provided to a virology lab in Wuhan, China, the city where the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020. Paul chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Paul’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“They’re still perseverating over Wuhan and what took place there in the latter part of 2019,” Horton said.

The World Health Organization and most scientists say a spillover from nature is the most likely cause for the pandemic. Investigations have been hampered by a lack of data from China, but U.S. intelligence services said last year that a lab leak was probably the cause.

(Reporting by Jennifer Rigby and Bhanvi Satija in Barcelona; Editing by David Gregorio)