On Wednesday, Nicholas Wade, a former science editor for the New York Times and editor for the journals Nature and Science, criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci for his repeated attempts to discredit the “lab leak theory” of COVID-19’s origin.

This came just days after newly released emails revealed that the former White House chief medical adviser commissioned a paper early in the pandemic to disprove the theory.

Wade suggested that Fauci was unhappy with the theory because it suggested that the virus may have escaped from research funded by his agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.

Wade made these remarks while testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The journalist and author accused Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins of mishandling the COVID virus origin issue, stating that it’s difficult to believe that they would make such a serious mistake in their long careers. The evidence seems to support this claim. Additionally, the journalist criticized the national media for accepting the natural origins story without skepticism and failing to report significant evidence to the contrary.

According to a cover email submitted with an article to Nature Medicine on the lab leak theory, Dr. Kristian Andersen stated that Fauci and Collins had urged him to conduct a study to disprove it. The article was published five days later and later cited by Fauci in a White House briefing, without disclosing his own involvement in its creation.

During his testimony, Wade mentioned an email from Andersen to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, where Andersen expressed concern over the virus’s “unusual features” that may have been engineered. Andersen also noted that he and others found the virus’s genome to be inconsistent with evolutionary theory.

However, according to Wade, Andersen later rejected his initial position within days.

“Within four days, Andersen in an email on Feb. 4 repudiated, deriding the lab leak as a crackpot theory,” he said. “What made him change his mind? No new scientific evidence came to light.”