The leading medical journal The Lancet has rejected a request to provide evidence to the Senate about the origins of the pandemic, its editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, said today in an interview with Reuters.
“We have received a request to come and give evidence to a Senate inquiry, which we are not going to do,” Horton said during the Reuters Pharma event in Barcelona.
Horton said the magazine would not work with “an administration that has attacked some of the most important scientists of our time,” referring to the treatment of former top US health official Anthony Fauci, who led the country’s response to the pandemic, by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Fauci has received threats on his life and has been targeted by Trump and other Republicans. Last year, the president canceled the security guard he had been offered as the top executive of the federal state.
In February Horton revealed that the Lancet was asked in December 2025 to provide all records related to the coronavirus from 2018 to 2022, including emails, notes and studies. A similar request was made to the journal Science, according to a publication on its website.
Horton was referring to the investigation being conducted by Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who is looking into US funding given to a virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city where the Covid-19 pandemic began in late 2019. Paul heads the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Paul’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“They’re still fixated on Wuhan and what happened there at the end of 2019,” Horton said.
The World Health Organization and most scientists argue that the origin of the virus from nature is the most likely cause of the pandemic. Investigations have been hampered by a lack of data from China, but US intelligence agencies said last year that a leak from a laboratory was likely the cause.
