{"id":1130572,"date":"2023-07-12T21:18:11","date_gmt":"2023-07-12T21:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/production.public.theintercept.cloud\/?p=435870"},"modified":"2023-07-12T21:18:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T21:18:11","slug":"house-republicans-accidentally-released-a-trove-of-damning-covid-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/07\/12\/house-republicans-accidentally-released-a-trove-of-damning-covid-documents\/","title":{"rendered":"House Republicans Accidentally Released a Trove of Damning Covid Documents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
House Republicans on<\/u> the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020<\/a>, was titled \u201cThe Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2\u201d and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese \u201cwet market.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report<\/a> by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private, that lab escape was likely, while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the \u201cProximal Origin\u201d authors\u2019 real-time thinking. <\/strong>According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using \u201cAcrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,\u201d indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps<\/a>. Microsoft\u2019s documentation<\/a> cautions that \u201cCropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,\u201d going on to note: \u201cIf there is sensitive information in the area you\u2019re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n