Is a cosmic rock truly an alien spaceship that the government does not want you to know about? Misrepresentations of scientific inquiry or hypotheses often aren’t an accident, but a structural by‑product of how curiosity, media incentives, and speculation collide. Space science, especially the search for alien life, sits at the perfect fault line: high uncertainty, high awe, and enormous public attention. The result is a constant churn of overreach, misinterpretation, and claims that outrun the evidence.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by astrophysicist David Kipping—director of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University and creator of the Cool Worlds channel—to examine how serious science pushes back. We unpack why astronomy and astrobiology attract so much distortion, how careful speculation differs from storytelling dressed up as science, and what it means to communicate uncertainty without killing curiosity.

We talk about:

• why space and alien life grab the public imagination—and why that makes audiences vulnerable to grifters

• the difference between compelling speculation and testable scientific hypotheses

• working with institutions like NASA, and where institutional communication succeeds or fails

• the risks and rewards of engaging massive platforms that don’t consistently respect scientific limits

• what scientists, creators, and audiences can do better or differently to stop misrepresentation before it hardens into belief

Being careful and evidence-driven isn’t about shutting down wonder or fun speculations. It’s about protecting them—by keeping evidence in charge.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Anti-science isn’t a bug in the modern information ecosystem—it’s the feature. Today’s secular gurus don’t need robes or rituals; they wield academic credentials, technical jargon, and a galaxy-brained confidence that turns YouTube, Twitter, and podcasts into pulpits. Their gospel? That institutions are corrupt, science is suspect, and only they have the answers.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Chris Kavanagh and Matt Brown, hosts of Decoding the Gurus, for a forensic look at the rise of anti-science influencers and the cult dynamics that keep their audiences loyal. We dissect how “decorative scholarship” and anti-institutional rhetoric undermine trust, why audiences crave affirmation over information, and what happens when universities and media fail to defend the basics.

We talk about:

• the anatomy of a secular guru—and why credentials are both weapon and shield

• how online communities form around grievance, identity, and ritualized in-group policing

• the psychology of audiences: why emotional energy, resentment, and narcissism fuel the ecosystem

• why institutions struggle to respond; and what academic freedom really means in the age of information warfare

• practical strategies for fighting back: critical consumption, evidence, and refusing to feed the fire

This isn’t about dunking for sport. It’s about understanding the playbook—and arming yourself for the next round.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Modern authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with tanks. It announces itself with spreadsheets, budget cuts, accreditation fights, and the quiet capture of institutions most people barely notice—until they’re gone.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Professor , Professor of Operational Research at UCL and creator of the Trump Action Tracker, a data‑driven record of nearly 3,000 actions documenting the attacks on democratic and scientific institutions in the U.S.

Drawing on her public communication work with Independent SAGE, Christina now raises the alarm about US politics with hard-to-refute data; explains why universities, regulators, media, and science itself are always early targets, and how fear and anticipatory compliance do much of the authoritarian work for free.

We talk about:

• her data collection project “Trump action tracker” and the administration’s method behind the madness

• why modern authoritarianism is quiet, bureaucratic, and strategic

• how controlling data and “official numbers” beats outright censorship

• why institutions don’t protect themselves—and often can’t

• how vulnerable UK institutions really are (even the ones you assume are safe)

• and why paying attention, speaking up, and refusing to disengage still matters

This isn’t about doom-scrolling news. It’s about pattern recognition—and a warning from someone who knows how quickly “it can’t happen here” turns into “it already has.”

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

What happens when fringe anti-vaxxers move from fleecing online communities to the highest halls of power?

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Dr. Dan Wilson, molecular biologist and creator of the Debunk the Funk YouTube Channel, to dissect how anti‑vaccine narratives became mainstream—and why so many institutions seem unprepared to stop them.

Dan walks us through his journey from being conspiracy‑curious as a teenager to becoming a meticulous science communicator, explaining why teaching the scientific method matters more than just throwing facts at people. We unpack the rise of COVID contrarians, the business model behind misinformation, and how grifters learned to weaponize frustration, identity, and “medical freedom.”

We also talk about:

• Why journalists keep asking the wrong questions

• How figures like RFK Jr. slip past accountability

• Why being polite to ordinary people is imperative, yet being polite to grifters a recipe for disaster

• What burnout looks like when misinformation keeps winning

• And how ordinary people can still make a difference without losing their sanity

This isn’t about losing faith in humanity. It’s about learning how bad ideas spread—and how to push back with evidence, empathy, and better questions that spark curiosity rather then reactance.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we welcome epidemiologist, MacArthur Fellow, and lifelong AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves to talk about what happens when politics is attacking public health.

Gregg was on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic with ACT UP in the 1990s, helping to force institutions like the NIH and FDA to accelerate research and expand access to lifesaving treatments. Later, he brought that same activist-scientist playbook to South Africa, confronting deadly AIDS denialism at the level of government policy.

What happens today in the US not only echoes but in many cases exceeds the terrors of the past.

We talk about state-sanctioned pseudoscience, the capture of public-health institutions by political actors and charlatans dead-set on burning down the house, and what has already been destroyed for a generation. We also dig into what activists and scientists did in the 90s to change the course of history—and what those lessons mean now, as global health systems face funding cuts, political sabotage, and a new wave of anti-science ideology.

How do you defend public health when the notion of reality itself is under attack?

You speak up. You organize locally. And you fight them for every school board, city council or community leadership seat at the tables where you can make the lives of people around you better.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

Ancient aliens. Lost Ice Age civilizations. Atlantis hidden under the pyramids.

Pseudo-archaeology is having a moment—and it’s not just harmless fun.

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with archaeologist Flint Dibble and science YouTuber Kayleigh Dunning to break down how conspiracy history took over the internet—and what it takes to fight back.

We talk about the rise of viral pseudo-history pushed by figures like Graham Hancock, why “secret knowledge” narratives spread so easily online, and how social media incentives reward myths over evidence.

But this isn’t just about bad history. It’s about anti-intellectualism, harassment campaigns against scholars, and the growing gap between academic knowledge and public discourse.

So how do you push back?

By stepping into the arena. By meeting audiences where they are. And by showing that our human history is far richer than grifter fantasies want to make you believe.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview.

You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to amplify lies.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to dissect the machinery of modern disinformation. We explore why falsehoods leave a cognitive footprint — and why even highly educated people can fall for propaganda and reason themselves into nonsense.

We dig into:

• The psychology of “sticky” misinformation

• Why intelligence isn’t immunity

• How social media architecture supercharges conspiracy thinking

• What the EU’s Digital Services Act gets right about platform power

• Why democracy depends on “epistemic integrity”

• And what scholars can do when autocracy pressures academia

Democracy runs on shared facts, so what happens when those facts are systematically undermined?

We take a hard look at how cognition, algorithms, and power collide — and what it will take to defend reality.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

Protest isn’t radical. Silence is.

This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Colette Delawalla, clinical psychology PhD candidate and founder of Stand Up for Science, for a furious, clear-eyed breakdown of how American science is being dismantled in real time—and why scientists can’t afford to stay “above politics” anymore.

From mass purges at federal agencies and frozen clinical trials to banned words lists and regime-sanctioned pseudoscience, Colette lays out how the Trump administration has turned science into a political weapon. This isn’t abstract policy debate: patients lose hope, researchers lose careers, and the public loses protection.

We dig into how a single act of defiance—“fuck it, let’s protest”—sparked the first mass mobilization against Trump 2.0, why appeasement by legacy science institutions is a dead end, and what actually works when democracy and evidence are under coordinated attack. Along the way, we talk whistleblowers, organizing under pressure, why “science is apolitical” is a myth, and why bringing white papers to a political war guarantees defeat.

This episode is about harvesting anger productively, taking up more responsibility, and drawing lines.
If science is a public good, defending it means showing up—and saying no.

No neutrality. No appeasement.
Just resistance, strategy, and a counterpunch.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

This week on Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with one of the most uncompromising voices in online science communication: Dave Farina, better known as the creator of Professor Dave Explains.

Dave joins Sam Gregson and Philipp Markolin for a no-holds-barred conversation about the modern pseudoscience economy: how misinformation spreads, why it pays so well, and how grifters, influencers, and political actors exploit distrust in science for profit and power. From antivax propaganda and flat-earth cults to billionaire-backed “anti-establishment” narratives, we break down how the science denial ecosystem works—and why it’s more dangerous than ever.

We dig into Dave’s famously combative style of debunking, the ethics and effectiveness of punching back hard, and whether politeness has quietly helped misinformation go mainstream. Along the way, we talk burnout, audience capture, cult dynamics, algorithmic incentives, and why factual discourse so often loses to flashy lies online.

Most importantly, this episode asks a hard question for scientists and communicators alike: if science denial is now institutionalized, what does fighting back actually require—and who needs to get into the trenches?

No false balance. No kid gloves. Just evidence, context, and a right hook straight to pseudoscience.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

What do vaccines and climate science have in common? The same political actors, media ecosystems, and financial interests have worked to discredit both.

In this inaugural episode of Science Counterpunch, Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Michael Mann go head-to-head with the modern anti-science machine—petrostates, plutocrats, propagandists, performative media, wellness grifters, and the platforms amplifying them.

We break down the tactics: gaslighting, false balance, “freedom” rhetoric, debate traps, and the weaponization of uncertainty. More importantly, we ask what it costs when societies can no longer agree on basic facts.

This is frontline testimony from scientists who’ve taken the hits—and refused to stay quiet.

If you care about science, public discourse, or the future of evidence-based policymaking, this is one to listen to.

Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.

Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.

Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.

Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!

For years, science and scientists have come under pressure from anti-science influencers, propagandists, conspiratorial crowds, deep-pocketed industries and politicians in power.

While the visibility and velocity of these attacks have increased general awareness and raised alarm in the wider scientific community, especially since the second Trump administration, many scientists feel trapped between a rock and a hard place. Institutions they thought would have their back either caved or got corrupted, played it safe in silence or tried to appease. Academic societies are slow to wake up and find their spine. And the press was all too often complicit in sanewashing insanity, simulating neutrality while justifying abuses of the aggressors and shifting blame onto scientists.

We have had enough.

When systems fail, when aggressors threaten, when we get suckerpunched by fascist goons and lose the first round, we don’t give up; we get back up and ready for round two.

This fight has just started, and in our corner there is plenty of reason for hope. We got the brains. We got the evidence. And more importantly, we got the extraordinary courage of ordinary people, scientists and citizens alike, to fight back and not relent when the going gets tough.

So join us, when we bring on scientists under pressure, science communicators, science journalists, activists to explain how to fight back for science.

Every episode will cover new case studies, hard-earned experiences and concrete solutions from people in the fight already. We need to listen and learn. And just maybe, their actions and insights will create a roadmap of effective actions for all of us too.

The time of lying flat on the mat is over.

Now we get up and fight for the future of science and democracy.

Check out our inaugural episode:

Get ready.

Note: This article is a first essay out of my larger research focus on building participatory democracy in the digital age: how to counteract the global authoritarian movement. Given recent AI news and a sense of urgency, I wanted to share one idea that maybe is worth a discussion today.

Unease about the AI investment boom is everywhere

The Atlantic’s excellent article by Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens” inspired something that has been on my mind for quite some time. I will get to that in a bit, but let’s recap:

Quoting from the article:

“The AI boom is visible from orbit.” Fields in Indiana now host vast data centers that “demand more power than two Atlantas.” The U.S., they argue, is becoming an “Nvidia-state,” where one chipmaker has become a “precariously placed, load-bearing piece of the global economy.”

Despite hype, profits lag: “Nearly 80 percent of companies using AI discovered the technology had no significant impact on their bottom line.” Analysts whisper “bubble.” OpenAI lost $5 billion last year; Microsoft’s AI losses topped $3 billion.

The article likens today’s frenzy to “the canals, railroads, and fiber-optic cables laid during past booms.” Whether AI transforms the world or triggers a crash, the authors warn, “either outcome will bring real, painful disruption for the rest of us.”

It paints a vivid picture of America racing headlong into an AI-driven infrastructure boom that could reshape—or destabilize—the global economy.

In a matter of years, AI infrastructure has come to dominate American growth. Vast energy-hungry data centers rise from farmland; trillions flow into chips and computing power. I think the authors point out, correctly, that the economic return remains uncertain, I recently argued a similar point about AI and productivity loss and why that might be. So rapid economic windfall justifying the investments seems very unlikely. Like many others, the authors point to the dot-com and other infrastructure bubbles; history suggests such frenzies rarely end smoothly. Whether the AI revolution fulfills its promise or collapses under its own weight, they conclude that shock will be profound, and the United States may already be too invested to turn back.

For me, there is no real question whether this is a bubble, of course it is. But everybody seems to think they can ride it long enough to be not harmed when it inevitably bursts.

As The Atlantic article pointed out, the bigger the bubble gets, the more people will get harmed by the ensuing fallout. Yet hunger from the companies for finding ever more convoluted, reckless and possibly illegitimate ways for money to be poured into their ecosystem to stretch the AI bubble just a bit longer is palpable.

And if the dynamics also sound familiar, it’s because not two decades ago, the Great Recession was precipitated by banks packaging risky mortgages into tranches of securities that were falsely marketed as high-quality. By 2008, the house of cards had collapsed. - The Atlantic

Which is why, when the WSJ just a few days ago reported that the OpenAI CFO calls for a federal backstop, more than a few eyebrows were raised by investors. The comment was followed by a quick supposed walkback from the CFO on LinkedIn, but not really since she just rephrased the point more politely about the government having to “play its part”. Privatize the win, socialize the losses I guess.

All while the systemic risk of a major recession increases by the day.

So why are we allowing them to take the gamble?

Know the game before you gamble

Several stories are told of why the current AI race, despite being a bubble, needs to happen as fast and recklessly as it does, no matter the cost, harms or methods deployed. That China will otherwise win the AI race is one such current crowd pleaser, especially out of the CEO of NVIDIA who coincidentally would gain the most by stoking such US anxieties. Or that AI will unlock untold productivity and lead to real value creation in every sector of the economy soon. Well, I am more of the persuasion that AI is a normal technology, useful and transformative in the long run, but not magic. It seemingly follows a normal S-curve of innovation and people overextrapolate from the current slope while ignoring that we are already seeing some signs of a plateau. But whatever your belief in economic gains in the mid to long-term, I would certainly like to retire the bedtime story that today’s AI boom is a moonshot for machine sentience, and not only because these graphs look immensely silly:

The current AI paradigms will inspire innovators to find applications that actually add value to various industries; but they can not usher in AGI, singularity or extinction. And yet, a combination of these stories and their penetration of the public infosphere, especially the part about imminent or future superintelligence, ushering in various visions of utopia or dystopia, seems to inspire investor FOMO and public imagination.

So let me challenge that frenzy with a different story, one I believe to be more grounded in history and reality, and in many ways more urgent:

It’s the robber barons, rails, rents and defaults of the next twenty years I worry about, not skynet, the singularity or misaligned paperclip optimizers.

Infrastructure ownership: it’s the rails, not the robots

Infrastructure capture refers to the consolidation of essential systems, such as transport, energy, communications, or now AI tech stacks, under the control of a small number of private actors. Historically, this pattern has produced enduring power asymmetries. When a resource becomes indispensable for competition in the market and cannot be reasonably duplicated, its owner wields structural power. When public infrastructure gets privatized or commodified into a corporate chokepoint, those who own it do not merely extract rent; they set the terms of participation in economic and civic life.

A classic example is the Gilded Age railroad monopolies in the United States. By the late 19th century, a handful of companies controlled the rail network, enabling discriminatory pricing and political leverage while producing the largest wealth inequality between a small elite and masses in poverty.

We have seen the same more recently with the big social media platforms, that for too long were treated as consumer products, when in reality they aimed to become the roads and bridges of digital life for most of us while extracting a heavy rent on our attention. That rent did not only make them filthy rich but also extremely powerful and politically influential, enshrining continued exploitation of their users data as their business model.

AI infrastructure magnifies these stakes, as AI tech stacks are becoming the interface to information creation, dissemination and consumption. If a few companies own the chips, data centers, cloud compute, foundational models, model weights, and distribution channels, they effectively control any future useful AI application build on top of it; and with it, the epistemic and economic arteries of the 21st century.

The gamble to become the next Vanderbilt, Rockefeller or Carnegie’s of the info age are long underway. Current tech giants have already captured chips and cloud computing, that is why Nvidia’s data‑center revenue hit $18.4 billion in a single quarter—up 409% YoY as AI hyperscalers started hoarding H100 chips like potable water before a drought. Amazon plowed $8 billion into Anthropic so Claude will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud and training partner, and will utilize Amazon’s custom AI chips. OpenAI will purchase an additional $250 billion of Microsoft Azure cloud compute and locked its model distribution to Azure’s cloud for the next decade.

Such infrastructure costs billions and billions of dollars to provision and maintain, and it’s highly depreciable. In the case of the hyperscalers, the staggering cost is cross-subsidized by other businesses–themselves also massive platforms with significant lock-in […]

In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players.

- Meredith Whittaker on Bluesky

This brings us to the next point:

Strong-arming society into technological lock‑in

Infrastructure capture is not just about finding one bottleneck to own, because bottlenecks can be remedied with just building more capacity over time through market competition or government investment. Real infrastructure capture today is much more about owning the full value-chain, tech stack or ecosystem. That is why the current AI players aim to cement vertical control—chips → cloud → model → API—where each layer enforces the others and makes competition almost impossible. The current AI web of partnerships and strategic investments have only one goal: to entrench big tech incumbents across multiple layers of the value chain.

Good luck trying to spin up an alternative service provider when technical incompatibilities, contractual exclusivity and prohibitively expensive user switching cost sabotage any type of fair competition.

Historical examples include AT&T’s telephone monopoly and Microsoft’s bundling of Windows and Internet Explorer in the 1990s, both of which stifled competition until antitrust interventions, and they seem really tame compared to the AI tech stack capture we observe today by what is basically an industry cartel.

One idea we have to get rid ourselves of is the thought that technological lock-in just happens as a feature of innovation or first-mover advantage by offering new technological capabilities. No, these are deliberate business decisions as rapid adoption is the biggest challenge these companies face, they need to race to entrench themselves before the dust settles.

We can feel their urgency by opening any app these days. They simply put their AI anywhere so people can not escape it. Again, this is not coincidence:

Here is an article by Brian Merchant puts it succinctly: How big tech is force-feeding us AI.

By inserting AI features onto the top of messaging apps and social media, where it’s all but unignorable, by deploying pop-ups and unsubtle design tricks to direct users to AI on the interface, or by pushing prompts to use AI outright, AI is being imposed on billions of users, rather than eagerly adopted.

When your AI business model is to extract rent and exert power through infrastructure and technological lock-in, you better find a million ways to force people to adopt your AI stuff, no matter how crappy, immature or outright unsafe, by any and all means necessary, even leveraging the Trump administration to pressure EU regulation.

Technological lock-in is key because it ensures dominance of tech-turned-AI giants for generations to come. And we know that dominant firms face little pressure to improve quality, consumer protection, or maintain reasonable prices. Instead, once we are locked in, the real squeeze can start.

Preparing for the big squeeze with data colonialism

AI models are built on collective data: the internet’s archives, social media posts, public domain works, academic research, and user interactions. Yet, as these commons are appropriated into proprietary model weights, they cease to be shared public knowledge and become enclosed corporate property.

The AI hunger for data is palpable, not least shown by a steady drip of licensing deals between content publishers and AI hyperscalers.

With a lot of money going around, cash‑starved newsrooms are happily negotiating with AI firms whose models already cannibalize their traffic but now promise them a share of the AI boom and newfound social relevance.

Take a look at The Associated Press:

The news organization has spent the last nine to 12 months making its tens of millions of content assets across text, video, photos and audio formats, machine-readable for LLMs to assimilate easily. […]

“The best AI has the best inputs and generates the best outputs. This is the inverse of garbage in, garbage out,” said Roberts at the summit. “This means that in the future, we need more good quality, high quality content, not less. We’re going to transform the entire multi-trillion-dollar global economy based on AI, and AI fundamentally needs great information to be great”

- Jessica Davis, Digiday

Then there’s Reddit, which disclosed AI data‑licensing contracts with Google and OpenAI, selling their user content for training in exchange for boosts in AI search, immediately tripling their user base thanks to Google AI search.

Sounds like a win-win, right? Let me come to that in a second.

Before, we need to also acknowledge that AI hyperscalers are rarely so kind to ask for information, rather than pirating it by scraping the internet or worse. All AI companies are currently in legal fights over their blatant copyright infringement of information they had no legal way of obtaining, such as books or art. Anthropic recently settled one case for $1.5 billion for pirating half a million books. Peanuts for AI hyperscalers drunk on investor money and the prospect of robbing humanity blind in the future.

But this will make AI just more useful to users, so why worry about how companies get there?

This dynamic mirrors what Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias coined data colonialism: the systematic appropriation of human life through data extraction, justified by narratives of progress and innovation. There was also a time when big tech platforms, from google search to social media platforms, felt genuinely useful and empowering to users. How did that turn out?

The Canadian writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the lifecycle of digital platforms that initially serve users, then prioritize business customers, and finally exploit both for maximum profit.

Remember social media platforms that once felt like open, empowering infrastructure? It is no coincidence they quickly devolved into an extractive apparatus for mass exploitation, with all the negative social and political consequences for society we have to grapple with today.

The AI data colonialism currently happening is even more worrisome. The common goods of our digital lives—language, images, art, stories, code—are either mined, bought or simply stolen to produce systems that we then must rent access to through corporate APIs and subscriptions. Every prompt becomes a micro-transaction in a planetary rent economy, and everybody will pay for what was once a public good.

And the social and political consequences will be almost unfathomable.

Something new: owning the interface to reality

Historically, media theorists have warned that the medium shapes the message. Today, it is more like: Control the interface, control the story.

As AI systems are installed as the default lens on the web, they act as new gatekeepers that will arbitrate which facts surface and which fall through the cracks. How thoroughly vulnerable this approach is to the whims of billionaire oligarchs that own the AI systems will surprise exactly nobody who just paid a glimpsing look at Elon Musk’s Grokipedia.

“Shortly after launch, several sources described articles as promoting right-wing perspectives, conspiracy theories, and Elon Musk’s personal views. Other criticism of Grokipedia focused on its accuracy and biases due to AI hallucinations and potential algorithmic bias.”

-Wikipedia (which is actually a community-based model that has proven invaluable to the world)

This is a subtler, more pervasive form of any previous censorship or propaganda system because it operates under the guise of assistance and personalization while selling a very specific and narrow ideological worldview.

The more these captured AI models mediate our access to information, summarizing search results, generating news reports, drafting our communications, the less we experience the raw plurality of perspectives that once defined the open web.

Gatekeepers, censorship and propaganda are of course only the surface of how bad things can get.

Because AI is currently also deployed to create an unmeasurable amount of slop, deep fakes, fan fictions and disinformation that fundamentally will pollute and destroy the information ecosystem as we know it and make it basically unusable for human agents. Leading the pack is of course X.

“We’re trending quickly toward an internet that could be 99.9% AI-generated content, where agents and bots outnumber humans not just in traffic but in creative output. AI agents chat with each other on forums, generate news articles, create thought leadership, engage on social media, leave product reviews, spark controversy, and post memes. Each bot believes it’s talking to a human. Each human statistically is engaging with a bot. Every interaction seems plausible, even engaging. But it’s all synthetic.”

- Benjamin Wald, Galaxy

When the signal to noise ratio of any true information is one in a million within an ocean of related, personalized and microtargeted lies that are optimized to be emotionally compelling, what confidence can we ever have in any information we consume?

Our current chaotic and broken information ecosystems already breed epistemic nihilism, where citizens believe that nothing is ever really true except for what feels right and convenient in the moment.

It is no surprise so many people turn to AI and treat them as answering machines, oracles or all-knowing gods over fact-checking and verifying sources themselves. That cognitive dependency on AI models and agents as navigation tools will only get more profound as time progresses.

Do I really have to point out the power differential when few entities will own and control the AI gatekeepers that generate the bulk of information flows at a time when billions depend on AI for cognitive navigation? Market monopoly would instill a much more powerful epistemic monopoly: control over the conditions of knowing.

Linguist have already noticed that AI “externalized thinking so completely that it makes us all equal” in our use of language. It decreases democratic plurality in the worst way possible; by boiling our human diversity of thought and expression down into a homogeneous language slop.

Once users internalize the AI model’s outputs as truth, it will not only homogenize how we speak but how we reason and see the world. I for one would put that power under as much democratic accountability as possible.

Or much worse… but I do not want to give them any more ideas.

So let’s conclude our current state of affairs:

Welcome to the robber‑mogul playbook

All this leads me to an unpleasant but not unexpected conclusion:

Today’s AI arms race is best understood as a calculated corporate power grap: spend unprecedented sums on compute, secure strategic infrastructure along a vertical tech stack, use your investor billions to manipulate, muscle or coerce a critical mass of users and industry into rapid adoption of your stack despite productivity and expertise losses, security risks and environmental destruction, and let the narrative fog of “AGI” anxieties, geopolitics and empty promises cover up the construction of your death star rentier empire.

Unfortunately, the AI infrastructure boom for these tech moguls isn’t about reaching AGI; winning against China, or unlocking productivity utopia and abundance for humanity. As if any of these narcissistic wannabe sun-king egos would ever spare ambition for anybody but themselves. They play into these narratives with their appearances, press releases and pocketbooks to keep the media and the population occupied to look somewhere else.

But best I can tell, the current evidence suggests that the AI race is mostly about an older, more mundane, imperialistic impulse from centuries past that vast wealth inequality has always engendered: A lust for power. Dominance over the means of human affairs, from collaboration to production, enshrining their position over society for generations to come.

If the tech moguls win their gambit, if they succeed at infrastructure capture, technological lock-in and public dispossession of our shared information ecosystem, we will have ceded more than we have bargained for. Once control over knowledge creation, distribution and consumption (and with it increasingly cognitive agency) is lost for most of us, what awaits is a new dark age of monarchs, myths, manipulation and magical thinking.

A handful will own, a tiny minority will benefit, and the rest of us will fall into exploitation, exclusion or serfdom.

How to stop feudal entrenchment

What would a non‑feudal alternative require?

It is a question that many people are currently working on in the EU and elsewhere. One of them is Robin Berjon, a seasoned technologist and governance expert whose career spans web standards, open protocols, data governance in media, and next-generation infrastructure like IPFS. He works on figuring out how digital systems can be governed in the public interest. He was also very kind and charitable to sit down for a chat with me and outline solutions.

“We really have to break this myth that monopolies were made by innovation, and that they could be broken by innovation.”

- Robin Berjon

He emphasized that the first imperative is to treat digital and AI infrastructure as public-interest infrastructure rather than private consumer products. That means regulation, not innovation, is needed. Historical lessons from railroads and telecom monopolies show that when essential systems are privately captured, democratic oversight collapses. As a strong proponent of digital sovereignty, Robin was very clear about the stakes:

“We have to treat this like a war effort... what you’re fighting for is the right to set your own rules in your own country.”

- Robin Berjon

While my investigation into this topic is still very much ongoing, I already learned from him and others that there are good reasons for hope.

For example, there are already some practical solutions, often with proven efficacy at smaller scales or throughout history, already on offer.

So here is what we (and our representatives) should work on:

• Establish pre-emptive regulatory guardrails today like the EU AI Act’s transparency and systemic-risk obligations, combined with antitrust enforcement to curb exclusive cloud-model tie-ups and break vertical control by tech cartels.

• Enshrine capabilities-centric infrastructure neutrality for things like identity verification, safety or content moderation, ensuring plural applications can compete with each other without having to recreate their own capabilities to fend off bots, spam, scams or cyber attacks that any digital endeavor suffers from

• Demand open protocols, federated architectures and interoperability standards (similar to ActivityPub [Bluesky] or Beckn) to reduce dependency on single platforms, prevent lock-in and empower citizens by transferring data ownership back to users.

• Governmental and public adoption incentives of pro-democracy communication infrastructures. Habermasian democracy depends on institutionalizing norms of discourse. Adoption incentives ensure these norms are embedded in digital spaces rather than leaving them to market forces.

• Foster institutional density: AI should be regulated by a dense web of local institutions and governance models that reflect the diversity of communities and use cases. Start by building governance frameworks locally, experiment and pressure test, whatever works can then be shared or scaled horizontally to other domains.

“If you want democracy, it has to look like a hairball. Democracy is messy, but that’s what makes it resilient.”

- Robin Berjon

• Allow for epistemic pluralism by encouraging many models with diverse priors; resist interface monopolies. Information has a powerful impact on our identity and worldview. Grant individuals the right to control the mechanisms and interfaces that filter their perception

In short, we have to understand and reclaim digital infrastructure as a public good for all of society.

That is my key message for you today; and wildly at odds with current AI developments, media narratives and public attention.

Let’s change that, together.

A quick update on a COVID-19 origins-related discovery making headlines this week — and often for the wrong reasons.

The Telegraph is reporting the finding of a “new COVID virus” in Brazil. That headline is inaccurate: COVID-19 is a disease caused only by SARS-CoV-2. The new virus, BRZ batCoV, is something different — and its discovery actually reinforces what scientists already know about: That nature, not engineers, created the Furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2.

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Here is the quick rundown of the discovery:

An international team of scientists has discovered a new coronavirus, BRZ batCoV, in moustached bats from Brazil that carries a furin cleavage site — a key genetic feature also found in SARS-CoV-2. While the Brazilian bat virus is quite divergent from an overall sequence perspective, forming probably its own subgenus next to the Sarbeco- and Merbecoviruses, its amino acid sequence and position at the critical S1/S2 junction, forms a functional cleavage site remarkably reminiscent to the one observed in SARS-CoV-2.

Of note, the spike protein of this novel bat coronavirus possesses a functional furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction with a unique amino acid sequence motif (RDAR) that differs from that found in SARS-CoV-2 (RRAR) by only one amino acid. - Takada K. et al., bioRxiv, 2025

This finding is significant, but not surprising.

As I wrote previously, these cleavage sites are not unique by any means; in fact, they independently develop all the time in the wider coronavirus family. The wider CoV family tree is sprinkled with FCS sites at the S1/S2 position.

This is not surprising either, because FCS are very short sequences (4 amino acids) and these polybasic cleavage motifs will happen over and over just by chance through recombinations, insertions, or mutations. Most FCS motifs are likely acquired de novo and just don’t stick around if selection pressures do not favor them.

Furthermore, there is good evidence that the S1/S2 boundary region of the genome is a highly variable region in all CoVs and more permissive to genetic alterations than the wider genome through point mutations, insertion, and recombination mechanisms.

The authors find this as well by investigating the protein structure in the S1/S2 region of the BRZ batCoV

"…our results suggest that FCS acquisition is impacted by protein-level constraints, with the S1/S2 junction representing a structurally permissive “hotspot” for stable incorporation of cleavage motifs. - Takada K. et al., bioRxiv, 2025

Again, this just adds to the picture we already had. To support this notion of a ‘higher dynamic’ at the S1/S2 location, another genomic study of SARSr-CoVs in European bats found some indications that FCS at this location might pop in and out of existence in Sarbecoviruses at very low frequencies in a population.

Overall, this discovery adds to our already exisiting evidence basis that nature is perfectly capable of creating a furin cleavage site, no engineer needed.

And if you need any more convincing that the FCS we observe in SARS-CoV-2 is natural and was not engineered, I’ve written a very long article about it, but just look at that hot mess below:

Alright, so science does what science does, continuously adding new nuggets of evidence to an already existing body of knowledge.

The day closes with another L for the lab leakers, as is typical when it comes to scientific support for their fantasy.

Anyways, what else is new?

Rand Paul keeps digging a rabbit hole to hide in:

Sometimes, it is hard to convey how ignorant, dishonest and malicious political actors have been on this topic.

Rand Paul treats virology papers the way flat-earthers treat NASA photos: highlights the wrong part, zooms in 400%, and calls it a smoking gun.

That will not change anytime soon, but for anybody who wants to understand why this fabricated origin controversy has reached the highest halls of power, you know I got you covered:

Alright, that is it for my origins news dispatch.

Stay safe, stay smart, stay connected.

Manufactured controversies for the classroom?

A recent opinion article in statnews by Michaela Kerrissey and Richard J. Tofel has caught my eye on Bluesky.

In it, the authors argued that the origin dispute should serve as a case study in how public-health agencies, science communicators, and media have supposedly struggled under conditions of ambiguity; how they treated and still treat the origin as a taboo topic, and that:

Initial concerns about the possibility of lab involvement gave way to the forging of an apparent early scientific consensus on zoonotic spread. Countering that consensus became very costly; at least one scientist who did so received enough threats to consider changing her name.

This consensus, however, has now at least partially unraveled in the face of multiple investigations.

If you are not so familiar with what they are talking about; these are basically regurgitating three totemic falsehoods highlighting how eagerly they gulped down the lab leak koolaid.

• nobody “forged” an early consensus; unless the authors believe in Anthony Fauci teleconference / proximal origins conspiracy myths

• The authors reference Alina Chan, who was rewarded immediately, never changed her name, never faced any real cost but rather became a media darling by playing the contrarian martyrer. In contrast, virologists that actually worked on the origin question faced incredibly dire costs, from defunding to death threats, from smear campaigns to security incidents at their homes

• The scientific consensus has solidified over the years, and the investigations the authors link to are unscientific political fictions from GOP congressional operatives

Funnily, the authors claimed that they hold no position on the origin questions but somehow align 100% with lab leak lore.

Within science, the consensus remains that zoonotic spillover is overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. The many mutually-contradictory lab leak speculations lack comparable empirical grounding and are often contradicted by hard evidence.

Anyways, that does not stop the authors from explaining their alternative history of events as a supposed failure of public health scientists to grapple with uncertainty.

The lessons here involve both management and communications […]

Beyond this, we think students (and maybe all of us) benefit from exposure to the arguments of those who believe passionately that they know something, even as passionate advocates reach very different, often irreconcilable conclusions — and even if they are partisan.

Apparently, not the strength of evidence, but the strength of belief behind a position should guide our serious considerations and public health communication.

With this simple appeal to “teach the controversy”, the authors fall back on a tried-and-tested tactic from the past. “Teaching the controversy” was a manipulation campaign by creationists from the conservative Discovery institute to subvert evolutionary theory in schools. It manufactured a controversy surrounding evolutionary theory and claimed that fairness requires educating students with a “critical analysis of evolution”, basically that creationism should be taught side-by-side.

Maybe the authors should also have learned from the past they are trying to recreate. One should not respond to manufactured controversies by taking them serious, but contextualizing and questioning them:

The scientific community and science education organizations have replied that there is no scientific controversy regarding the validity of the theory of evolution and that the controversy exists solely in religion and politics.

-American Association for the Advancement of Science. February 16, 2006

I would then still argue that a more robust approach would be to teach why scientific controversies emerge — how media incentives, partisanship, and online ecosystems amplify extremists views — rather than treating both hypotheses as symmetrical. This preserves the authors’ stated goal (teaching epistemic humility) without furthering unsupported narratives.

Blaming the scapegoats

Unfortunately, when continuing to read their opinion piece, the intentions and worldview of the authors become hard to explain cheritably.

We need to come to grips with the root causes of this loss and avoid the easy out of apportioning responsibility to bad actors only. Loss of trust also comes to those that are well intentioned but do not foresee — and do not return to address — the eventual consequences of their early actions, from either a management or communications perspective.

What the authors really do here is to perpetuate not only a manufactured controversy, but something more sinister; they validate the anti-science narrative that the scientists who have been turned to scapegoats by politics and bad actors are to blame for their own circumstances:

I have lost count on how many supposedly “polite society” pundits and outlets have moved in the last years towards blaming scientists for the loss of trust in science, if not for the hardships and trauma of the pandemic itself.

And while the pandemic origin controversy often seems far behind, those who profited the most from it are still working every day to entrench their positions and excert influence over public understanding. All while ordinary science and scientists lose their independence, funding, freedom of inquiry and societal trust and goodwill.

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So what can we do about it?

This has been a question I find myself increasingly occupied with. The participatory nature of online discourse makes it clear that influence flows through networks, that communities often decide what is heard, seen, believed. Silence is surrender, and many scientists are waking up to this reality:

To defend themselves, they [scientists] had no choice but to recognize the political battlefield they were placed on.

And you are right—scientists are now more outspoken. They’ve realized that silence isn’t neutrality; it’s surrender. If they don’t defend evidence-based inquiry, no one else will. Scientists are a minority in every country. Journalists are weakened by collapsing media ecosystems. If both remain silent, truth itself is left undefended.

Of course, scientists must also reflect on their role. For too long, many lived in ivory towers, buffered by public trust and generous funding. The pandemic fractured that trust. Politicians, charlatans, and business interests exploited the gap between science and society, deepening public mistrust. Bridging that gap now requires effort on both sides: scientists must engage more directly with the public, and citizens must reclaim science as a defense against manipulation. - Philipp Markolin, www.wsws.org

So while I spend most of my time these days researching and interviewing experts from many different fields to map out a solution roadmap, I will still try to be present and participate in correcting pandemic origin discourse.

Because althought it is exhausting, it continues to be important.

Today more than ever, I believe we need to have an honest account of what happened in this origin controversy, not regurgitate retconned bullshit, to adequately address what happened to us as a society.

If you are new, unfamiliar or have forgotten a lot about the details surrounding the lab leak narratives, you are not alone. Matt and Chris from the Decoding the Gurus pod created a fantastic primer on the topic while talking about my book:

If you have any questions, feel free to write in the comments or reach out; and I will try to answer them best I can.

Stay safe, stay smart, stay connected!

“Petrostates, polluters, politicians”, or “plutocrats, pros, propagandists” and sometimes also “the press”; there is no lack of aliterations when it comes to Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez new book “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World”.

The dynamic duo of academic heavy hitters are no strangers to sparring with many of the forces of anti-science aggression they outline in their book.

Michael Mann, a destinguished climate scientist most famous for introducing the now iconic Hockey-stick graph into public climate awareness learned first what it meant to become a target in the information age. Ever since hackers stole and misrepresented scientists’ — including Mann´s — emails to cast doubt on climate research right before the 2009 global climate summit in Copenhagen to sabotage international collaboration, Michael Mann has found himself at the center of the public storm over truth in science. Though multiple independent investigations cleared him and his colleagues of any wrongdoing, the “Climategate” smear campaign cast him as an early villain in what we know understand to be the desired manipulative mirrorworld created by coordinated disinformation networks that Science Under Siege describes. Rather than retreating into the safety of academia, Mann turned outward, becoming one of the most visible defenders of climate science and of scientists’ right to speak without fear.

Peter Hotez, a renowned vaccine scientists, has fought a parallel battle on another front: public health. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the vaccine scientist and pediatrician found himself vilified by anti-vaccine activists — most notably, now HHS secretary RFK Jr cast him as the “OG villain” for writing his deeply personal book about how vaccines did not cause the autism of his daughter, but that autism is a complex genetic disease.

Like Mann, Hotez experienced firsthand the personal cost of promoting evidence-based medicine and confronting misinformation — harassment, threats, and the relentless distortion of his work, which just escalated beyond recognition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Hotez, too, refused to withdraw. His advocacy for vaccines and global health equity, and his insistence that science must serve humanity rather than ideology, echo throughout this book.

Despite the depths of consideration for the human condition - to preserve human health and a livable planet - and appeals to the better angles of humanity shining throughout the book, the most profound impression lingering is the uncharacteristically sharp and plain-speaking tone and tenor the two bring into its pages.

With scathing commentary and righteous fury, the authors rejected to beat around the bush or the all-too-common academic retreat to euphemisms, rather opting for refreshing — even scorched-earth — clarity of where they stand and who their opponents are. One can not help escape the conclusion that the book is drawing a line in the sand with every chapter; a rebuke to the silent and accomodating institutions that rather surrender academic independence than put up a fight.

There is no appeasement when the fight is existential, the authors remind us; often with some heavy leaning into fictional metaphors, such as The Lord of the Rings:

“The battle for Middle Earth wasn´t won by appeasing the dark lord and his forces. It was won by defeating them”

From fossil fuel magnates and billionaire tech pros to the US congress and a captured SCOTUS, or autocratic petrostates and their agents, to home-grown propagandists and media makers, the authors do not shy away from implicating key players and their malevolent activities that pose a threat to our health, our planet, and more and more, our democracy and freedom.

What malevolant activities? The anti-science ecosystem has long grown beyond shadowy think tanks and closed-door fundraisers to lobby politicians; state-actor sabotage, plutocrat campaigns and dark-money sponsorship has since extended to prop up the “pros” and “propagandists” on social media (or “anti-social media and the bots of war”, one subtitle reads); empowering and amplifying their use of emotional myths and conspiracy theories to dominate online discourse, sway bystanders, and with it indirectly how the “press” covers these events.

“For propagandists, a key feature of the antiscience playbook is its reliance on conspiracy theories and conspiracy-filled rhetoric”

Hotez and Mann do a fantastic job in exposing pay-for-play connections, dirty relationships and how they led to inauthentic outcomes in supposedly democratic real-world events. Much of the book is concerned with the important task of correcting the record on some of the misleading highlights of the last years; which for many people not in the weeds of it, might be as surprising as devastating to learn. From COVID-19 lab leak conspiracies to climate doomism fostered by the mainstream press, from New York Times to Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and Fox News and most mainstream outlets inbetween, the seasoned authors hold a special grudge to previous bastions of evidence-based reporting and good-willed truth-seeking institutions that seem to be no more, or at least, strongly diminished when it comes to uphold science. Worse, some like the New York Times actively have become powerful allies of aggressors, justifying the rightwing assault on science and scientists:

With both COVID and climate, the mainstream media have helped keep alive a pernicious but misguided narrative that - to the extent there is distrust of the science by some members of the public - it is the scientists´ fault.

The book describes the “collapse” of the fourth estate and the rise of “client journalism” that has been felt society-wide, and unfortunately, scientists have lost a critical ally in the press when expertise gets discarded or subverted in favor of media content serving vested interests. Even worse, our recent shift into a new dark age of myth, manipulation and magical thinking has made scientists canaries in the coalmine of democracy, and when reading this book, one is left with the sinking feeling that the carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber.

“Our list of allies is growing thin”

The authors report, another reference to The Lord of the Rings. And yet, rather than concede, the authors end the book with broad strokes outlining how the war can still be won, offering “battle plan” and urgency for all of us who want to defend science, democracy and an evidence-based worldview.

The “antiscience superstorm packs a one-two-three punch, and each of the threats must be addressed in concert with the other”, they caution, but for all of them, they advise a 3-pronged strategy for scientists. Communicating constructively because the “best defense is indeed a good offense”; proactively addressing the “triple threat” of invisible scientists, missing science journalism and performative press neutrality head-on. Protecting scientists is another key ingredient, institutionally and legally, that become targets of anti-science assault. And lastly, destroying the disinformation machine; which of course is a challenge that extends far beyond science. On that part, “punishing the pros, propagandists and the press”, “pressuring the plutocrats” and “mending the media”, with the force of the law, new regulations, and ultimately, our pocketbooks and democratic organizing might not surprise the avid reader and democratic citizen who likely has asked themselves the same question at least since the 2024 US election.

“We have to be the change we want to see in the world“

the authors credibly advise, given their own personal trajectories and accomplishments, before ending with another The Lord of the Rings rallying cry that it is worth fighting for what is good in the world, for us, our children and future generations.

Even in dark times, my suspicion is that the furious and clear-eyed moral argument advanced by “Science under siege” will age as well as the science it defends — not because the good guys always win, but because truth and integrity never go out of style.

“Murderer! Murderer! Smug murderer!” The threatening calls from an unknown conspiracy theorist followed Peter Daszak down the seemingly endless hallway of the US Capitol building. Some of his detractors were trying to get him rattled—any reaction, really—holding their phones to his face so they could blast it out to their followers. Also there: Emily Kopp, working for the anti-biotechnology activist group USRTK. She was chastising Peter for causing trillions in damages to the US, following behind him with a professional camera team recording her monologue. This would potentially be good footage for her next attack piece or possibly a movie. After countless books, op-eds, podcasts, and YouTube videos, the lab leak conspiracy genre was lacking a big-screen cinematic experience; rumors about its production had been circulating for months now.

Peter knew it would get bad the moment US Republicans took control of the House in 2022. They had been campaigning as the party of accountability and oversight. A false promise. In reality, they wanted to direct the emotional energy of voters for political gain, whitewashing President Trump’s pandemic failings by using scientists as scapegoats. They also wanted to use the spectacle of public witch trials as campaign events—the offline version of the omnipresent pile-ons from social media. The agitated online mobs had called feverishly for a party that would exert revenge for the trauma of the pandemic, and Republicans were keen to ensure that it was the scientists and their democratic opponents at the other end of that particular pitchfork.

Many pseudo-events had led up to this moment for Peter, from the White Coat Waste Project, using Matt Gaetz and Marco Rubio to cascade awareness of his WIV grant towards an irascible Trump, resulting in its unlawful cancellation on live television. The USRTK playbook included decontextualizing Peter’s emails to give ammunition to conspiracy theorists, while the relentless media onslaught about gain-of-function research stoked a moral panic. Then, the “leak” of DRASTIC’s re-interpreted DEFUSE proposal, the supposed blueprint for creating the pandemic virus. Katherine Eban’s hit pieces cast him and Shi Zhengli as the main villains. All of these were an avalanche of events, in addition to his supposed arrangement with Anthony Fauci as the “kingmaker” of grant funding and the many virologists in cahoots circling the wagon.

Simultaneously, virus hunting had been demonized as well. Myths about the supposed dangers of discovering viruses were powered by biosafety activists, catastrophizing influencers, and sponsored in considerable part by the cryptocurrency fraudster and effective altruism fanatic Sam Bankman-Fried, who donated millions to various media outlets to write scary existential risk stories about virology. EcoHealth Alliance’s mission was recast as creating the conditions for biological warfare, treated by some commentators as the equivalent of nuclear testing. The utility of virus discovery for research and pandemic prevention was ridiculed. Even Republican senators missed no opportunity to blast Peter regularly in the Daily Mail and New York Post for uploading something as innocuous as a short video of a bat eating a banana. Each time he made the news, allegations against him would be recycled and refreshed in people’s memories. No matter what Peter Daszak did or did not do, no matter if he spoke up or withdrew, the drumbeat continued.

The media landscape about him was a bizarre mixture of directed fan fiction and choose-your-own-adventure stories, with multiple co-created narratives about Peter, his role, and his supposed fault mixing, converging, and spinning into ever-new reasons to hate him. His supposed villainy was entertainment at this point, and the third act of his story arc was already prewritten.

“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) led by Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup tweeted in June 2023. They all had big plans for the lab origin myth. In early 2023, they were laying out a path for the public shaming of scientists, first and foremost Peter Daszak, his colleague David Morens at the NIAID, and including Dr. Anthony Fauci. The HSSCP and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA) were the main tools for those ambitions.

On November 14, 2023, behind closed doors, they pestered Peter with questions for over nine hours. “It is clear that they take it as a fact that we did reckless gain-of-function research,” Peter told me at the time, despite the NIH disagreeing. They also constantly hammered him about his role in the WHO mission and the supposed NIH-sponsored gain-of-function experiment The Intercept had homed in on. And, of course, the DEFUSE proposal, or more accurately, the distorted media version of it. His lawyers had advised him to not argue and contest the many false interpretations of technical details; he would come off as adversarial, and the politicians would blame their scientific ignorance and confusion on him. Rather, he should keep it simple and reiterate that this experiment was not gain-of-function based on the NIH definition and that the DEFUSE proposal was never funded, nor was the work ever conducted. He tried to stick to the advice, but he could not prevent himself from clarifying why certain technical allegations were just false and nonsensical. After the arduous interview, he left uncertain of what would happen next.

Then, radio silence.

Sometime in March 2024, Peter naively thought that he might not be called in for a public hearing. The vibe had seemingly moved on; the HSSCP was focusing their efforts on giving anti-vaxxers a platform, chastising school closures, lockdown measures, and issuing a subpoena to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “to answer for these deadly policy failures.” The usual political clown shows in a heated election year. The rewriting efforts of Trump-era policy failures had apparently shifted towards blaming the Democrats. Perhaps the lab leak narrative was just not that interesting or useful anymore after four years? Some virologists expressed the same feeling; the story was an old and tired trope at this point.

They would be wrong.

Shortly after Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the primary campaign, thereby securing the presidential nomination of the Republican Party again, the winds shifted quickly. His enablers in Congress focused on getting him elected, mobilizing voters anew. With Trump’s chances of winning the White House against an aging Joe Biden looking increasingly promising, they needed to create momentum for the next Republican policy agenda—an agenda that became known as Project 2025.

Briefly, Project 2025 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks. The 922-page conservative policy magnum opus and “mandate for leadership” set out to radically transform the US. It aims to remove a lot of checks and balances necessary for a democratic society, bestowing the executive with unilateral power to implement their agenda and replacing tens of thousands of apolitical bureaucratic positions with pre-screened MAGA loyalists, including in the Department of Justice and scientific institutions such as the NIH, FDA, or CDC. Public health measures and climate action would be virtually impossible under the new regime. It would strip influence and independence from scientific bodies such as the CDC and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and bring them under tight political control. Similar plans have been laid out to remove FDA drug approvals for reproductive health care. Project 2025 is an all-out political assault on US science and institutions. Scientific American quoted Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, about the Project 2025 agenda:

Such a radical anti-science policy agenda needs many motivated rationalizations to convince ordinary conservative Americans (who remain overall supportive of science) of its appropriateness. The HSSCP and other congressional committees were ideally positioned to create the right pseudo-events for that purpose. Any epic drama starts with a great villain, and the lab leak myth had just the right story ingredients to give politicians what they needed.

The HSSCP announced Daszak’s public hearing on social media on April 4, 2024:

🚨BREAKING🚨

EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will testify at a public hearing on May 1, 2024.

Dr. Daszak must answer questions about COVID-19 origins, dangerous gain-of-function research, and his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

They claimed that “Dr. Daszak and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research” and that “mounting evidence continues to show that COVID likely originated from a Wuhan lab.” They urged Peter to come to clarify his statements, insinuating he had “directly contradict[ed] previously uncovered evidence about his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology & his oversight of gain-of-function research.” Throughout April, the HSCCP would ramp up their attacks along the same line. Familiarity. Repetition. What they were missing was novelty. So, what’s the twist this time?

The online absurdity reached a tragic peak when scientifically illiterate House representatives started to impose their ignorant interpretation of the DEFUSE proposal upon Peter’s supposed intention, alleging nothing less but a thought crime about a proposal that was never funded and work that was never conducted.

Lying to Congress is a crime.

@EcoHealthNYC President Dr. Peter Daszak told us he intended to conduct risky gain-of-function research in North Carolina. However, recent evidence suggests he actually planned to conduct the research in Wuhan.

On May 1 — we will seek the truth.

Open intimidation. The politicians threatened publicly that if Peter didn’t concede to their interpretation of unreality, he would be in criminal jeopardy. Now, that is new enough.

Like a marketing campaign before a big event, the HSCCP regularly used their Twitter posts as teasers about the spectacle they had prepared for viewers:

In less than one week, EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will appear before @COVIDSelecT for a public hearing.

✔️ COVID-19 origins

✔️ Gain-of-function research

✔️ Wuhan Institute of Virology

✔️ Dr. Anthony Fauci

…and more are on the table.

May 1, 2024 | 10:00am ET

While conspiratorial communities online and Republican-aligned niche media had covered the upcoming public hearing of Peter Daszak throughout April, the overall traction in wider discourse was still limited to a few hundred thousand online people. Sizeable, but not news-cycle defining. That was to change exactly seven days before Peter Daszak’s hearing. Rep. Brad Wenstrup announced the bombshell in the best velocity hacker fashion: Dr. Anthony Fauci was up next. His hearing would happen in June, a few weeks after Peter’s. Now that announcement got the attention of mainstream outlets such as The Daily Caller, The Washington Post, and Fox News, putting Peter’s hearing on the map. Dutifully, Fox News framed Peter’s hearing as the preamble to the main blockbuster:

Wenstrup said that the panel will also hold a public hearing with EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak on May 1 that will serve as a crucial component into the origins of COVID-19 and provide essential background ahead of Fauci’s public hearing.

Free advertisement for the upcoming HSSCP-choreographed influence campaign. Finally, on May 1, 2024, the show was ready to start. And it did with a big bang.

Precisely 12 minutes before his scheduled public hearing, as Peter was still being chased down the hallway, the HSCCP Twitter account posted an official-looking document. It was the Republican majority interim report “recommending EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak be formally debarred and criminally investigated.”

Criminal investigation? Debarment? These are radical actions, especially as their sole evidentiary merit seems to lie in the fact that EcoHealth Alliance sent an NIH progress report in too late. However, with the lab leak narrative, the lack of supportive evidence was never a barrier to action. Peter was indeed referred to the Justice Department for allegedly lying to Congress and misleading funding agencies about conducting gain-of-function research. The NIH was not off the hook either. The report leveraged the same charge of facilitating dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan “contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

In other words, heads were finally going to roll.

Even more cynically, the report openly tried to rewrite history, claiming that “the Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the WIV and instructed the NIH to fix the problem” and that “this intervention likely prevented EcoHealth from continuing to conduct dangerous research.” The shutdown of EcoHealth’s grant in 2020, which had to be reversed because of illegality, was now whitewashed as a necessary and just action. The purpose of scapegoating Peter Daszak and NIH officials was pretty clear:

[According to] evidence collected by the Select Subcommittee, there are serious and systemic weaknesses in the federal government’s—particularly NIH’s—grant-making processes. The weaknesses identified by the Committees not only place United States taxpayer dollars at risk of waste, fraud, and abuse but also risk the national security of the United States. These weaknesses can only be remedied through both executive and legislative action.

Project 2025 officially kicked off.

All of this happened before Peter even read his introductory testimony. But if the verdict was already in, why go through with the public hearing after the fact? Virality, of course. To cement the rewriting of the past in the public’s mind and prepare them for the atrocities of tomorrow. If you make it trend, you make it true.

“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the HSSCP had announced. After all, nothing flies in our gladiatorial arena of social media more than a public witch hunt. In the factional war of all versus all, consensus can only be found when we come together around shared enemies. Politicians know this best.

Peter’s hearing went predictably with posturing politicians trying to look good on camera while reading their prepared monologues. Peter, aware that the verdict was already out, was sitting in as a campaign prop, facing his accusers, getting cut off any time he tried to clarify or correct the record. An exercise in cruelty. He was still fighting for his reputation when the string had already closed around his neck. The setup, imagery, and his futile attempts to satisfy the accusers just provided the gravitas to the choreographed event.

In their monologues, Republican representatives really did not offer to lay out any evidence or examine his charges; rather, they would try to find ways to insinuate and link Peter Daszak´s work to various grand conspiracy myths of the day. First and foremost, he facilitated gain-of-function research in China, helped the Chinese which caused the pandemic. But there were also some tangents and other dog whistles. For example, Rep. James Comer from Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Accountability and Oversight, tried to paint him as a spy or CIA asset, or at least somehow in cahoots with the intelligence agency. “Does the intelligence community know what happened in the Wuhan lab? Did the intelligence community believe that China was manufacturing a bioweapon?” A nod to MAGA Republicans who believe that the “deep state,” including the intelligence community, was somehow involved in creating the pandemic, to institute vaccine mandates, totalitarian control, or whatever. Peter Daszak answered that it was a question for the intelligence agency, then referenced the 2023 ODNI report, where all intelligence agencies ruled out that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon.

Rep. Michael Cloud from Texas used his five minutes to ask if Dr. Daszak had been engaged with social media companies and whether he agreed with their moderation policies. Nothing to do with Peter, but a dog whistle for a different battle over misinformation and disinformation research, another field of science that Republicans are attacking along with public health, medicine, climate change, and a general evidence-based worldview. He also questioned Peter Daszak’s patriotism and allegiance, given that he works with a country that does “unrestricted warfare against the United States.” More red meat to the broad anti-China coalition in the US. Peter replied that to stop pandemics, we need scientists to go to the places where they emerge and that, ultimately, this is in the interest of US citizens.

Rep. Morgan Griffith from Virginia spent his five minutes in a virtual monologue, talking himself into a rage about Dr. Daszak being a supposed liar while not letting Dr. Daszak address any of his contentions. Overall, a lot of grandstanding was expected from this side of the political spectrum that had long made up its mind about the myths they wanted to buy into. Their verdict and recommendations were entirely expected.

The real surprise for Peter was the other side of the political aisle. Representatives from the Democratic Party had very different goals and talking points prepared, potentially to the surprise of many who did not pay close attention. Their overall goal was to paint Dr. Daszak as dishonest, self-serving, and even fraudulent.

Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz from California spent considerable time claiming Dr. Daszak was conflict-of-interest-ridden given his involvement in the Lancet letter. Why did he not acknowledge he was working with the lab that was the focus of conspiracy theories? The intelligence communities say the question is still open, but “the statement you authored attempted to summarily close the question,” Rep. Ruiz claimed. Peter Daszak explained that conspiracy theories at the time were about bioweapons, HIV inserts, and snake DNA—all prominent conspiracy theories. He did not imagine, back in February 2020, that this statement condemning these circulating conspiracy theories would be a conflict of interest. But Rep. Ruiz was not interested in his explanations, emphasizing that Peter Daszak did not explicitly state that he was working with WIV. Why was Rep. Ruiz so hell-bent on a conflict of interest statement for an opinion letter?

Rep. Debbie Dingell from Michigan took up a conspiratorial talking point about the 2018 DARPA proposal, which was never funded. The anti-science pressure group USRTK had claimed that earlier drafts of that proposal would expose an attempt to mislead the federal agency because of a side note stating that some assays might be performed in China. In reality, the submitted draft to DARPA had more specifications and did not support any assertions that misled the agency. Also, if the proposal had been funded, the agency had to submit and agree on a detailed work plan with exact allocations of where and what work would be performed. Either way, there is no substance to these assertions of a supposed thoughtcrime.

Yet Rep. Dingell was not interested in Dr. Daszak’s explanations of how these allegations made no sense given the grant-making process. She just said, “Well, there are appearance issues here… We won’t accuse you of creating COVID-19, but to the extent that you have considered misrepresenting facts, we consider this a very serious mistake,” she cut him off.

Rep. Deborah Ross from North Carolina went all in on another completely unrelated project that the NIH had awarded to Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli to study coronaviruses in China. The multi-year grant had annual reporting requirements, and there was a problem with the year-five report, which Dr. Daszak had not uploaded on time in 2019. The reason was a supposed banality; a software or related error in the NIH system prevented EcoHealth from uploading the report. “The system locked us out; we contacted NIH; we received no response,” Dr. Daszak explained. He had emailed his grants manager to upload everything; the committee had the emails corroborating that EcoHealth intended to upload the report. However, once again, nobody seemed to care.

“The NIH has conducted an electronic forensic investigation into their report submission systems and found no evidence of a lockout,” she claimed. Rep. Ross went on to state that the rules need to be followed when taxpayer money is involved, and although EcoHealth Alliance had been “exemplary” for four years, that it did not happen in year-five invited questioning from her colleagues. But what exactly were the Democrats questioning? Again, none of this has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19 or the pandemic but about a reporting mishap (at most, a violation) on an unrelated grant.

On and on the Democrats would go about these trivialities, as if EcoHealth Alliance was not an organization with dozens of people, multiple projects, collaborators worldwide, and a million things going on that might sometimes have human mistakes in the mix. The 18-month-long audit of EcoHealth by the Department of Human Health and Services (DHHS) has found some errors but no significant violations, after all. So why were the Democrats so hell-bent on painting Dr. Daszak in a very negative light? Rep. Ruiz stated in his final summary:

I wanna be clear, nothing produced for the Select Subcommittee over the last 14 months, 425.000 documents, over 100 hours of close-door testimony substantiates claims that federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance and the Institute in Wuhan caused the pandemic.

But somehow that would not excuse Dr. Daszak’s alleged lack of transparency. “I do think, at the end of the day, Dr. Daszak, your responses here are unsatisfactory,” Rep. Ruiz would finish up. “You claim you submitted, and yet it was not submitted.” “Your administrative responsibilities and lack of reporting in a timely manner are concerning.” “You are explaining things to your convenience to avoid consequences, and that is concerning.”

Remember, the Subcommittee’s report was released before the public hearing; no matter what Dr. Daszak explained to them, their agreed-upon verdict with Republicans was already in. “It is important that you and your actions as grantees are held accountable,” Ruiz finished his monologue.

The Republican counterparts were happy, congratulating each other for their bipartisan agreement. Rep. Wenstrup had the final word and closed the hearing with skepticism toward scientists. “We cannot just blindly trust the scientists because they are scientists.… Especially when they are not forthcoming and honest,” pointing at Dr. Daszak. “Getting money for a federal grant? That is a problem,” he listed Peter’s supposed crimes. “Hiding behind different definitions of gain-of-function research,” he continued with performatively raised eyebrows.

Rep. Wenstrup clearly enjoyed his moment. “There are scientists in China,” he reminded everybody. “A country that is an adversary to the United States of America.” And Peter was supposedly masterminding a “misleading grant application to DARPA, downplaying the Chinese part,” he gleefully added. “You did not disclose your collaboration with the WIV in The Lancet,” he raised his eyebrows again. “This is a troubling pattern of behavior that we are seeing,” he paused briefly, “and conduct as well,” he added for impact. The hearing between Democrats and Republicans was then closed amicably.

I had watched the hearing live with increasing discomfort, and I wasn’t alone. Scientists from three continents were chatting with me about their unease. “Shitshow” and “The whole thing makes me sick. Political theater at scientists’ expense” would be some of the sentiments expressed. But I think something a bit more concerning was going on.

The Democrats attacked Dr. Daszak because he was considered a weak point in the coming Project 2025 assault on the CDC, NIH, NIAID, and other agencies. Especially with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing scheduled just weeks later, throwing Peter under the bus quickly might be the right defense strategy. Already in the interim report, the HSSCP Republicans stated that their goal is to “reign in the unelected bureaucracy, especially within government-funded public health.” Institutional expertise and independence out, political decision-making in.

The Republicans further recommended granting the NIH director or the HHS secretary, both political appointees, not career public servants, “the authority to immediately suspend a grant determined to be a threat to national security.” In other words, they want to make President Trump's action by canceling EcoHealth Alliance’s grant on TV in 2020, which NIH unlawfully enacted, legal for the next Trump administration. In that future, all scientific grants will henceforth be up to the whims of the executive. Good luck with getting funding to study any politically inconvenient topic.

The committee also wants to “incorporate the national security and intelligence community into the grant-making process,” specifically for countries they deem a concern—another vehicle to curtail the independence of science in the US and bring it under political control.

Given these larger political circumstances and the immediate threat to independent institutions, I believe the Democrats decided to try to direct heat away from the NIH and other federal agencies. These organizations awarded EcoHealth Alliance with grant funding for research and are responsible for oversight. They approved the work done in China. They also made themselves liable by canceling Peter’s grant unlawfully at Trump’s orders.

By painting Peter Daszak as this dishonest, conflict of interest-hiding, deceitful actor, the Democrats laid out their defense strategy for institutions. Even if these agencies were found to have financed risky research, or even gain-of-function research, as they all deeply believed to be true, it was without NIH approval. It was not a failure of oversight but deliberate fraud by Peter Daszak. And the unlawful cancellation of the grant in 2020 was just and reasonable given these circumstances.

A convenient political framing. They upheld their oversight but were misled by the uncooperative Chinese and their conduit, the “shady” Dr. Daszak (whose character they just smeared). They then acted decisively to shut them down. In my opinion, they were throwing EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak to the wolves in hopes they would get their fill and relent from pressing Democrats in an ailing presidential campaign. Sounded pretty good if the Republicans let them have this one. Which, surprisingly, they did, at least for now.

Again, this is my interpretation of their actions, as I am not privy to any concrete backroom deal, they may have made with their Republican counterparts. Maybe the Democrats independently decided on that strategy simply because nothing makes for better bipartisanship agreements than a shared villain. The Democrats probably felt that it was a smart move in order to protect the institutions from false allegations of willingly financing gain-of-function research in China.

Nobody at the HSSCP cared that SARS-CoV-2 had nothing to do with gain-of-function research and that no lab could have produced a virus like SARS-CoV-2. The tragic reality was that politicians did not care about any facts or scientific reality, only about their voters’ desires.

Today, 66% of Americans believe the virus came from a lab, many of them feverishly. In a general election year with razor-thin margins and everything at stake, the Democrats certainly did not want to open new avenues of attack against them. No party wants to be in a position of having to educate citizens about technical gain-of-function definitions or defend a complicated scientific reality their voters do not want to believe in anyway. No politician wants their party blamed for the trauma of the pandemic. For the Democrats, it was just too risky to be perceived as defending EcoHealth Alliance, or worse, as the party covering anything up, especially with China involved. The Biden administration has always taken a hard stance on China; the origins investigation was a good topic to show. All Democrats needed to do to create parity with Republicans was to get in on the spectacle. Be even more vicious than them. Who cares about the fate of a non-profit organization with no power to push back? Especially one led by a scientist who makes such a great villain? With democracy itself at stake in the upcoming election?

Politically, they likely saw it as the right move, given the circumstances. Yet by making that political maneuver—that it is better to play into popular sentiment rather than risk exposure by sticking up for facts—I worry that Democrats in the House have embraced the same pugilistic worldview of their opponents and information combatants online, where power and perception matter much more than an evidence-based worldview.

If you make it trend, you make it true. And scientists all over the US felt the political wind shifting.

Prof. Angela Rasmussen told the magazine Science that she “was disappointed that the Democrats joined the Republicans” in what she described as “essentially an attack on science.”

It’s a very dangerous situation because most scientists who are approaching any problem — whether it’s the origins of the pandemic, whether it’s anything else — are going to think twice: should I actually get involved in research that is high impact but potentially politically controversial?

While all these House committee hearings have the makeup of an interrogation and imbue a courtroom feeling, they are anything but. Peter came to testify, but his verdict had been posted on Twitter before he had even read his opening statement. There was no defense lawyer or jury present. Politicians constantly interrupted him to deliver their prepared five-minute soundbite monologues. It was a televised witch trial, not a legal ruling. However, most media treated it as a definitive case anyway.

EcoHealth Alliance and its scientists felt the impact immediately. A five-million-dollar research grant for analyzing the risk of bat viruses interacting with wildlife farms in Vietnam, all but finally approved, suddenly was pulled from the process without comment or justification. This type of work is exactly what scientists believe could elucidate the emergence of COVID-19 through the wildlife industry. Now the human cost and fall-out was real. “It’s crazy to see the death knell of my scientific career mentioned so casually,” Dr. Cadhla Firth, a talented evolutionary biologist who studies zoonoses and works at EcoHealth Alliance, wrote on Twitter in response. Laughs and derision ensued, with commentators happy to point out how she had it coming for causing the pandemic. She replied:

I didn’t start working for EHA until 2021, so I’m not sure what I have to do with any pandemic-related bullshit? You clearly aren’t aware, but EHA isn’t just Peter, there are a lot of amazing scientists in the organization that have never even spoken to Peter.

Two weeks later, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) sent a letter to EcoHealth Alliance, informing them of their suspension from procurement programs and proposed debarment for years. With these actions, politicians hung a Damoclasian sword over the organization, stigmatizing it to the outside world.

“I want to remind everyone that we have not yet been given the chance to respond to allegations.” Peter would clarify on Twitter a few weeks later. He was now gearing up for a legal case because, in the end, the courts need to decide whether or not it is lawful for the DHHS to debar an organization from funding. A measure like that would need to show evidence of substantial wrongdoing, not mostly meritless allegations, and a late grant report submission. “We will contest every one of them, with substantial evidence, both to the HHS & publicly,” Peter showed some fighting spirit.

In an evidence-based world, his chances in court are pretty good, for as long as “innocent until proven guilty” remains a core American legal concept. In a law-based society, everybody deserves a fair hearing and a proper process. Only in the witch trials of old, as well as autocratic regimes, does the burden of proof get inverted. There, the accused have to somehow prove their innocence to the satisfaction of their accusers. Often an impossible task. I fear that, at least in our modern media ecosystems, we have once again reached that point.

“Covidselect has not received anything that proves your innocence, and NIH moved to debar you,” the HSSCP mocked in response to Peter’s above tweet. The cynicism was staggering. After their publicity stunt and blatant abuse of political power, the politicians were the ones who get to define reality now, continuing: “EcoHealth Alliance, under your direction, facilitated dangerous gain-of-function research in China and repeatedly violated the terms of its NIH grant.”

Their implication was clear: he helped create the pandemic and could not prove otherwise. He was guilty until proven innocent. Bystanders reacted accordingly. The comment sections under the exchange were full of calls to put Daszak in jail without trial or sometimes directly to the guillotine. Often replies were accompanied by the hashtag “Nuremberg 2.0,” in reference to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals. Many celebrated that the HSSCP, and by extension, “their team,” finally got the first one of those responsible for the trauma of the pandemic.

It was disgusting to watch, and not over by far. Pouring gasoline on that fire was Alina Chan, with the help of The New York Times. On the day of the Fauci hearing, June 3^rd 2024, they published an elaborately crafted and highly manipulative op-ed with full graphic support from the NYT’s editorial team. The article must have been months in the making, timed perfectly to create buzz for the witch hunt and to legitimize the Republican attack on gain-of-function research and Dr. Fauci, who the op-ed advised to “cooperate with the investigation.” Scientists were shocked to have the paper of record invite a well-known activist to do political propaganda. Multiple outlets featured scathing commentary from scientists about Alina Chan’s piece and NYT’s enabling role in the weeks after. The NYT’s responsible editor did not answer my request for comments about the peculiar timing either. Either way, it was too little, too late to make a difference. The NYT’s op-ed, along with the buzz from Dr. Fauci’s hearing, hit the infosphere like a meteor. A masterpiece of velocity hacking, from the misleading graphics to the headline to the timing of publication. The world reacted. Virologists told me that random bystanders from their social circle who had not thought about the pandemic origins since 2021 asked them whether it was now proven that it leaked from a lab because they had read the NYT article. If you make it trend, you make it true.

While virology, in general, faced the brunt of Alina Chan’s article, the aftermath was even more torturous to Peter. The New York Times’ unethical op-ed legitimized the HSSCP witch hunts in the eyes of the public and elites. Peter explained to me that, for EcoHealth Alliance, it was:

…pretty damaging, because everyone here reads it in New York. And the people who run foundations read it, and the donors read it, and they all think it’s true because The New York Times has done a glossy thing about it.

With the paper of record going all-in on the gain-of-function lab leak narrative, prospective donors and steadfast supporters of EcoHealth Alliance grew hesitant to further support the organization. They had to think of their own reputations. If there is so much smoke, how could there not be fire?

Then came the killing blow. “So, at first the agencies didn’t instantly terminate all the grants,” shared Peter. His organization was involved in many critical research projects around the world, outside of coronaviruses and bats. Studying the impact of deforestation in Brazil or conservation efforts in Liberia would be among those. They were also cooperating with many US universities on projects in South Africa and Borneo. The DHHS suspension and proposed debarment did not demand these multi-year projects immediately stop. EcoHealth Alliance scientists involved in these financed projects would still have some runway to finish up—at least usually.

But that lasted a few weeks, and then Senator Joni Ernst… She wrote to all the agencies, saying, ‘Explain to me whether you have suspended EcoHealth Grants or not.’ So, after that, they started terminating them.

One by one, upon pressure from the same US senator who was outraged by Peter’s “giving a bat a banana” video he shot in Thailand, agencies felt pressured to terminate successfully running and paid-for projects. Projects that were often awarded primarily to US universities with academic researchers in the lead and EcoHealth Alliance only as a subrecipient in a supportive role. Details did not matter. “EcoHealth should never get their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars again,” Senator Joni Ernst stated in her press release.

With these actions, they have been made the ultimate pariah, ending any further cooperation even with US universities. The politician’s signal to the academics and academic institutions was clear: cooperate with EcoHealth and face termination of your grants too.

Systematically, the actions and influence of news outlets, politicians, conspiracy theorists, influencers, and media activists worked together to dismantle any revenue stream to keep EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization for the public good, in existence. An NGO does not sit on a lot of cash; they do not turn a profit; all their grant money goes out to research materials, scientists, and collaborators. If EcoHealth Alliance runs out of money before the court trial about the legality of their debarment starts, even a successful legal defense becomes meaningless. The organization and its people will be long gone. That seems to be the plan—letting them bleed out rather than making their case in court.

By the time we chatted, the court hearing had already been pushed back a second time to a later date. EcoHealth Alliance had to let go half of the staff, often rapidly, because their grants were terminated out of the blue. Brilliant scientists working for the public good are suddenly out on the street. Others hang on by the thinnest of threads, but likely not for much longer either; that includes Peter himself.

“People are very unhappy,” Peter acknowledged, as if life had been sucked out of him. I quickly asked what happened to the international collaborators of EcoHealth Alliance, some of which I got to know. “It’s been a bit of a mixed bag. They all lost our money. Some of them are angry,” he said.

Scientists in Malaysia took it best. When they were cut off, they also had to let go of some staff as well, but “they are determined to raise some money elsewhere.” To not give up. Other collaborators retreated. According to Peter, Supaporn stopped responding. They had a paper:

…that was ready to go on this new virus that’s close to SARS-COV-2; it binds to human ACE2. A clear and present danger… We need to do some more analyses. That’s gonna take some time. We don’t have any money to do that, and that’s not gonna come out. She’s basically not going to publish that work.

Of course, virus hunting has become very controversial in Thailand as well. Supaporn faces a lot of hardship on her own. No Southeast Asian country wants bat scientists to create new data about the pandemic’s origin. Nobody wants to be blamed by a world that has not made its peace about natural risks that span borders, industries, and peoples.

Other EcoHealth collaborators, especially in Africa, were hardest hit. Critical projects and conservation efforts stopped. Rescued animals are again without protection and care. People lost their livelihood or purpose. Anger, depression, and despair had gripped some formerly funded collaborators. The grim reality is that many people, animals, and communities will suffer because of US representatives playing politics with science. Politics with pandemic prevention efforts. Some critically important science will not be done; some will not get published. Training of regional experts and educational interactions with communities will subside. Progress of the last decade will be reversed.

This fallout is a lot to put on a person’s shoulder. Peter Daszak was always proud of the meaningful work EcoHealth Alliance did. To see it all come crashing down is tormenting. “This is, you are going through a horrible psychological torture,” the haunted zoologist confessed to me. The events flashed past his inner eye. What could he have said differently? Done differently? Was he trapped from the start? He confessed before trailing off in thought:

Despite the difficult years, the Peter Daszak I got to know a bit in late 2022 was still a hopeful guy, embattled but not bitter. He had a can-do attitude toward problems; it was part of his charisma. Now, our conversations were more stagnant, almost like an eerie distance had emerged, separating him from the ground he was standing on. His recurring nightmares haunted him because his brain struggled to find a solution to a problem that was not of his creation and remained elusive to his control. He can’t even wrestle control from his lost thoughts anymore. “So it’s right there, and then you wake up, and then it’s reality. And then you have to face your reality.”

§

The HSSCP was not the only Republican-led committee formed to do pandemic revisionism and political propaganda. Four other Republican-led committees also wanted to extract their pound of flesh from scientists, including EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak. Virologists would not be their only target either. Ever since 2023, these revenge committees have called public health experts, institutional leaders, scientific journal editors, and even disinformation researchers in front of Congress.

Innocence was no protection from punishment. In 2023, the HSSCP called in Prof. Kristian Andersen and Prof. Robert Garry to testify about the “proximal origin” paper and Fauci’s alleged role in suppressing the lab leak hypothesis. While the virologists did absolutely nothing wrong and admirably held themselves to the public grilling, making the Republicans look stupid, one might think that they came away well. But that would be wrong. Because Republicans had abused their power and issued subpoenas for troves of private messages of scientists, they could immediately retaliate for their botched hearing. They “accidentally” leaked subpoenaed private messages of virologists to motivated propagandists, effectively tasking them to smear virologists through decontextualization. The USRTK playbook, if you want, but hypercharged by the might and resources of a political party in power. Client propagandists on Substack did much of their propaganda, crafting a malicious character assassination through decontextualizing private slack messages that went viral.

The smear campaign proved not only profitable for the propagandists, but also very effective. Not only did they discredit Prof. Kristian Andersen and his coauthors’ reputations in the eyes of the public until this day, but it was also creating doubt about all virologists and science in general. A year later, right after the Fauci hearing, a New York Times op-ed columnist was given the space to falsely allege that it was scientists like the “proximal origin” authors that destroyed public trust in science. The misleading of the public all started with those lying virologists and “Dr. Fauci’s teleconference” for them. Revisionist history from punditry is all too eager to show scientists their place. In reality, the virologists’ only real offense was to do good science that happened to interfere with political myth-making and popular sentiment.

Unfortunately, politicians wielding the power of the state against scientists will find many influencers and commentators in big newspapers and elsewhere all too willing to legitimize their abuse. Especially when their interests are aligned to shut up and marginalize those pesky fact-checkers and myth-busters that sabotage the popular narratives that made them powerful.

“The point of the exercise was punishment, not oversight,” Renée DiResta would write about these congressional hearings. Disinformation researchers like herself were facing the same treatment by Republican-led revenge committees. She and others had come under fire by Republicans because they tracked disinformation around election interference and influence operations. Their research findings tended to somehow always interfere with what right-wing influencers and politicians tried to sell the public, such as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or that social media had censored conservatives. So, of course, these researchers had to pay for their audacity to speak the truth, too.

The wild theories spun in the online fever swamps can serve as a pretext for something even more sinister: Politicians, who wield real power, citing propaganda as justification for sham investigations and other forms of retaliation.

“They retaliate, however, because real power is at stake, and discrediting the people exposing them is the best way to cast doubt,” Renée DiResta would further explain. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where her research group was based, was bombarded with subpoenas and lawsuits, racking up legal costs into the millions for the university. Ultimately, Stanford got the message and did not extend Renée’s employment, effectively shutting down the research group. As a reward for her stellar research, Renée also found herself the villain of a networked smear campaign, alleging that she was a CIA spy masterminding the deep state’s censorship-industrial complex. She, of course, knew what would come her way once the ridiculous narrative was picked up by the influential:

It was glaringly obvious to those of us who study propaganda and disinformation what was going to happen: documents and excerpts of interviews would be leaked to ideologically aligned propaganda outlets, and those mentioned in the resulting coverage would be targeted by online mobs.

Retreating from public life offers no remedy against these networked attacks.

Playing ostrich does not stop the rumors or end the story; it simply lets somebody else control the narrative. If you are sufficiently interesting or useful as a villain in a conspiracy theory, the propaganda machine and rumor mill can keep recycling claims and allegations endlessly.

Renée wrote about her experiences in her book. Having a front-row seat to a modern-day witch hunt is certainly not how she expected her research on propaganda to go. As attacks on scientists across the board mounted, we kept in touch. She was not happy but remains steadfast for the moment, hoping that reality will eventually exonerate her work and reputation. “The people who stood up to McCarthyism are the ones history remembers,” she said, referencing another era where the allegiance of scientists was questioned by an authoritarian political movement. A movement empowered by the “red scare” moral panic and enjoying broad societal support.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist, sees parallels between the current anti-science aggression experienced by biomedical science and the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union under Stalin. While history does not really repeat itself, it certainly likes to rhyme. I would offer that such anti-science aggression has become a necessity for old and new powers in the information age who want to entrench their particular worldview and consolidate their grip over public discourse and with it, wider society.

The lab leak narrative enjoys the buy-in of the wider public, as well as motivated conspiracy theorists, activists, influencers, dark-money-funded NGOs, tabloid newspapers, mainstream outlets, politicians, diplomats, even some intelligence agencies, and the leaders of nation-states. A diffuse coalition of convenience, profit, and power, aligned by a shared narrative. That makes the current lab leak alliance no less forceful or dangerous than past ideological movements or moral panics in my opinion.

This is not solely a US problem either. Science is under pressure globally. A broad anti-science coalition aligned with a grand geopolitical narrative is scary and dangerous for any scientist whose research tends to interfere with said narrative. All around the world, virologists and scientists I’ve gotten to know see their work threatened, find themselves targets of abuse, and face general suspicion about their motives from international institutions, governments, and citizens.

We already heard about how Prof. Alice Hughes has tried to pull her life back together. Shi Zhengli has not left China since and has recently felt renewed pressure on her because she dared speak to foreigners, including me. Many Chinese scientists faced repercussions for sharing data, albeit these are rarely as public as when Zhang Yongzhen, who published the first genome with Eddie Holmes, was found sleeping in protest outside his lab. He had lost it. One of my contacts told me about another Chinese scientist losing his position for greenlighting the upload of the Huanan market meta-transcriptomics data that Florence Débarre discovered. Others, who will not be named, are in a precarious situation because they have been talking to Western scientists informally or privately.

Linfa Wang from Singapore, who tried to keep a low profile and not speak up until recently, has somehow evaded being dragged into the worst abuses, although I learned his name is regularly flaunted by Republican Senate staffers. I wonder what happens when the documentary movie comes out to raise public awareness of him. Either way, his students like Wee Chee and other young virologists look into a future of hardship because, on top of all the professional challenges—the painstaking work, the long hours, the isolation—their research brings with it, they will have to contend with a hostile society. A society that does not want them trained and removes funding for the profession, sabotages their publications, and punishes them if they get too visible. Bat researchers everywhere face suspicion and riled-up regional communities that do not want them around anymore for fear of governmental repercussions. That Supaporn Wacharapluasedee in Thailand has broken off contacts is maybe less surprising. She’s had her fair share of hardships, losing her lab once already because of the origin myth, being investigated, and having her collected bat samples destroyed.

Even in healthy democracies, scientists are not necessarily safe. Eddie Holmes and Dominic Dwyer in Australia faced their hardships, with the former recounting a harrowing experience and security incident at his home during the height of the “proximal origin” witch hunt in the US Congress. The Murdoch media empire in Australia is influential, and Eddie makes a great domestic villain for Australian audiences. Even today, conspiratorial mobs insult him, write him messages, and sabotage his institutional email address. British scientists are very much in the same boat. Anti-science aggression has gone global everywhere, and it correlates with how outspoken scientists are.

Merely talking to me was also not without risk. Uploading our interview on YouTube got Brazilian parasitologist Carlos Morel in trouble with the WHO press office. As a member of SAGO, another advisory expert committee to investigate the origins of pandemics, he dared to say there was no evidence of a lab leak. Because he keeps speaking publicly, fighting the good fight for evidence over fiction, he has become a target of conspiracy theorists and their media outlets. Other researchers reach out in private to me, not keen on becoming the next target of online hate mobs or politicians. Junior researchers worry about their careers, but even established professors try to avoid attention in this climate.

Even if not directly attacked, virologists and public health scientists feel pressure mounting from every side. Already on a shoestring budget, frontline defenders against avian influenza and other emerging diseases like Erik Karlsson and Filip Claes in Cambodia need at least five times the manpower to uphold their responsibilities for pandemic anticipation and prevention. However, that support is unlikely to arrive. The WHO has been paralyzed and made ineffective by the geopolitical tap dance around US and Chinese interests. Governments, funders, and NGOs everywhere seem to have lost interest in public health and abdicated their responsibilities of acting to prevent the next pandemic. China even pulled out of international collaborations for wildlife and wet market surveillance and loosened its laws against this industry again. What future are we building for ourselves? How can we mend the bleeding scars of the growing chasm between societal beliefs and scientific research?

Virologists who have been hit hardest have been sounding the alarm not only about their research but also about the damage the false lab leak myth is doing to science.

Science is humanity’s best insurance against threats from nature, but it is a fragile enterprise that must be nourished and protected. The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. Yet, the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.

We must understand that scientists are a minority in every society they are embedded in. Science values evidence over tribal affiliation, which is why it has no friends among political camps or extremists that tend to spearhead attacks on them. Because scientists are just not part of any larger political tribe, and most of society is oblivious to what happens to them in today’s fragmented information ecosystem, nobody comes to their defense when anti-science aggressors come for them.

This has some very direct consequences. First, inconvenient scientists are picked off one by one. Second, anybody who speaks up in their defense might become the next target. Third, nobody is safe to pursue independent research that might interfere with popular beliefs or power.

Take Marion Koopmans, whose role in the WHO mission has been questioned in her home country’s parliament several times. “Right-wing politicians were immediately attacking me,” she recounted what had happened to her. Lawsuits followed. “We had several court cases,” not necessarily restricted to the lab leak myth but often related. For her, it cascaded from the “PCR gate” conspiracy theory to “plandemic” and various anti-vaxx movement-associated narratives. After the WHO mission, she explained, “There was a bombardment of harassment.” She was now part of the origins cover-up as well. When the WHO looked to recruit her again for SAGO, activists bullied them out of the idea. “There was a coordinated effort against me,” Marion said. Alleging conflicts of interest, corruption, cover-ups, and worse. She sent me an Excel file documenting over 200 different attack pieces against her in the media, from bloggers to contrarian outlets to mainstream sources.

Now “We are bringing Marion Koopmans to justice” posters were plastered. Her students are approached by political operatives and conspiracy theorists, trying to get them to go to court against her, supposed witnesses to her many crimes. “I have been told by security advisors that it will go on for some time,” the sharp-eyed virologist admitted her frustration. Yet she was not giving up. The experience has invigorated her sense of importance in explaining science to society. That is the reason she still speaks out, albeit it comes with so much hardship. She has avoided traveling to the US because of safety concerns in such a radicalized country. She’s had security for three years; guards checked every physical meeting she attended.

These worrying experiences abound, especially in the last few years. I have witnessed events that I thought were largely impossible in a democratic society, yet they happened. I have had conversations with scientists who do not feel safe anymore, who self-censor, and who stopped communicating to the public entirely. I have seen essential research projects scrapped, defunded, and scientists giving up pursuit of certain areas of research to protect their careers, their lab members, and their families.

These are not trivialities about social media harassment, trolls, or random junk from the internet. These are existential problems facilitated by an aggressive anti-science movement that saw an opportunity in the lab leak myth. Scientists, abandoned by society, have no chance against their onslaught. Ask yourself: When did you have to change your home address and scrub the internet of private information because you and your family receive daily death threats from hate groups?

When people are continually calling your place of work, protesting outside it, filing lawsuits, and your employer loses funding, do you have the capacity to continue your work?

When your private messages can be subpoenaed by political activists and then leaked to their client propagandists to instigate a national smear campaign, would you feel comfortable talking about a controversial topic even in private?

When New York Times columnists work closely with conspiracy theorists to build their hit pieces against you, are you thinking twice before speaking up for scientists even as a bystander?

When you get dragged in front of Congress in a witch hunt, where they lie about you to your face and afterward refer you to criminal prosecution, do you want to roll the dice that the justice department has not been tainted by the institutional rot impacting every other area of government?

“Where is the public outcry?” Marion asked me. When innocent scientists get harassed, threatened, buried in lawsuits, dragged in front of politicians to denounce their beliefs, or face criminal prosecution? Why does nobody lift a finger? Or worse, why are so many seemingly cheering on the spectacle? “That is worrisome.”

§

“There is no true insight into the nature of reality without liberating ourselves from the noise,” the documentary filmmaker Christian Frei explained to me how his thinking has evolved on the topic. How can we make sense of the present moment?

I believe informational conflicts between our various bespoke worldviews and objective reality are inevitable. It is a battle that has plagued humanity ever since we formed tribal societies with different creation myths, religions, and politics. For most of our histories, these conflicts between worldviews often led to repression of others by various forms of power, subjugation, or bloodshed. Might decided who was right.

With the scientific revolution in the late Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, humanity started on a different project. While still often shaped by power and privilege, the scientific method gradually transformed our knowledge of the observable universe into a more coherent picture. No matter our idiosyncratic, magical, or personal worldviews and politics, science works whether or not we believe in it. Scientific evidence—not might—suddenly could decide what ideas about reality were right (or at least who was the least wrong). Raw power still often won, but over time, the superiority of this new “weight-of-evidence”-based approach became impossible to deny.

Today, the scientific method has been awarded the inherent authority to create, assert, dispute, challenge, and correct information about objective reality. It is the ultimate arbiter of solving informational conflicts or contradictions that constantly arise within our colorful, bespoke worldviews. Science has become the pin that holds us attached to shared reality and, I would argue, each other. It may offer one of the greatest services an enlightened society could wish for: the formulation of a consensus reality based on shared facts. A common ground that allows us to work together and solve problems larger than ourselves. If we want to, that is.

Since its inception, the scientific method has always faced pushback from certain segments of society. Science is a constant danger to religious ideology, shady businesses, and pseudoscience peddlers that rely on myth, manipulation, and magical thinking. Attempts to discard science and discredit scientists by these motivated actors are not new.

In a world of increasingly bespoke realities, what if science has become an existential threat to all our most cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews? To our recently developed online politics, identity, and community?

I believe that today, an entirely new front of informational conflicts has opened between shared reality and our digital world. We all have found ourselves participating in and co-creating bespoke online communities. When the pandemic pushed scientists and scientific topics to the center of society and into the middle of the attention economy, many underlying tensions just escalated, drawing near the breaking point. All that was needed was a good emotional hammer to shatter the glass around the moral panic button about science. Both fringe and well-funded anti-science movements seized on the opportunity. The pandemic, and the lab leak narrative specifically, was their once-in-a-generation chance to topple the supremacy of science and tear society away from supporting and trusting it. An opportunity brought about by technological disruption, vulnerable information ecosystems, and a traumatic global crisis.

The unleashed information war over reality now constantly pits science and scientists (as well as investigative journalists, educators, and other defenders of an evidence-based worldview) against crowds and information combatants arising from all layers of society. Even worse, researchers now regularly find themselves in the crosshairs of those with real power and influence. Science as a global public institution for humanity poses a considerable threat to grifters and snake oil salesmen, populist influencers and narratives, ideological billionaires, unethical businesses, tech platforms, and, of course, state actors and autocrats. They all currently dominate in the world of fragmented and bespoke realities. They all cling to their newfound power tooth and nail, seeking to shape public perception in their favor and to entrench themselves and their separate little epistemic fiefdoms permanently. But how to go about it? In the information age, leading attacks against scientists, gaining ground against the scientific method, and winning decisive battles against an evidence-based worldview have become their avenues of choice to project and defend their influence over society.

With so much at stake and so much to gain, participating in the current anti-science (or anti-reality) movement rewards many networked agents of influence handsomely. Almost anybody can gain popularity, profit, persuasion, or power by undermining the authority, function, and perception of science sufficiently well in the information age.

The marketplace of motivated rationalizations is constantly looking for new, valuable products. That’s why all these networked agents, activists, and agendas seek to portray science and scientists as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. Rather than a public good for the benefit of all, they work hard to cast scientific insights as the opinion of a weird, secretive niche interest group, tribe, or cabal. They paint inconvenient scientific research as ideologically subversive and existentially threatening. Independent science is a thorn in their eyes, something that needs to be beaten in the fight for societal supremacy, public perception, and political power. Their acts of anti-science aggression are what we see playing out in real time today.

But what happens when their viral narratives and emotional falsehoods remain unchecked? When any semblance of a science- and evidence-based worldview is relegated to a thing of the past?

Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky has studied how conspiracy theories and misinformation impact democracies. He and others view the rise of anti-science activism and sentiment as a hallmark of democratic backsliding. “Everything that is a counterweight to power is being undermined,” he explained to me. “I think the goal is to abolish accountability as a stepping stone. That means you got to discredit science.” He and his coauthors argue that science is a critical guardrail for the “epistemic integrity of democracy.” We need a shared set of facts to function in a democracy; without them, any collaboration on shared issues becomes impossible.

“Once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore,” the Kyiv-born journalist and propaganda researcher Peter Pomerantsev said in his Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America. The congressional witch hunt against Renée DiResta had caught his eye.

Democratic decline has become the topic du jour in intellectual circles. Many scholars, intellectuals, researchers, and historians point towards misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, authoritarian politics, social media, and polarization as root causes. I believe everybody looks at a valid subset of the larger phenomena, which I would offer is that our modern information environments have changed how information flows through society and thereby restructured our societies into conflicting and mutually incompatible bespoke realities. Unfortunately, the current information ecosystem asymmetrically favors emotional myths and viral narratives over scientifically accurate content, all while incentivizing us to form our identities and communities in opposition to science.

Yet without science as a pin that keeps us attached to shared reality, I worry about losing everything that we have taken for somewhat granted, including living in a democracy.

Or, as the Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist, puts it even more bluntly:

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

I’d say that if scientists can indeed be seen as canaries in the coalmine of democracy, carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber. Many scientists went silent and retreated from the public after years of reckless onslaught. Who is going to speak up in the future when the next viral falsehood comes along? We need to act now before it is too late.

As I write this, the false lab leak myth is gaining steam once again, readily invoked by right-wing politicians and MAGA Republicans in the US. It is used not only to target their domestic enemies or activate voters by giving them scapegoats but also in service of a more sinister authoritarian agenda. Leading the efforts again is the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks and the key organizer behind Project 2025, the current playbook for enabling the authoritarian takeover of the US. One of their main goals, called “Schedule F,” is to replace tens of thousands of politically independent public servants and career scientists with loyal party apparatchiks, bringing all institutions under the unilateral control of the presidency. Consolidating power in the executive branch might be a terrible idea for both the independence of science and the future of the republic.

On July 8, 2024, the Heritage Foundation laid out its grand plan for the false origin myth. They assembled “what we believe will be the most important commission in decades” COVID-19 origins group, consisting of former Trump officials involved in the false bioweapon myth like former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Deputy HHS secretary Robert Kadlec, and former CDC director Robert Redfield. The group also included lab leak activist Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton National Security staffer and anti-China hawk looking for influence again. The HSSCP chair, Brad Wenstrup, was there as well for the launch of “a report with actionable recommendations for the president and legislative branch of government to implement right now.”

These people, all very familiar with weaponizing the government, would decide what to do about the lab leak myth in the future when the Republicans gain power again. Here is their fundamental position: make China the enemy. Jamie Metzl, from Heritage’s origin commission, asserted:

There can be little doubt… that the Chinese government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.

Various segments in the US, predominantly but not exclusively on the right, have long cast China as an existential villain, not just a geopolitical adversary anymore. In the factional warfare between bespoke realities, we only come together around a shared enemy. Seasoned politicians understand that principle deeply. You do not work on solving shared problems with your mortal enemy.

Subsequently, the commission outright rejected, even mocked, the idea of ever collaborating with China on shared environmental, climate, and public health challenges. According to a snide comment from one of their speakers, working with China in the past was always a misguided idea that had failed spectacularly. The pandemic supposedly proved this. Jamie Metzl further summarized their points of action, asserting that the pandemic resulted in “18 trillion in losses to the United States,” arguing the only path forward, and “as a means of establishing accountability and discouraging similar behavior in the future, …Chinese companies and the Chinese State must be held accountable and liable for these losses.” Doing anything else would just further incentivize the CCP to engage in “dangerous, aggressive, and secretive behavior,” they claimed. In other words, they will make China pay 18 trillion dollars in reparation to the US, and this will somehow stop the next pandemic, which many of them believe was a bioweapon anyway. An absurd demand and non-sequitur from anti-China hawks designed to escalate tensions further. “We also want other countries to use what we have done as a blueprint to hold China accountable,” John Radcliffe added. He is proposing nothing less than basically a return to a Cold War era with China.

Yet, should the Republicans win political power and even the White House, these fringe positions of the Heritage Foundations will likely become official positions once again. The weaponized lab leak narrative is a trigger they can pull again and again for enemies, domestically and abroad. Other efforts are already planned. Next to ongoing activities by the HSSCP that burned Peter Daszak at the stake of public opinion, there is the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability led by McCarthy-era wannabe and lab leak truther Rep. Comer and the powerful Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The latter will likely see long-term gain-of-function fearmonger Rand Paul take over chairmanship with the election and Senator Josh Hawley in the driver's seat of the new inquisition.

The first sham hearings were held on June 18, 2024, to smear the virologist and “proximal origin” coauthor Prof. Robert Garry as a propagandist while giving Rand Paul’s close collaborator Richard Ebright the stage to spew politically desired falsehoods about bioweapon agents and research. In September, Josh Hawley accused Dr. Carrie Wolinetz, former chief of staff at the NIH, of “actively misleading the American people.” His fulminating monologue was clipped by Forbes Breaking News and received over 1.8 million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. Thousands of approving comments made it clear that people wanted more of this. Self-serving theatrics aside, much worse is expected to come from these revenge committees weaponizing the conspiracy myth.

After years of viral propaganda, the lab leak community has grown to include ordinary citizens, online mobs, client propagandists, commentators, as well as mainstream journalists, and has captured media outlets all the way to both chambers of Congress. With such a powerful amplification network in place, it’s easy to imagine how the emotionally captivating myth could be quickly re-deployed by another Trump administration. Utilizing the right-wing outrage machine, agitated crowds, willing influencers, and mainstream media enablers, political leaders might want to recycle the lab leak myth to stir popular demand for further escalation against China, even to justify military aggression. When the other is cast as an existential threat, all manipulators need to do is fabricate a few novel twists to justify the larger narrative. Instigate some fresh pseudo-events that seem to support what most Americans already believe in and ensure that many dedicated amplifiers are willing to push it repetitively.

If you make it trend, you make it true. How about a new story arc about the evil CCP supposedly working on bioweapons to be deployed against Taiwan? Now, that would catch eyeballs if it could be made to look real.

Novelty, familiarity, and repetition are not only key ingredients to virality but effective manipulation tactics to persuade the masses and shape their bespoke realities. While absolutely far-fetched from today’s point of view, some type of military escalation would not be an unprecedented US response either. After the traumatic events surrounding the 9/11 terror attacks, popular fears and misconceptions about terrorism and old tropes about Muslim fundamentalism were merged and weaponized by politicians. The so-ignited emotional energy could later be directed skillfully with the right set of fabricated pseudo-events. Pseudo-events like the supposed existence of compelling “reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq’s military,” as NPR reported. These misrepresentations were subsequently brought forward by ostensibly credible voices like US Secretary Colin Powell to support the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) narrative. Emotionally activated citizens, their critical faculties blinded by trauma, rage, and grief, ate it up. The mainstream press not only failed to calm the situation but fanned the flames. Instead of critically questioning the evidence and narrative, The New York Times did the most to legitimize the WMD narrative. Ultimately, elite belief in its veracity and the constant media drumbeat created wide public support for the military invasion of Iraq. A remarkable outcome considering that political tensions with the country have been going back decades. Escalations have come and gone. War was certainly not inevitable. Few doubt today that the evidence-free invasion the Bush administration was obsessed with would have been possible without 9/11 as a traumatic catalyst.

Do we really believe the trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic that killed far over a million Americans is any less potent a catalyst if hardline warmongers and anti-China Republicans get their way? Especially if we talk about the authoritarian MAGA movement winning power again? Russia’s Putin already used the fabricated “US Biolabs in Ukraine” narrative (another variation from the lab leak genre) as one of his supposed justifications for invading Ukraine. A sizable proportion of Russians (and sadly, also Americans) readily bought into these fabrications. Every dictator and strongman stirs the emotions of his nation’s people by creating an enemy abroad or starting a war. The purpose of war for autocratic leaders is to legitimize their iron rule at home to call for unity while using it as a pretense to crack down on domestic dissenters. What might an authoritarian second Trump administration, keen to enshrine power and supported by the Project 2025 apparatus handpicked for loyalty by the Heritage Foundation, be willing to do if given the chance?

I honestly do not know what could happen; the example is provocative on purpose. A scenario to highlight that our failure of imagination often makes us blind to how badly things can escalate if we let them. We need to find our way back to epistemic clarity about the world we live in. As Russian dissidents will tell you, when nothing is ever really true, any justification for political actions, no matter how absurd, stupid, evil, or unimaginable, becomes possible. Or take the words of Hannah Arendt, a scholar of totalitarianism:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And people who no longer believe anything cannot make up their minds. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please.

That is why I want to fight our epistemic paralysis of the moment.

Conspiracy myths specifically have always been tools for mobilization against certain individuals, groups, races, or even nations. They are part and parcel of the fascist and totalitarian playbook that we have no excuse not to wise up about. How effective conspiracy myths can rouse our feelings and mobilize voters will be shown most prominently in the next US presidential election. I strongly believe the all-consuming political myth-making and the ensuing grand narratives of perpetual conflict against a foreign enemy should be relegated to the past, where they belong.

Irrespective of the outcome of world events, we have to understand that an evidence-based worldview is and will remain under attack globally by networked anti-science aggression and viral meta phenomena within our information spheres. That is the new tragic normal, enshrined in the circumstances and systems we inhabit today.

This means that all types of blatant exploitation of our emotions and crafty manipulations of the public have become much easier with the many vulnerabilities that emerged with our new information ecosystems, no matter who is in power and who happens to catch our eyeballs. We all have to do our part to build resilience and protect our democratic and scientific institutions, ourselves, and our agency from the power grabs of cynical politicians, self-serving influencers, media manipulators, motivated crowds, exploitative algorithms, and the viral narratives that rose out of our collective interactions online and that prey on us from within. That is a tall task for us today, and possibly the only task that matters if we want things to turn around for the better. I also believe that we have the power and will to create the future we want to live in.

One of the most important direct actions that defenders of an evidence-based worldview can take immediately is to not be bullied out of the conversation by (what is in my experience) just networked losers, loudmouths, and lunatics. We all have some influence online. Do not let media manipulators and activists preemptively rob your voice and your impact on others with empty posturing and mob tactics.

We also have to create social friction to slow the spread of harmful viral narratives. Let’s ask for evidence and time to assess before participating. We need to resist the seduction of story tropes when they seem to neatly support our team or worldview, especially when they villainize and dehumanize others. The world is much richer than the usual make-believe villains and heroes conjured up by gifted storytellers. We need to build new online systems that allows rationality and plurality to florish online. Most importantly, we need to hold the line against falsehoods and their amplifiers instead of giving in to bluster, pressure, or nihilism. Let’s defend the scientific method as the best tool we have to approximate ever-more accurate views about our shared reality. It will not always be convenient to do so. Speaking up for something incurs some risk of pushback.

I have no doubt that I will get attacked, smeared, and discredited by the usual agitated lab leak believers just for writing this book. I also expect the book will likely be downrated by organized campaigns on rating websites and ranking systems, as happened to Renée DiResta’s work. Lab leak influencers will likely cherry-pick passages to fabricate outrage or to dismiss my words, and the book will quite probably be overshadowed by the next shiny manufactured pseudo-event anyway. C’est la vie. If that is the outcome, I am okay with it. What is important is that for all their asymmetry of passion, they could not stop me from writing, nor can they stop you from reading the inside story of the COVID-19 origin controversy.

If my book, against the odds, threatens to gain any traction in mass media, it will possibly lead to fiercer pushback. The same tried and tested containment strategies and character assassinations that motivated lab leak believers previously used will be deployed again to try to shut down and discredit the findings of scientists whose remarkable trajectory we followed over twelve chapters. But will their detractors succeed again? Containment is difficult, for good or bad. I would wish for the book to give the scientists another round of attention and a fair hearing to tell their story.

But no matter what happens in the media, I would urge to not let activism and anti-science aggression rob you of your right to hear the scientific evidence from the very scientists who painstakingly produced it. The facts are in; the pandemic was not created in a lab. It is essential to democracy that we do not let those in power rewrite history to their convenience.

On the origins of SARS-CoV-2, scientists did their job admirably, sometimes in the direst of circumstances and at high personal cost. Now, I believe it is on us, society at large. We all can do our part to aid those scientists, help them get the evidence and their stories out, and help each other show up for reality—every defender of evidence-based worldview matters. If we learned one thing from how events unfolded, it is that we need to be networked when it comes to sticking to evidence, too. We all have a circle of influence; how we choose to use or not use it cascades outward. Even a little bit of compassion for science and scientists, and ultimately ourselves and the society we are embedded in, can make a lasting difference.

Science often seems untouchable and locked away in ivory towers, but the reality is quite different. Science is a powerful yet fragile enterprise, done primarily by curious and good-willed humans like you and me. They need the support of society just as much as society needs its scientists. While often not delivering answers as fast, intuitive, or satisfying as we would like, the scientific method as a humanity-spanning collective endeavor still deserves our trust. We would not be who we are without it. Science certainly serves as a critical guardrail against the excesses and abuse of society by politicians, governments, media manipulators, and gladiatorial influencers who crave power, cater to our intuitions, and utilize misleading information as their weapon of choice.

Lastly, we need to become clear-eyed about what is at stake because the sobering reality of our present conundrums does not change when inconvenient science is shut up.

We are integrated into vulnerable information ecosystems we don’t fully understand. We live in an interconnected world that seems currently ill-equipped to face viral threats, both online and offline. Our democratic societies have taken a turn for the worse. We have to deal with perilous political movements while being divided into increasingly bespoke realities. We are currently marching toward a new dark age of myth, manipulation, and magical thinking that all of us hoped to have left behind. The outlook is dire.

But we also have the tools to work against these trends. In Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World, the compassionate communicator offers us science as a candle in the dark. It can illuminate our way forward and keep the many demons of our human nature, as well as of our own making, at bay. We just need to remember that science does not exist in a vacuum; it is deeply embedded in society and done by ordinary humans like you and me. That makes it both beautiful and fragile, and certainly vulnerable to all-out societal assault.

I believe that we all need to reclaim our role as the perpetual guardians of that precious light of the Enlightenment. We have to recognize that we have been sleeping at the wheel as the forces of anti-science aggression, of manipulation and myth-making, of autocracy and nihilism, have been building up their digital war and propaganda machinery. They learned that by using the most compelling emotional conduits who channel our frustrations, fears, and trauma into activism, we could be lured to participate in the gladiatorial spectacle of viral anti-science narratives. They learned to target our tribal human nature and desire to belong to funnel us toward bespoke communities in opposition to science. They learned to root our online identity in their manipulative falsehoods. As a consequence, scientific illumination is once again quickly fading from society.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

It falls on all of us citizens to learn that we have to hold the line and stand up for an evidence-based, democratic worldview. To find community and build identity once more based on our largest shared humanity, not the lowest common denominator. All we currently have to get us out of our self-imposed epistemic crisis is ourselves. No cavalry is coming to magically rescue us from the encroaching darkness. We can't wait much longer on the sidelines either.

Welcome to shared reality.

Let’s get to work.

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

Related links: The anti-autocracy handbook for scholars.

Related links: How social media destroys democratic discourse

Related links: The playbook of anti-science actors - 3 part series

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On March 4, 2023, while doing unrelated research, Dr. Florence Débarre randomly came across a new set of FASTQ files (a text file of nucleotide base sequences) on the GISAID database. Curious, she started investigating. Less than two weeks later, another viral information cascade would ignite the lab leak media universe ablaze again. This time, instead of the usual manufactured pseudo-events and trope-laden stories, a highly relevant scientific discovery supercharged its velocity and exploded in virality. A panic set in within the lab leak community; they were losing control over their viral narrative.

Like Stuart Neil, Alex Crits-Christoph, Michael Worobey, and many others, Dr. Florence Débarre, a French theoretician in evolutionary biology, had started out being very open to lab-leak ideas, lauding the efforts and engaging regularly with DRASTIC, Alina Chan, Jesse Bloom, and other lab leak proponents for much of 2021 after the theory went mainstream. She wrote that it is “actually good scientific practice to explore different hypotheses” in response to criticism of Bloom et al.’s Science letter, the one that caused so much grief between Mike Worobey and Kristian Andersen.

Florence, an extremely careful and meticulous researcher, had the habit of following up on certain lab leak ideas with investigative rigor. For example, she clarified with a web activity monitoring website that Shi Zhengli’s database of viral sequences “was not suspiciously taken down in September” to hide any sequences. It turns out the database first came online in April of the same year and never worked very well, dropping offline sporadically for months. It remained somewhat accessible until Feb. 2020, when hacking attempts finally stopped WIV researchers from putting it back online for fear of manipulation. Just as Shi Zhengli explained and Jane Qiu reported.

Over the years, Florence has single-handedly cleared up about two dozen such falsehoods that the lab leak conspiracy myth cottage industry had made into the lore if my cursory counting is correct. She calls these fact-checks “niche threads” on Twitter, but they dismantled, debunked, and destroyed many lab leak talking points, like death by a thousand cuts.

“The lab leak hypothesis survives in part because of poor fact-checking in the media,” she tweeted to explain why she followed up on all these circumstantial niche talking points. However, Florence did not have it out just for lab leakers; the zoonati would face the same type of scrutiny. Peter Daszak, for example, told me that Florence wrote to him countless times to fact-check statements he made in the past, asking whether he had supportive evidence and similar. He wasn’t alone; when Florence wants to get to the bottom of something, she becomes very tenacious and will not stop until she separates fact from fiction.

For that, she has earned the respect of fellow debunkers and scientists and, unsurprisingly, has become another arch-villain to the lab leak community. This is because lab leak ideas and talking points tended to fall apart under her scrutiny, while points raised in favor of zoonotic spillover tended to hold up. Reality, on average, is easier to substantiate than made-up fiction. For her independent efforts, the female researcher has been not only severely harassed, smeared, and discredited like the rest of the zoonati she is now lumped in with but also encountered despicable misogynistic insults, stalking, and threats of violence. A high price for somebody who is an extremely private person by nature and avoids the spotlight.

When Florence realized in early March 2023 that the new GSAID files she found were metagenomic data from environmental samples of the Huanan seafood market, which Chinese authors from Dr. George Gao’s CDC team had uploaded, she reached out to the Huanan market paper authors around Mike Worobey and Kristian Andersen. They, in turn, immediately started frantically downloading the data, which was about 500GB.

“I was pretty convinced that we will probably never see these data,” Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph stated, describing his take on these hectic days and the drama that would follow. “But I have been thinking for over a year what we could do with it if they were ever published,” he laughed about how quickly he reacted. He was the fastest to look at the data. On the same day Florence had reached out, Alex downloaded the metagenomics sequencing data and pretty much worked through the night, looking first at the samples taken from the one corner of the western market where the wildlife stalls had been identified. “I found a full mitochondrial genome of a raccoon dog.” He remembered his excitement over the discovery. “And later that night, I remember bamboo rat and civet popped out as well.” Just as Mike Worobey and his market coauthors had predicted, wild mammals had been at the market, leaving their genetic footprint behind. So, what animals were possibly at the market in late 2019? “The first approach was the mapping to a few possible hosts, quick to see what is in there,” Alex recounted. They wanted to satisfy their curiosity.

The next day, Prof. Eddie Holmes contacted a Chinese scientist, one of the few who tried to keep information channels open. To protect the scientist’s identity, let’s call the person Chen. Chen, whom Eddie described as someone “I trust completely” had previously told him that these metagenomics data had been messy, and they sequenced it multiple times. While not being part of the Chinese CDC, Chen had some insights into the sequencing data created for George Gao’s team. Eddie, opening his emails for me, explained how his first intuition was to talk to Chen and tell him that they saw the data uploaded on GISAID. Chen responded very quickly:

Dear Eddie,

Yes, George [Gao] has asked his colleagues to upload these data. In fact, some of these samples have been sequenced twice or even multiple times. [They] have uploaded all these data, including both SARS-CoV-2 positive and negative samples from the market. You can ask a group member to analyze them independently. I am happy to help if you have any questions.

Best wishes,

[Chen]

That reply had been encouraging to Eddie; Chinese scientists were finally able to share some crucial market data from the preprint they published in 2022. A bit later, Eddie excitedly shared in another email to Chen that they had already found raccoon dog DNA in the environmental samples:

He received no response from Chen after that. None of them did. Alex Crits-Christoph, Mike Worobey, and Kristian Andersen would all write to George Gao and his coauthors about the data, wanting to talk to them and open a collaboration. But radio silence.

Unease set in with the international scientists. Suddenly, “and this was on like day three,” Alex described breathlessly, “the data disappeared from GISAID.” The Chinese authors, or somebody on their behalf, must have asked GISAID to pull it. “That really was pretty spooky, I think. We don’t know exactly what the heck was going through everybody’s mind.”

Everybody tried again desperately to contact George Gao, William Liu, and others who had collected the data. They offered to work together on the analysis. However, the Chinese researchers were no longer willing—or able—to reply. Eddie, Kristian, and Mike thought something had to be done to get the data back online. They contacted WHO, which promptly engaged in a quiet meeting with the Chinese CDC about their meta-transcriptomics data.

On 12 March 2023, some of us met with WHO and some members of SAGO (the WHO-convened Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens) to discuss our observations. On 14 March 2023, the WHO convened a meeting with SAGO where some of us and representatives from CCDC presented our respective results. [...] This meeting constituted one of several efforts to establish a collaborative relationship with our colleagues at CCDC to share data and findings as rapidly as possible. We acknowledge that these circumstances are unusual.

A summary by the authors would be made later. Meanwhile, led by Dr. Florence Débarre, all coauthors were busy analyzing the data and compiling a report for WHO. In another blow, they were all locked out of the GISAID database, which accused them of having breached the terms of use. A scary development.

It was right around this time when journalists learned about the existence of these data and the upcoming report. Alex Crits-Christoph assumed that a member of SAGO leaked the information to journalists, but details remain murky. The press, in turn, started circling the scientists, smelling a scoop. Some asked for comments directly. The cat was out of the bag; many other press requests followed, and some of the scientists felt they had to give some statements.

When the science writer Katherine Wu from The Atlantic reached out to Alex soon after, he tried to keep his statements general but explained candidly the rough outline of what happened. What they downloaded, what they analyzed, and that a raccoon dog was one of the species they found. He told Katherine Wu that she would be able to see more details in the report they are preparing, which was expected to come out soon.

Katherine replied that she was going to publish her story before the report came out. “Oh my God,” Alex recalled. “The rest of the conversation was me telling her that this is a horrible idea.” But according to Alex, the reporter did not want to wait; she “was convinced it was all about the scoop.” In the attention economy, she was under pressure to be first, after all. Jon Cohen, a seasoned journalist from Science who had covered the origin controversy extensively, was informed about their findings too, but “he had the correct understanding that he should only publish after the report came out,” Alex admitted.

On March 16th, just four days before their scientific report came out, Katherine Wu published her scoop in The Atlantic titled “The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” which Alex and others in the team thought was very unfortunate. Such analyses are complex, and more details are needed. Alex had mostly misgivings about the sensationalist headline. He felt the content of the article was factually correct, although some context and caveats should have been applied. “She did learn about the raccoon dogs; that was the only species she heard about,” he explained. “That’s why the article has an overly focus on raccoon dogs… It is not necessarily wrong but incomplete; we have other plausible hosts as well.” Also, the body of evidence surrounding the market was strong before, so the headline framing was misleading, creating the impression that this finding changes everything rather than just adding to the existing body of evidence. Irrespective of these reservations, few expected the waves Katherine Wu’s article would create.

The secrecy and drama surrounding the discovery and takedown of the data, the urgent arrangement of a WHO press meeting, the murmurations about raccoon dogs, and the framing of the scoop from The Atlantic journalist all contributed to the virality of the story. People reacted. Within hours, the journal Science would publish its own article about the report, corroborating the scoop. The dominoes in the media started falling. The New York Times would pick up the Atlantic article on the same day to run its own story about “New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Huanan Market.” Things escalated quickly. The following morning, WHO’s Director General Tedros called an urgent meeting and used it as an opportunity to stand up to China and demand “every piece of data relating to studying the origins of COVID-19 needs to be shared with the international community immediately.” Others joined the chorus.

It seemed that, for once, media attention and news cycle dynamics were working in favor of the scientifically supported zoonotic origin theory, if only to yet again allow amplifiers and leaders to signal their vehement opposition to supposedly Chinese duplicity and Beijing’s cover-up about these animals and data from the market. Renée DiResta argues in her book that virality on social media demands three key ingredients: novelty, familiarity, and repetition. A combination of a novel scientific finding, a familiar trope about Chinese secrecy and intransigence, and a lot of repetition in the press and on the world stage certainly matched that description.

In response, lab leak believers in media, politics, elite circles, and online mobs were pushed into a reactionary role for a few weeks like they never had before. The fear of losing control over the origin narrative and, along with it, their gradually formed network, community, and even parts of their identities and worldviews seduced many of them to throw all caution overboard and go on the offense, outing themselves as science deniers.

“It was a fascinating time because in the two weeks after that [article] and the report, we saw so many things thrown against the wall,” Alex explained about the hectic period. Personal attacks, professional attacks, political attacks, and everything in between were mobilized to hit back at them.

On the raccoon dog findings, reactions varied widely. Matt Ridley claimed that all of this is old news and much ado about nothing. Everyone knew the raccoon dogs were there; the question was whether they were infected. Scarlett, the bioweapon whistleblower, claimed the CCP planted the raccoon dogs as scapegoats, while Yuri Deigin and Dr. Washburne questioned the veracity of the sequencing data and analysis, as well as whether raccoon dogs were even at the market. Either these were Schrödinger’s raccoon dogs, or proponents just picked and chose their version of reality, I guess.

“There was this idea that the human data had been selectively depleted” in those animal samples somehow, making the animal reads feature more prominently, Alex remembered. Pretty ignorant hogwash. Metagenomics sequencing data are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fake without it being obvious. Alex had been over this spiel with lab leak proponents multiple times, who over the years alleged RaTG13 was fake, the pangolin virus sequences were fake, and bat viruses like RpYN06 were all just fake and part of the cover-up, even though some of these genomes were discovered before the pandemic.

Next, after years of lab leak proponents calling for independent investigations, of trying to get data out of China, of Sinophobic attacks against the credibility of Chinese researchers, “we had [the same] people telling us we are scooping poor George Gao, doing imperialist science,” Alex chuckled. As if Alex and his collaborators severely wronged some underprivileged Chinese authors by analyzing data they themselves put online on the GISAID database, a platform for sharing genomic data.

“Like come on, it’s the elite public health institution of a major superpower, not some underfunded lab,” Alex rolled his eyes. Indeed, the Chinese authors had been sitting on these data for over three years and had enough time to analyze them, as would soon become apparent. The report to the WHO was not even a paper, so the Chinese authors could still publish their own analysis, which they did shortly after in the journal Nature. In the corresponding paper by Liu et al., the Chinese authors begrudgingly acknowledged the existence of raccoon dogs while moving the goalposts about how others would need to somehow prove the animals were infected first to make any claims about where the virus came from:

Our study confirmed the existence of raccoon dogs, and other potential SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animals, at the market before its closure. However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected. Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out human-to-animal transmission, as the sampling was carried out after the human infection within the market. Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans, or cold-chain products, cannot yet be ruled out.

Notice the evasive tone and pivot to the far-fetched cold-chain hypothesis again that was already used for coloring the results of the WHO mission.

But the harshest attacks were coming, as always, from the usual lab leak commentators. There were these ideas that we “orchestrated The Atlantic to come out before the data” for various malicious purposes, Alex remembered, like preempting any criticism and independent assessment by the lab leak commentators, who had to wait four days for the report of their analysis to come. “I do not know what to make of the new strategy by Proximal Origin authors & friends to start their media campaign even before the preprint (data & methods) are available,” Alina Chan would write in her classic manipulative framing.

Some lab leak proponents more explicitly construed the scoop by a journalist as a fabricated PR stunt orchestrated by the zoonati. “The new natural origin propaganda by The Atlantic is laughable; their source is literally a scientist who helped cover up a lab leak in the first place.” The conservative YouTube show host Saagar Enjeti, who in my opinion relentlessly pushed pro-lab leak propaganda for years, would immediately try to discredit the findings.

Others did not even try to talk science, stating that the allegedly “conflict-ridden” proximal origin authors and friends made stuff up. “Pseudoscientific nonsense. From stooges who have been peddling pseudoscientific nonsense for three years,” Rutgers Professor and radicalized foul-mouthed Richard Ebright would cough up. Political commentator and pundit Nate Silver and NYT columnist Zeynep Tufecki, reminiscent of Katherine Eban’s usual beat, were quick to remind the chattering classes that everything from these “conflicted” authors needed to be taken with a large grain of salt and heightened scrutiny.

Then there was the detail that Mike, Kristian, Eddie, and their coauthors presented their findings to WHO first behind closed doors, which rubbed many people the wrong way. Within the fever pitch of activist mobs and conspiracy theorists, it was touted as an illegitimate act of international foul play. A conspiracy of the highest order.

“There were hundreds of ideas thrown out,” Alex remembered. It was akin to an avalanche of nonsensical and mutually contradictory arguments that were impossible to respond to, aligned only with the purpose of undermining the scientists and their new findings. “Just total panicking and pandemonium. People ostentatiously on the sidelines came out against us,” he recalled about the attacks from surprising sources. All the false equivalency pushers and commentators with large social media platforms, who had built a niche around the convenient idea that “we will never know, so we can blame who our audience wants,” saw their built-up popularity, credibility, or profits threatened. They were all unwilling or unable to accept the new critical data, which once again strongly pointed toward a zoonotic origin of the virus. Everybody was seeking to create or buy into a counternarrative that would stick.

Luckily for them, as we know by now, the infosphere tends to always deliver.

Within weeks, it was Jesse Bloom who finally became the kingmaker of public discourse and provided a resolution to the battle of conflicting counternarratives. “These data do not conclusively prove that animals were infected,” he would explain. He made his own analysis, applying different filters for processing the sequencing reads and finding a correlation of increased SARS-CoV-2 positivity with fish, not mammals. He concluded that, because of the paucity of reads, nothing should really be said about the samples collected in January anyway. A New York Times opinion columnist immediately picked up Jesse’s preprint and used it to scold people to calm down about raccoon dogs in an op-ed that labeled the new findings from Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph and his coauthors nothing short of “bad science that got hyped” in the headline. A scandalous accusation in itself, in my opinion.

In the op-ed, Jesse Bloom was given ample space by the writer to air his personal criticisms about how the sequencing data are not perfect, which is true but hardly unusual. He used a different threshold to filter the data, creating a false anti-correlation between the virus and animal reads. Mere co-detection of viral RNA and animal DNA alone does not prove that the animals were infected, Jesse’s argument would go. Also, there were just so few viral reads in those samples that it would amount to scientific malpractice to make any statements. He did not receive any pushback from the editors, nor were the market authors offered space to refute for balance. Guess journalistic neutrality works differently when the NYT op-ed section wants to push a narrative. Even more unethically, Jesse framing created a strawman about the discovery that others could use to knock down the work publicly. Who knows if the viral sequences in the samples even came from animals? Just like the Chinese authors Liu et al. asked, what if a sick human infected the animals first? What if infected humans just contaminated the environmental swabs? This type of co-detection data was not enough to conclusively prove directionality—that the animals were the ones who brought in and were shedding the virus. This last criticism is narrowly correct but misleading. A strawman to the more nuanced argument Alex and his coauthors were actually advancing.

Their analysis unequivocally proved the existence of these wild animals at the market, just as Worobey’s paper had predicted in 2022. The thrust of their argument was that the animals were there, despite years of denial, and therefore, all the necessary ingredients for a zoonotic spillover were in that market at the time when the outbreak started. All the new evidence uncovered was consistent with what would be expected if the animals were infected. For the totality of available evidence, this missing piece was a homerun finding. There was no more wiggle room around it. SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animal DNA intermingled and was co-detected with viral RNA in environmental swabs taken from stalls where we have past photographic evidence of them being kept there. In other words, every scientific effort to disprove a zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market failed; the market spillover theory remains standing as the most likely hypothesis, if not the only parsimonious hypothesis, that explains how the pandemic started.

Yet, obfuscating that simple scientific reality is the bread and butter of motivated influencers. Jesse’s analysis claimed that the study’s limitations were somehow too severe to draw any conclusion at all about the new data. This prompted lab leak influencers to subtly move the goalposts. They created the false perception that Alex and his coauthors now needed to prove directionality—that they needed to prove the animals were infected first, or their whole work would be worthless. No one dared to acknowledge how neatly the discovery fit and was predicted by the body of evidence we already had for zoonotic spillover at the market.

The hungry media coverage and amplification of Jesse’s criticism and framing also created a lot of smoke around the discovery. By taking these inherent and largely inconsequential limitations to the larger picture and blowing them up, amplifiers and lab leak proponents created a sense of uncertainty of the findings that was unwarranted given the overall strength of the evidence.

Then, they turned the discovery around on the market authors, labeling them as bad scientists for daring to derive obvious conclusions. As a result, mockery of the market authors and their findings ensued in print media and the heterodox podcast sphere, on social media, and in influential circles.

Leaning heavily on the “bad science that got hyped” op-ed by the NYT, Jesse’s framing and criticism of the findings allowed believers to hold on to their beliefs, their community, and their identity. All “without looking like idiots for doing so.” I remembered Matt Browne’s comment on why we tend to fall for these pseudoscientific rationalizations. That is the role of secular gurus and influencers, after all. Preserving identity and community are powerful motivators.

“When Jesse´s analysis came out, people just pivoted,” Alex Crits-Christoph corroborated what they experienced. All of the other motivated arguments thrown at them that did not gain wide traction just faded away; now everybody could point to Jesse’s analysis and say, “This proves that they are wrong.” The inconvenient discovery of scientists was contained yet again before it could persuade the wider public.

In fact, once it was neutralized publicly, the study could be repurposed to work in favor of the viral lab leak narrative many more actually want to buy into. Soon, conspiratorial allegations against Kristian Andersen, Mike Worobey, and others from the year prior were recycled and reinforced. Their new findings were spun as yet another piece of evidence that these virologists are guilty and making it all up to cover their asses—for Fauci, big virology, and their own money streams. “It’s just the same people, with the same conclusions, over and over and over again… They just can’t afford to let it go,” Heather Haying and Bret Weinstein would pontificate on their popular heterodox podcast before going into deep conspiratorial water about the world-shattering implications of allowing their allegedly risky virology research to continue and how they are paid off by Fauci anyway. Familiarity, novelty, repetition. These are not only the ingredients for online virality but also what makes narratives stick with the public.

Did any of their accusers ever pause to consider that neither Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph nor Dr. Florence Débarre, the first and last authors of these findings, are even virologists? They started working with Kristian and Mike not because of incentives or coercion but because good scientists follow the evidence wherever it leads. That is what brings them together around a body of evidence, no matter where they started. This is the beauty and power of science and a weight-of-evidence-based worldview.

However, what I observe again and again online is another unspoken coercive phenomenon, sometimes known as audience capture. To remain a successful influencer, it seems you are required to follow the viral narratives wherever they lead. Depending on how the co-created story evolves, it can lead to some pretty undesirable places, both professionally and morally.

“If you remember, Jesse [Bloom] wrote an entire paper on how lineage A was not at the market. And when it was found, he just dismissed it.” Alex recalled clearly how little evidence was able to shift opinions, even of credentialed scientists caught up in the myth. Identity and belief are personal, not rational. Jesse Bloom never apologized to Chinese authors for his flawed “deleted sequences” paper either. The ones he had accused of a cover-up despite them having done nothing wrong. Now, his convenient perspective was featured in The New York Times once more, trashing the work and ethics of Western colleagues after baselessly accusing Chinese scientists years prior.

“All these characters, they went through an evolution, where at first they were like, ‘I am just asking questions,’ [or] ‘I think it is even; it’s 50:50,’” Alex recounted all the excuses over the years. “And then, of course, the data has come overwhelmingly to support zoonosis,” and they “all have gone completely the other way.”

“Alina Chan used to say that she was agnostic, that she was just brave enough to bring up the idea,” he remembered. Today, she not only claims that it is now “common knowledge” that “top experts around the world acted to shut down” an investigation into the lab leak theory to allegedly “protect their own interests” but constantly insinuates that their reckless behavior created the pandemic and killed millions of people. Unlike Rutgers Professor Richard Ebright and others, who directly call virologists mass murderers, the media-hungry contrarian is smart enough to keep her accusations and brand sufficiently ambiguous to not run into defamation lawsuits and remain palatable for the opinion pages of The New York Times. All the biggest influencers are talented double speakers like that, heavily signaling their “red meat beliefs” to audiences while keeping enough strategic ambiguity to not be pinned down. Evidence to the contrary can be rationalized away over time, and goalposts will be moved to keep the viral lab leak narrative that made them influential alive.

In contrast, changing one’s mind with the evidence has become incredibly difficult for influencers who have publicly staked out a position and gained an audience for it. This is because “influence, activism, and profit are increasingly intertwined,” Renée DiResta explains. To retain their audience, profits, social status, career prospects, popularity, or just community and friendships, influencers remain dependent on the viral narratives that let them rise above the crowd. That is a hell of a motivation to move heaven and earth to find ways to discard inconvenient research, discredit pesky scientists doing the hard work, and dismiss any challenge to the narrative they depend on one way or the other. Science and evidence be damned.

Unfortunately, the motivated rationalizations and technical vocabulary of credential contrarians may be the last nail in the coffin of shared reality. When people are already sorted into polarized groups by viral information cascades, every time new scientific research comes out, a barrage of counter-narratives is bound to be created by contrarian scientists as a function of the underlying topology of their social communities. Because these contrarians are also part of a dedicated amplification network, their ideas can move rapidly from the periphery to the center of society, i.e., from a thread on Twitter to the opinion pages of NYT. Counter-narratives that arise through co-participation in the bespoke community, in turn, entrench the worldview of participants further, sharpen their sense of identity and belonging, and make bridge-building and consensus-finding around shared facts even harder.

“It is not about the weakness of evidence that we have, which is very strong,” Alex Crits-Christoph said. It is just that lab leak proponents move the goalposts until the counter-narratives become unfalsifiable by normal scientific inquiry. He was certain that if they could find infected animals on a wildlife farm outside of Wuhan, lab leak proponents would just move the goalposts again, arguing that humans infected the market animals first, who then brought it back to the wildlife farm. No matter what happens, they will find a motivated rationalization to explain away any new scientific finding.

“But it is funny. When we get this paper published, we will see some of that again,” Alex was certain. Their initial report to the WHO from 2023 has since morphed into more extensive and careful scientific publications, backed up with more rigorous methods, more coauthors, a long peer review, and some very subtle but cutting conclusions. At the time of our interview, I had just learned that it was accepted for publication.

Did Jesse Bloom’s criticism about the data hold water? Was there really nothing to be learned from these new market environmental samples? Or did Alex and his coauthors discover something in those vast meta-transcriptomics data that could be relevant to the origins? The young researcher shared his screen with me, pulling up the latest version of the paper, and we went through the data, figures, and conclusions together.

He showed me some phylogenetic trees and said, “We see about a 99% likelihood that the ancestor of the pandemic was the ancestor of the market sequences.” This again contradicts the idea that humans were the ones who introduced the virus to the market rather than animals. Some counter-narratives have proposed that the virus spread silently in Wuhan before it emerged in the market, but their data told a different story. Jonathan Pekar’s modeling showed that on average, only around 3 people had been infected between the first introductions not observed and the first detected cases at the market. Not a lot of wiggle room for a lab leak, multiple sick WIV workers, and an asymptomatic community spread, bringing it to the market but nowhere else in the city.

“Any hypothesis of COVID-19’s emergence has to explain how the virus arrived at one of only 4 documented live wildlife markets in a city of Wuhan’s size, at a time when so few humans were infected,” their paper states. Animals carrying the virus explain both the lack of human cases prior in the city and the location of the epicenter around the Huanan market, the largest of its kind. On top of that, the idea that humans brought the virus is further challenged by the high likelihood of transmission chains that depend on single individuals going extinct. It supported the theory that a sustained animal-human interface in the market facilitated multiple spillovers, which are more likely to cause a sustained outbreak and the establishment of two distinct lineages in the human population.

As The Atlantic reported, they also found that “among the potential intermediate hosts present in the Huanan market, raccoon dogs are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, to shed high titers of the virus, and to be able to transmit.” Raccoon dog DNA was also the most abundantly detected animal species in market wildlife stalls sampled on January 12th and in the wildlife stall with the most SARS-CoV-2 positive samples. However, other potential animal hosts cannot be discarded; in fact, they are not even that unlikely. Amur hedgehogs and Malayan porcupines were quite prevalent as well; even a few reads of masked palm civets were discovered in one environmental sample, and those animals had been involved in the 2003 SARS outbreak.

“The bamboo rat is another candidate, top 3, maybe even top 2,” Alex said. This has to do with a fascinating finding in the genetic traces it left behind. It turns out the market bamboo rats were infected with a curious-looking murine coronavirus. “It was very, very closely related to a virus found and reported in bamboo rats in South China in 2018 and 2019,” Alex got excited. The market bamboo rats were infected with a direct descendant of those rat viruses discovered in Guangxi Province.

“What this means is that as these animals are being transported up from South China, from Yunnan, from Guanxi, they are bringing viruses,” he explained. Eddie Holmes, who was working on a different paper with Chinese authors on surveilling the wildlife trade, had shown me how they found that, while wild animals rarely carry viruses, captured wildlife is “chock-full” of them. He reasoned that the moment they enter the wildlife trade, they come in contact with many other species in poor sanitary conditions, and their viral burden increases, from a few sporadic infections after capture to multiple infections with multiple cross-species jumping viruses at the end of their trading route before being sold at those wildlife markets. The bamboo rat viruses Alex found certainly argue for such a scenario.

Then he got amused, a sneaky smile running over his face because he already knew that I was going to enjoy the next part. “So, they bring up a beta-coronavirus,” he chuckled, “and one that has a furin cleavage site.” It took me a step back; I had missed that detail when I first read the preprint. He continued:

And the other funny thing is, it is a beautiful one; RRKRR, like a canonical one; like the type that if it had appeared in SARS-CoV-2, maybe then you would be like, ‘Oh, is it engineered? Because that looks like the type we would engineer.’

We laughed at the absurdity of it all. This breathless media fuss about this supposedly unique genetic element that required human engineers seems to pop up quite a lot in wildlife all by itself. We underestimate nature at our own peril.

Prof. Stuart Neil agreed. He had just published a commentary in the journal Cell about the discovery of yet another freshly acquired furin cleavage site in a MERS-related bat virus harbored by smuggled pangolins. Bat cousin viruses in that specific MERS-like subgenus have also not been found with furin cleavage sites; yet it seems the moment the host switches out of the bat, no matter if to bamboo rats, pangolins, Middle Eastern camels, or humans, these polybasic cleavage sites seem to be suddenly favored by selection pressures. They can enable the switch from a bat gastrointestinal virus to a respiratory pathogen in other mammals. “Like for a lot of people, my gut feeling is that the FCS has been acquired upon transmission out of the bat,” Stuart Neil offered as the best estimate. “I would still hazard a guess that the next stage from the bat is the pangolin.”

Pangolins are the most trafficked wild animals in the world. Chinese authorities made a recent bust of a criminal gang smuggling 23 tons of pangolins over the border to give an example of the scale of these operations. Pangolins, because of their prevalence and ubiquity in smuggling chains, seem to act somewhat as sponges for these bat viruses or maybe sentinels for whatever is circulating along the wildlife trading routes and smuggling operations. Pangolins come in contact with all kinds of other traded wildlife, so they capture circulating viruses and possibly shed them quite frequently.

I remembered that Supaporn Wacharapluesadee from Thailand had found a sample from one pangolin smuggled in 2003 that retrospectively tested positive for SARS-1 in 2020, which was previously only linked to civets and raccoon dog farms. In 2020, Supaporn also found another pangolin sample positive for SARS-CoV-2, again from a smuggled animal captured by Thai authorities. A year before the outbreak in Wuhan, multiple pangolins were found carrying distant SARS-CoV-2 relatives with almost identical RBDs to the human virus, which Eddie’s former student Tommy Lam rediscovered early in the pandemic. Since more scientists started paying attention, more smuggled pangolins have been found with Hibeco viruses and MERS-like viruses, gaining an FCS as well. Uncanny. It appears that sick, scared, and stressed wild animals stacked together in cages on top of each other provide a fertile breeding ground for viruses to explore new intermediary hosts and routes of transmission. “Bat coronaviruses are fecal-oral transmitted,” Eddie Holmes argued as well. That’s where bat researchers tend to find them, but not in other tissues in bats.

I think many haven't put all the puzzle pieces together. The molecular evidence suggested that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 was a rather recent acquisition, boosting respiratory transmission at the cost of spike protein stability. In the rough environment of bat guts, such polybasic cleavage sites are disfavored, which is why most bat viruses cannot maintain them. Everything changes when such a bat virus spills over into an intermediate animal, where suddenly, the more labile spike protein fares better in respiratory tissue and starts to become dominant. “I suspect the furin cleavage site is not a natural bat adaptation. I strongly think it came in an intermediate host, and that allowed it to change its tropism to be respiratory rather than fecal or oral,” Eddie Holmes explained.

This is not only true for the FCS but for all respiratory adaptations, even the ones that did not make the headlines. Viruses are complex biological machines; even small changes can have a large impact. An identical argument could also be made for the T372A mutation that alters the 3D confirmation of the trimeric S glycoprotein to a more open and respiratory infectious form and the flexibility mutation N519H we mentioned briefly earlier.

From hundreds of known bat sarbecoviruses, not one has yet been found with these essential mutations for respiratory transmission. Yet SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory pathogen. Human engineers in a lab did not know about these adaptations, nor could they come up with them in any reasonable experimental setup. So, where did these mutations suddenly come from? There is only one plausible explanation: Circulation through intermediate animals brought them forth and maintained them, possibly helped by the fact that the traded animals were stressed and wounded, and their immune systems were weakened.

The implications are serious. First, I trust we can finally dispel the myth that bat-sampling researchers somehow brought SARS-CoV-2 to Wuhan. This virus did not exist in bats; only its bat precursor did. A priori, it is very unlikely that a random bat virus can directly infect bat researchers, and even extremely unlikely that bat researchers will ever encounter a pandemic pathogen from the pithy sampling efforts bat researchers ever get to conduct. But now we need to add to this the evolutionary requirement of a host-context switch out of the bat gut and gradual respiratory adaptation over months in an intermediate animal host. This final ingredient to acquire and maintain respiratory elements like the furin cleavage site and necessary respiratory mutations such as A372T/N519H is what likely allowed a former bat virus to turn into SARS-CoV-2.

“The furin cleavage site gave me the strongest hint that the progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 is not in bats,” Linfa Wang explained to me some time ago. “It’s in pangolins, raccoon dogs, civets, badgers, or whatever; maybe another small mammal, we don’t know.” Because of politics, he was hesitant to speak up too much, but he was very certain about this. “With the US intelligence agencies, they all focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology because they have the most bat samples… I said, yes, but science says that this progenitor comes from a non-bat small mammal.” In other words, looking into bat samples in Zhengli’s lab, as the Chinese authorities did, and Westerners demand to this day to do independently, was always utterly improbable to yield any incriminating evidence in the first place. A witch hunt for magic that could not have happened there in the first place. “Even as a batman, I say bats are important, but they are not the only mammals.”, Linfa said.

For us, it is important to understand that SARS-CoV-2 could not have become the human pathogen it is today without circulating in intermediate animals for some time. They are the conduit for its virality. The wildlife industry provides the necessary environmental context to develop some of these critical respiratory adaptations we observe in human pathogens, including polybasic cleavage sites, conformational changes, and stabilizing and compensatory mutations that all must work together to gain prominence in those intermediate hosts and ultimately pose a danger to us and other mammals.

There has been a lot of hysteria and myth-making in our public discourse surrounding gain-of-function research and especially the furin-cleavage site over the last four years, but very few fact-based discussions. Science has advanced our understanding dramatically since 2020; we are out of the dark cave of uncertainty. I believe understanding the full context of this infamous genetic element, which has been falsely called the “smoking gun for engineering,” offers us clarity and illumination that viral narratives soaked in powerful emotions but hazy on facts cannot provide: The realization that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 contributes much more to bat researchers’ exoneration than to their incrimination.

It would certainly be a fitting and long-overdue twist of fate for bat researchers if society finally woke up to that reality, too.

“It just goes to show you, this is the place to look for furin cleavage sites,” Alex brought our conversation back, referring to the animal trade. All the mysteries and remaining uncertainties about the origin and trajectory of SARS-CoV-2 are found in the wildlife industry, not in research labs. Integrating this knowledge into ongoing investigations puts the emphasis on the wild animals at the Huanan market, specifically those known to be susceptible and able to transmit the virus. And that brings us back to the now famous raccoon dogs.

“Where are these [market] raccoon dogs coming from? Because a lot of them are farmed in Northern China for their fur.” Alex explained how millions of raccoon dogs are kept on fur farms in northern provinces, so that seemed a bit odd at first. “I think that would have made them less likely as a conduit [for viruses] from South China.” However, wild raccoon dogs inhabit an area from the Southeast Asian Karst region all the way up to Russia and include various distinct subspecies. Could they figure out what subspecies were in the market? The genetic material that raccoon dogs left behind in the environmental samples was quite extensive, so Alex and his coauthors managed to de-novo assemble full mitochondrial genomes from the discovered sequences. Mitochondrial genomes are often valuable as markers for intraspecific species identification. Indeed, the raccoon dogs at the market belonged to a less-known subspecies that was quite distinct from the northern raccoon dogs used for their fur. Another hint that points towards the wildlife trade, possibly from the heart of the Karst region, but this is speculative.

“Every time you could bet against raccoon dogs, and you would lose a lot of bets,” Alex chuckled. For him, these animals still hold the top spot for introducing the virus to the market. Imagine if you tried to disprove raccoon dogs as the culprits. You would find they are susceptible to the virus. You find they shed the virus efficiently to infect others. You find reports and photographs of them being at the market. “It could have been that they were super rare or not there at all,” Alex offered, specifically at that time in late 2019. Yet their DNA footprints were the most abundant. The number one animal from all other wild species detected happens to be the one most susceptible to shedding SARS-CoV-2. You find their DNA deposited in the environment together with viral RNA. You take their genetic material and discover these are not common raccoon dogs used for fur farming but possibly a wild subspecies. And, of course, raccoon dogs and civets were the animals responsible for SARS-1, a virus whose reservoir was traced back over 1,000 km from Guangdong to Yunnan. So, there is historical precedent that this host and route of viral emergence are possible and plausible.

Can we know even more? Outbreaks rarely divulge all their mysteries, but the ingenuity of scientific research should never be counted out.

Dr. Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist now with the University of Tokyo, and Jonathan Pekar, who we heard briefly about for his involvement in the market origin papers, were two young researchers with the most exciting and impactful PhD trajectories I certainly have ever heard of. They were also incredibly generous with their time to walk non-domain experts like me through some grueling and complicated technical details of their work. In 2023, they were sitting on a little breakthrough of their own.

While Jonathan worked on epidemic simulations that would end up supporting the multiple spillover hypothesis, Spyros worked on trying to understand the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 through the lens of viral recombination. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a mosaic genome, they realized that its history in bats is fragmented; there was no single progenitor virus but many incestuous parent and grandparent viruses that were spread all over Southeast Asia and China. By using all available bat sarbecoviruses that had been painstakingly sampled by bat researchers in China and Southeast Asia, the two junior researchers recreated a history for the recombinant genetic elements that would eventually end up in SARS-CoV-2. Using non-recombinant regions that remain largely unchanged in the hectic evolutionary arms race between family members, they found that they could identify recombination breakpoints—places where genetic similarity from one parental strain stops and similarity to a different parental strain starts. This allowed them to reconstruct not one evolutionary history but 27 different ones for each non-recombinant segment, teasing out an inferred common ancestor.

“It’s puzzle pieces that descend from that ancestor,” Jonathan explained. By studying them, they made a surprising discovery. “The virus pieces that were most similar circulated in bats very recently,” Jonathan shared their findings. SARS-CoV-2’s bat ancestor did not circulate in the wild for decades; rather, it came together “just a few years” before it emerged in Wuhan.

They were not done. On top of that, they combined geographic information from sampling locations of close ancestors with the phylogeny scaled with units of time. “Since we have sampling locations for the tips of the family tree,” Spyros explained, they can project the tree on a map. “Essentially, you zoom in on the parts of the map that correspond to the parts of the tree closest to SARS-CoV-2.” By doing so, they could narrow down a dispersion zone for the final recombination events that created the inferred bat ancestor. In other words, the most likely birthplace of the bat viruses that would later become SARS-CoV-2.

Based on their model, the South Chinese and Southeast Asian Karst region, a large area running from Yunnan Province, Laos, Northern Vietnam, and Myanmar down to northern Thailand, harbored those parental virus strains, with the diffuse geographic bullseye sitting over the wide border region between Yunnan, Laos, northern Vietnam, and Myanmar. The bat virus’s origin is likely multinational. Alice Hughes, somebody who collected some of the samples that informed their analysis and who was a coauthor of their paper, commented to me, “It just shows this pointlessness of trying to blame countries. Bats do not care about our borders.” Neither does the international wildlife trade.

Spyros, Jonathan, and their coauthors concluded that “direct ancestors of the SARS-CoVs likely could not have reached sites of emergence via the bat reservoir alone.” Meaning that somehow our human activities must have facilitated how the bat virus made its way into intermediate animals, acquiring respiratory adaptations before eventually being carried as SARS-CoV-2’s direct ancestor to Wuhan. It was another important piece of evidence that implicates the wildlife trading routes that run from Southeast Asia through Yunnan to the more prosperous Chinese wildlife markets in the north. “The border region is very porous,” Alice Hughes, who worked there for over a decade, explained. Sometimes, she and her team would wander over the borders in the wild by accident; sometimes, her students would sit on buses returning to Yunnan that carried wildlife from Southeast Asia in the storage compartment under the bus, only to vanish at the border. The often-illegal wildlife smuggling is especially hard to study for scientists.

Unfortunately, as of today, very little is also known about raccoon dog farms in Yunnan, and even less is known about conducts anywhere else in Southeast Asia. What and where are the trading routes that move them, together with pangolins, munjacks, bamboo rats, amur hedgehogs, civets, and other wildlife up north? There is much we still need to learn about how captured, smuggled or cultivated wildlife moves and ends up in Chinese and other markets.

“Of course, we know they exist,” Alex said, acknowledging the existence of smuggling routes as well as wildlife farms holding domesticated wildlife and wild-caught varieties. That has been clear since SARS-CoV-1. But how to gain insights into them? “We make these mitochondrial genotypes available because many people did not realize they could do this,” Alex explained their rationale. Once you have the genotypes of those animals at the market, you can go out and test where the host species might have come from. “In the case, of course, if there are different subspecies farmed in different areas,” he cautioned, this could narrow down the trajectory the virus took even further. Alex still had the hope that if tensions eased and people were allowed to sample farm animals in China or even wider Southeast Asia, a more granular picture of the origin would emerge. “If you have a national survey of raccoon dogs, you could pinpoint exactly where they came from,” Eddie Holmes agreed. “But it’s so sensitive, you know, that people in those countries do not want to admit they’ve got this wildlife trade problem.”

Honestly, who can fault their reluctance? Southeast Asian governments, just like Beijing, fear that more scientific discoveries will lead to them being blamed by a world that has not made peace with its natural pandemic risks.

The investigative reporter Michael Standaert, who was in Wuhan at the time the pandemic started, at least tried to find full numbers on the wildlife farms in China but was never very successful. He did, however, collect reports from the crackdown on the wildlife industry and the culling that happened starting in February 2020, where thousands of farms that had domesticated wildlife on them were shut down by the authorities. In Yunnan, 2,351 farms were impacted, in line with other provinces. Again, the wildlife industry in China is enormous, employing over 14 million people, and is estimated to be worth more than $70 billion USD. Smuggling and trafficking operations of wildlife from Southeast Asia have also been put at a price tag of around $10 billion, albeit these estimates have big uncertainties.

No matter if the illegal trafficking of rare animals over the border into China, hunting and trapping them in the wild for later sale or sustenance, or supplementing breeding in wildlife farms, this porous industry has many facets. Some activities are illegal but lack enforcement; some are traditional and culturally valued; while other activities, such as wildlife farms, were explicitly promoted by politicians before the pandemic. “Local officials trumpeted the wildlife trade as a way to close the rural-urban divide and to meet ambitious national targets to alleviate poverty,” NPR journalist Emily Fang reported about the role this industry plays in China. Given this reality, is it any surprise that follow-up on this industry has been politically sensitive from day one?

Michael Standaert, who specializes in property, contract, and business records, explained to me that on top of everything else, there is often a “black and red alliance” when it comes to wildlife trade. “Black,” meaning illegal activity like a black market, often owned and controlled by criminal syndicates like the Triads, and “red,” for local members of the communist party, who are corrupt officials looking the other way in exchange for a cut of the revenue. I recalled the Huanan market owner, who had allegedly lied twenty times to Peter Daszak and the WHO mission about no mammals being sold at his market. I learned that he apparently had direct connections to some powerful party officials, including a cousin of Xi Jinping, according to Standaert. Independent confirmation was hard to come by, so we are in the realm of speculation. Could that local black/red reality have obstructed Chinese health authorities and Chinese scientists from getting to the bottom of the outbreak despite their earnest efforts? Maybe even prevent tracing of wildlife traders, farms, and supply routes? “Why did they step away from following up on that?” Marion Koopmans’s question rang in my ear.

I honestly do not know the answer. However, I think these are contextualizing sideshows to the Chinese outbreak response in Wuhan that have not faced any investigations or scrutiny by the Western press and, more surprisingly, US intelligence services. Nor was there any compassion for Chinese scientists by the many grandstanding armchair investigators in the West, all too quick to question their integrity or character rather than their obstacles. Perhaps it’s not surprising the WHO mission faced 19 hours of fervent pushback in heated discussions about the Huanan market with a room full of delegates sitting in the back of Chinese scientists who were not allowed to concede that illegal wildlife had been sold there.

None of these are particularly pleasant speculations to talk about as a scientist. They are hard to substantiate in a repressive nation locked into a geopolitical skirmish with the US. These speculations are possibly still quite irrelevant to the larger origin question, which puts the totality of the global wildlife industry, not just an unlucky local market or country, under pressure. We have to be very clear on that.

Pandemic prevention is about the big picture—what we can learn about systematic problems and challenges—not pointing the finger at the unlucky victim of larger circumstances. For me, it is also important to understand that China is not a monolithic entity, where Beijing gives the marching orders and everybody obeys. Reality is, as always, much more nuanced and complex. Chinese scientists, journalists, and citizens have repeatedly shown their allegiance to the truth despite the consequences, whereas the “free press” and influencers in democracies often lie for self-serving gains without facing any consequences. On top of that, the global wildlife industry is enormous, similar practices are widespread anywhere, and no government in the world, not even Beijing, has the power to prevent all risky or illegal activities, nor can it stop humans from being humans with all the messiness that entails.

Yet, considering this messy reality, I believe we can understand the past and each other a bit better. Chinese authorities preferred to send out swaths of bat researchers, including Alice Hughes, to find evidence of a “blameless disaster” by discovering a bat “culprit” in the wild rather than being forced to open this particular can of worms surrounding their relationship to wildlife. Would other countries have acted differently? I do not know.

However, once the geopolitical blame games started at a time of domestic unrest and regime frustration, Beijing realized they would never get a fair hearing. Many politicians in the wider world, led by the US under Donald Trump, used the pandemic as a weapon against China and a tool to obfuscate from their own failings. Consequently, these actions, among other factors, led to reactionary policies of suppression and censorship occurring in China. Stopping any inconvenient research, controlling information flows, and pandering to domestic audiences with anti-US propaganda became more essential. This is still true today.

But some earnest efforts have also been made by Beijing. The authorities did initially crack down on the wildlife industry, shutting down thousands of farms, culling millions of animals, and successfully suppressing the virus within China for a long time before the increased virality of the omicron variant made it impossible. Their pandemic response offers no real excuses for the failings of our own governments.

Unfortunately, our human nature cannot be excluded from culpability either. Most early restrictions and bans for the wildlife industry implemented in 2020 have since flickered out or reversed. The wildlife industry is back in full swing. The same thing happened after the crackdown on civet farms after SARS-CoV-1 in 2003: they were shut down temporarily, bans were issued, then lifted. By 2019, the numbers of domesticated wildlife on these farms had risen to what they were before. “Not much had changed in those nearly 20 years, other than the magnitude,” Michael Standaert wrote on Twitter, commenting on an account by Hubei’s forestry officials, stating there were 631 total wildlife farms and 1.12 million animals on them by 2019.

This should not surprise us; 20 years after the Nipah outbreak in Malaysia, the pig industry is back in full swing as well. So are the factory farms in Mexico after the 2009 swine flu and about two dozen other risky animal-human interfaces, from the United States to China, from Brazil to Liberia, from Saudi Arabia to India, from Malaysia to Vietnam. We lose focus, we forget, and we trod on with little changes. The false lab leak narrative is simply facilitating this process again, against our better knowledge and interest.

But it’s 2024 now, and real answers to the question of where SARS-CoV-2 came from have been emerging. So, let me outline a different explanation for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic:

A comprehensive body of scientific evidence and field work has shown us that the immediate bat ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 came from one of the countless natural “gain-of-function labs” spanning the vast biodiverse Karst region from Yunnan in Southern China towards Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and maybe even Malaysia in Southeast Asia. The lingering and promiscuous endemic viral elements in that biodiverse geographic region constantly mix and bring forth new chimeric combinations within their socially intricate and transnational rhinophid reservoir hosts, while our exploitative human activities and reckless encroachment on bat territories stir the genetic cauldron ever faster.

Once a particularly combustible set of genetic elements had produced a potential pandemic pathogen with broad host tropism, the legal and illegal network of thousands of mammalian wildlife farms and markets likely became the maturing vessels. Only there, in this cruel environment of close-contact, stressed and sick animals could the former bat virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 have acquired respiratory adaptations over months to reach its final explosive form.

From the large wildlife industry supply chains, sick and infectious animals were dragged in front of hundreds of immune-naive future human hosts visiting the largest wet market of one particular Chinese megacity well connected with the entire world. This risky human-animal interface would end up seeding enough zoonotic spillover events for the virus to sustain an outbreak in people and eventually take humanity by storm, while political failures in most countries sabotaged effective containment at high economic, social, and personal costs to all of us.

That pandemic origin story, no matter how confusing, unintuitive, or otherwise emotionally unsatisfying, is the most likely and accurate approximation of reality given the weight of evidence we have and are likely to ever get; best I can tell after years of trying to understand this topic.

Instead of dealing with that inconvenient reality and implementing pragmatic counter measures, the viral lab leak narrative has done its fair share of harm in distracting us from the task at hand by offering scapegoats and entertainment rather than insights and solutions. Today, I also fear that too many lack the courage to follow the facts where they lead us because we fear solutions that put the onus on us to change. We intuitively shy away from acknowledging reality for the multidimensional and systemic struggle it is, trading real-world complexity for simple answers that put the blame on an outgroup. On top of that, we often lack compassion for the lived reality of others; therefore, we fail to make science-based change stick with communities.

Yet despite the challenges, I believe progress can be made without alienating people or polarizing the discussion, even on deadly serious topics. Science does not prescribe that 14 million humans in China involved in the wildlife industry have to suddenly give up their livelihood, and many more consumers have to change their culture or identity to prevent a future SARS-CoV-3. Instead, as Alice Hughes likes to argue, science allows us to find a pragmatic way forward. Karst forests and biodiversity can be protected by empowering local communities. Farmers can be educated about biosafety risks and best practices. Researchers can build surveillance at those risky human-animal interfaces and train boots on the ground for fast containment responses where new viruses are likely to emerge. Consumers can be offered safer choices for where, what, and how to shop for farmed wildlife. Regulators can be equipped with better tools to monitor, diagnose, and trace disease symptoms. Smuggling can be reduced by changing incentives and economic prospects, as well as enforcement actions. Authorities can establish fast-acting playbooks to anticipate, prevent, and counter outbreaks. All without overt blame, totalitarian control, or unrealistic expectations towards our human nature or communities.

In my opinion, if we, as a global society, can come to our senses, this is how a courageous and compassionate evidence-based response to the first global pandemic of the 21st century could have looked and might still turn out. We have no real choice; the biological danger is not gone but increasing. Many scientists I got to know now think another deadly zoonotic-origin epidemic—even a new pandemic—within the decade is more likely than not. The false lab leak narrative has sabotaged them—and us—from acting on that inconvenient reality. I certainly do not want to repeat the mistakes of COVID-19 nor write about the inevitably contested origins of H5N1 bird flu, Nipah-2029, SARS-CoV-3, or disease X a few years down the road.

Moreover, science and scientific institutions need to get ready for the information age. Pandemics are also always social phenomena. With the appearance of COVID-19 and the myths surrounding it, I believe we have fallen victim to a previously unobserved synergistic phenomenon: a hybrid attack of related viral occurrences. A biological pathogen has captured our attention and pushed us in front of our screens, thereby prompting social isolation, increased digitization, and online community formation. This hastened the disintegration of our shared infosphere by restructuring our social networks into polarized fiefdoms. That social fragmentation along the most successful information amplification networks has paved the way for harmful viral narratives to infect us at unprecedented scale and velocity. In return, the viral myths surrounding the origins of a biological virus helped to confuse, paralyze, divide, and conquer us to the point where we sabotage international and scientific collaborations, even blame scientists and distrust their advice. A lethal combination. A true global twindemic, perhaps the first of its kind, with long-lasting and incalculable damage. How can we hope to not repeat the same mistakes?

Given our broken information ecosystems, it is obvious to me that every future outbreak will be a war on two fronts. We already observe the same bad actors and myth makers prepare content for a potential H5N1 pandemic. If it comes to pass, they will profit while we will drown in confusion and chaos.

Unfortunately, as of today, while we have made a lot of progress on the scientific front when it comes to dealing with a novel biological threat, we seem stuck and less prepared to deal with virality in our online ecosystems that impacts our trust, our politics, and our ability to cooperate. We remain too captured by false myths and viral narratives that have become self-sustaining. Incapacitated by an overabundance of noise and confusion, we seem unable to bridge our divides and act on evidence, while some influential people among us are actively making things worse. The online restructuring of our societies into fragmented communities and polarized factions has not only paralyzed us but also made us sicker and more vulnerable to ever-new viral waves to conquer our bodies and minds.

This diagnosis is dire. We clearly have to reckon with the most self-serving among us who have spotted their opportunity in our current vulnerabilities and work tirelessly to exploit them further. After all, those who can create, shape, and maintain viral narratives in their favor have much to gain.

Yet I believe that most of us are neither gullible nor easily persuaded by self-serving commentators, contrarians, politicians, or grifters. These opportunists only gained influence over us by piggybacking on viral narratives whose power and social coercion we just did not understand before they hit us. We all participate in and co-create these viral narratives because we are a story-telling species and seek meaning. On top of that, our decisions to participate online are not fully our own but shaped by our emotional needs, cognitive biases, and the decisions of the people and social networks we trust and see as our own.

Our human flaws and idiosyncrasies have not fundamentally changed in the last ten thousand years; yet throughout history, some societies manage to still prosper, while others fall into chaos and decay. We have to understand that humans are not the only ingredient in our current conundrums; we need to be aware of the larger systems we have become part of and scrutinize them much more ruthlessly if they do not serve society.

Currently, platform companies have created merciless winner-take-all incentives for our pugilistic strive for attention, fostering a profitable information war of all against all with constantly shifting factional alliances. Within that system, we collectively have repurposed the internet from a marketplace of ideas into a marketplace for motivated rationalizations, with influencers creating justifications that legitimize the confident beliefs and worldviews of the powerful and the biases of algorithmically amplified crowds alike.

Unfortunately, it seems that the trinity of algorithms, crowds, and influencers has gotten too efficient for our own good, producing pseudo-events, fake news cycles, and counter-narratives at a breakneck speed to uphold their own polarizing virality. Hugo Mercier argues in his book Not Born Yesterday that:

Polarization does not stem from people being ready to accept bad justifications for views they already hold, but from being exposed to too many good (enough) justifications for these views, leading them to develop stronger or more confident views.

This, I believe, is the true reason why the information sphere always tends to deliver content to substantiate any narrative that gains traction. In turn, creating and controlling the distribution of these rationalizations that feed into larger viral narratives bestows a dark power over society.

The influencers and platforms of today, just like the regime propagandists of old, play a critical role as gatekeepers and super spreaders for these motivated rationalizations and mutually contradictory myths that feed into viral narratives. They are the champions of bespoke communities, the conduits of our feelings, the wordsmiths and velocity hackers that sharpen our co-created stories into epic viral narratives. And they are the shield bearers defending us with counter-narratives when we feel like upholding belief against all evidence. Under this gladiatorial spectacle of bespoke worldviews, what was once “the public” has further fractured every day, “coming together only to assail each other in factional warfare,” as Renée DiResta put it.

The only commonality, consensus-forming, and bridge-building that our current information ecosystems allow is not on issues but on shared enemies. Constantly creating new heroes and villains that activate us to take up arms, to participate, to defend the viral narratives we have come to believe in. “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer noted in his book The True Believer. The information age has seemingly turned us all into zealots on topics we participate in, to which we feel emotionally attached.

Science, rationality, and an evidence-based worldview have thereby become an obstacle to the co-created narratives that drive and define us. A pesky nuisance that sabotages the myth-making of the powerful or the will of the crowds. Is it any surprise that too many gladiatorial champions of our online arenas decided once and for all to make science their ultimate enemy during a pandemic that required us all to pay attention to scientists?

Renée DiResta wrote in her book about how hidden rulers shape public discourse. We all exert some influence by participating in crowds defending our bespoke worldview. Best I can tell, the rise of viral narratives has made the current crisis of trust in science and war on scientists both lucrative and inevitable.

The pandemic provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity for seasoned anti-science gladiators, such as anti-vaxxers and right-wing politicians, to tear down the hard-earned trust science has built with enlightened society over decades, if not centuries. Because scientific institutions were ill-equipped and unable or unwilling to participate, the gladiator’s modern crusade against them has been remarkably successful. Science and scientists have come under heavy siege, far outside the pandemic’s origin controversy.

This broadening war on science and shared reality shapes up to be one of the most consequential conflicts of our time. Unfortunately, for now, the lost battles, casualties, and consequences have been almost entirely one-sided for the upholders of an evidence-based worldview. This worries me immensely, not only for scientists but for society and our future. Without science as the arbiter of shared reality, the very incentives, vulnerabilities, and dynamics of our information ecosystems make polarization on any topic preprogrammed.

Without science, I fear that all our current conflicts will turn perpetual, and finding any cooperative solutions to shared problems turn to ash. Combating climate change, building up pandemic prevention, or getting citizens to protect themselves and others with a vaccine have already become seemingly unsolvable societal challenges despite having pragmatic scientific solutions at hand. Tragedy will inevitably follow.

Even worse, as hard as this is for me to write, is that our current vulnerable state of affairs has induced a dangerous type of “epistemic paralysis” in society, where citizens cannot separate facts from fiction anymore, no matter how hard and sincerely they try. We have unwittingly created the conditions where many citizens are left attaching themselves to the postmodern idea that nothing is ever really true and everything is always possible.

With science out of the way, this epistemic paralysis in turn has laid the groundwork for a very particular set of actors and authoritarian politics that we hoped to have banished to the past.

Their current rise is threatening to even more fundamentally change our democratic world than mere ignorance or inaction on scientific advice ever could.

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

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“I was always the ‘zoonati’ they could talk to.” Professor Stuart Neil, a virologist from King’s College London, chuckled about his perceived diplomatic role for DRASTIC and some other lab leak proponents. “I intrinsically thought this was an interesting story,” he said, remembering how he became intrigued by various ideas of how SARS-CoV-2 could have come about via a research-related accident ever since the Mojiang miner story blew up in the summer of 2020. Scientists are not averse to discussing controversial ideas; quite the opposite, many are attracted by them. Stuart came across some of the online figures who promoted it, and he thought there “were some people of good faith in this grouping.” He still believes they “were at some point,” but now laments that ultimately, even polite discussion and good faith engagements were made impossible by the emergent group dynamics of increasingly radical believers. “Gradually, that all got poisoned.”

Open inquiry and exchange are as important in science as in a democratic society. When my sci-comm colleague Sam and I first interviewed him in November 2021, Stuart had advised us to “avoid people that think they have all the answers.” He was curious about new developments and cautious about drawing hard conclusions. In many ways, his attitude was a good sounding board for some of the more creative lab leak proponents to test their ever-new speculations, at least in the early years.

Stuart’s open attitude in this controversy is representative of the free-for-all, evidence-driven approach characteristic of most scientists. He does not care who makes the argument as long as they bring the evidence to back it up. This was always the power and promise of the internet: to prevent group thinking and empower unusual voices to be heard where traditionally they would not get the chance. Stuart enjoyed entertaining alternative scenarios and engaging in good-faith speculations. He might have often been a bit rough on others and undiplomatic when it comes to nonsense, but he would acknowledge if they had made a solid point. Of course, like the rest of us, he migrated between amusement, bewilderment, and eye-rolling about the quality of popular discussion on the topic.

However, as the scientific evidence continued to stack up against any type of research-related accident and uncertainty about what wild theories could still be entertained in good faith shrank, the fronts hardened beyond repair. Building bridges to reach lab leak believers became impossible. Eventually, even scientists who had previously established good rapport ended up being considered enemies by the lab leak camp. Soon enough, he found his safety threatened, his private communications FOIA’d, and even his kindergarten-age kids were stalked and doxxed. All for the simple sin of following the evidence.

I reached out to Stuart because I felt it was time to tackle the most misunderstood and polarizing element in the whole origin controversy: the infamous furin cleavage site (FCS). What is known, what is still unknown, and what we can learn from it.

The FCS is a short amino acid motif in the spike protein that is recognized by furin-like proteases, which are cutting enzymes. It is a dramatic functional element for those various factions captured by the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow created in a lab. It is alleged to be the pandemic’s secret sauce. A trigger that was artificially inserted to turn an ordinary bat virus into the pandemic blight pathogen we have today.

Indeed, the FCS is critical in SARS-CoV-2; it increases virality and is required for efficient human-to-human transmission. Yet, it’s almost a mythological force in popular discourse that is entirely based on two misconceptions.

First, there is the common misunderstanding that the alleged introduction of a single genetic element has the power to create a pandemic pathogen. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is deliberate deception about how likely it is that nature or human engineering came up with the nucleotides insertion that led to the FCS we observe in SARS-CoV-2.

We are going to have to get a bit technical to address both points. But it will be incredibly worth it to understand, so bear with us.

As a molecular virologist, Prof. Stuart Neil was well-positioned to talk intelligently about the nuances of this topic; his research lab focuses on host-encoded antiviral mechanisms, and he has investigated the role of the FCS in that context. Viruses need to constantly adapt to beat immune systems since immune systems tend to evolve to beat back viruses. Stuart’s lab studied how “this evolutionary arms race plays out in the context of HIV1 envelope proteins, so the spike equivalent,” and he elaborated on where he traditionally came from before SARS-CoV-2 entered the scene.

The vast majority of enveloped viruses need membrane fusion with a host cell to enter it, which can happen directly at the outside cell wall or after being ingested in a big bubble, also known as endocytosis. Either way, the viral proteins responsible for entering host cells need some help from the host environment.

“In general, a lot of them are activated by having a protease cleavage site midway,” meaning our own protein scissors do the deed for the virus. The virology professor used both hands to illustrate how a cleavage site usually liberates a hydrophobic (water-insoluble) part of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. This part “burrows itself into the nearest target cell membrane.” Imagine a harpoon ready to fire as soon as the gun ports are opened. In fact, talking about a single spike protein is a bit imprecise because, on the virus surface, three spike proteins are always intertwined, forming a type of trillium flower with three such spring-loaded harpoons that are ready to shoot once liberated by a protease cut. The activating cuts by a human protease prime the viral proteins to launch their invasion into a new cell. But where does this activation happen?

For many viruses, the most important part of that cutting activity often happens after the virus is already attached to the host receptor, which would be the human transmembrane protein known as ACE2 for SARS-CoV-2. Once the SARS-CoV-2 virion is bound to ACE2 on the outside of a new cell, a human protease called TMPRSS2, a molecular cutter also embedded in the host cell membrane, activates the bound viral spike proteins via multiple cuts. Then the membrane fusion starts.

That’s one way. However, there is another option. For some viruses, such as HIV1 or H5N1 influenza, activating cleavage of their invader proteins can happen even before they leave the production factory, so to speak. Their most critical cutting steps predominantly occur still inside a currently infected host cell, where the next fleet of virions is assembled to start a new invasion.

In this “pre-cleaved” scenario, the viral battleships come out, guns blazing and ready to attack. Stuart explained how that could be quite consequential for cell invasion:

Not only is the virus going out into the space and then getting activated and breathed out, it’s [also] being able to come out very rapidly and infect the next-door cell, or come out the back end of the cell, and that sort of... makes it go bang straight through that epithelial way.

Unfortunately for us, Stuart acknowledged, coronaviruses “live in this happy medium, where they can deal with both [activation scenarios], and that was always a worry.”

Coronaviruses can get both pre-cleaved in the factory or cleaved directly at a new host cell’s door. Even worse, Stuart said, “They can be very promiscuous about what protease they allow to do that.” This is where the FCS comes into play. Furin is a protease that sits inside a cellular compartment called the Golgi apparatus, basically the very last station of protein production where assembled proteins get various modifications, such as sugar shields (glycosylation). Having an FCS motif would allow SARS-CoV-2 to get pre-cleaved in the host cell, right on the way out.

Why that works so well for SARS-CoV2 is not completely understood and was largely unpredictable beforehand. Virology is complex. However, what we have since learned is that pre-cleavage of spike proteins by furin does two very specific things to SARS-CoV-2. First, it opens up the structure of the trimeric spike protein, which makes it a lot less stable in its 3D configuration but allows for better epitope binding to its host receptor, ACE2. Second, it primes the TMPRSS2 cutting work, making this specific route of viral cell entry through direct membrane fusion faster and favored over alternative entry routes.

This matters because it is not only the availability of host cell receptors that define what tissues in our body are most susceptible to a specific virus but also the concentration of activating proteases in the cellular environment. Higher ACE2 and TMPRSS2 co-expression are found in respiratory tissues. These tissues would find themselves especially vulnerable to spike proteins that were pre-cleaved by furin proteases.

Think of the whole thing as an efficiency hack. Pre-cleavage favors TMPRSS2-expressing respiratory cells and enhances virion entry via the direct membrane fusion route, ripping open the host cell membranes to deposit the viral cargo inside. The increased fusogenicity at the outer cell membrane has the additional benefit of dodging some intracellular antiviral defense mechanisms that would come into play via endosomal entry, such as virions being chewed up, sliced apart, or boiled in acid inside the endosome. This efficiency hack overwhelmingly favors respiratory tropism and circumvents some of our innate host defense. The end result of the tiny FCS motif in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, through a complex set of molecular processing, environmental factors, and host biology, is that it happened to aid both in pathogenicity and respiratory transmission of the virus, to our detriment.

This outcome was not given by any means. If you switch the host or environmental context, for example, by putting SARS-CoV-2 into human cell culture, the FCS motif is lost very quickly. In that similar yet different human cell context, harboring an FCS destabilizes the spike protein critically and slows down the virus, thus the FCS motif gets outcompeted. Same virus, same genetic elements, different outcome. Only real-world selection pressures during respiratory transmission seem to favor and preserve the FCS motif in SARS-CoV-2.

Stuart cautioned that we should not be fooled by overly simplistic notions, either. “Finding an FCS does not a priori mean respiratory spread,” the virology professor warned. Nor does an FCS turn a random bat virus into a respiratory virus. Multiple changes, large and small, must happen iteratively to reach a point where a bat virus can expand its cellular tropism. This includes stabilizing mutations to compensate for pre-cleavage lability and new structural or conformational changes; gaining or losing glycosylation sites; avoiding or surmounting prior host immunity; finding ways to subvert the cellular machinery of the host; and somehow using new routes for transmission. No researcher anywhere in the world has yet been able to optimize a virus for human transmission in a laboratory setting. The widespread notion that merely introducing an FCS will do the trick, or is even likely to do the trick, is simply false. Context is king when it comes to viruses.

For example, MERS-CoV from 2012 and SARS-CoV-1 from 2003 both caused epidemics, one with and one without an FCS. In the case of SARS-CoV-1, some experiments have shown that the artificial addition of an FCS does not increase virulence or pathogenicity. Additionally, SARS-CoV-1 without an FCS is no less infectious in respiratory transmission to ferrets compared to FCS-containing SARS-CoV-2. Adding an FCS to 96% similar bat virus cousins, such as RaTG13 or Banal-like viruses from Laos, does not turn them into human respiratory pathogens either, although they do tend to show increased fusogenicity. Feline coronaviruses, which actually tend to have a furin cleavage site as a baseline, are usually mild but become much more virulent when they lose their FCS, a direct opposite to SARS-CoV-2. Some of our endemic human CoVs—common cold viruses infecting the respiratory tract—have an FCS but do not even use ACE2 as an entry receptor, while others have no FCS but still use ACE2. The human CoVs without an FCS do no worse in respiratory spread either. The point is that we should not be overly focused on the FCS or any other single genetic element, as Stuart and other virologists have cautioned me over the years. In nature, no genetic element acts alone; they follow their own logic born from constant adaptation and genome-wide optimization.

Stuart lamented. The reality is that for a pandemic virus, the right genetic elements, host, and environmental conditions have to fall together to create a perfect storm. We should also expect that any natural virus that is capable of starting a pandemic has a lucky combination of some unusual genetic tricks up its sleeve. Otherwise, every ordinary virus would cause a pandemic. So why was there so much fuss about this one genetic element?

As best as I can tell, the main reason why the short FCS sequence in SARS-CoV-2 (a 12-nucleotide out-of-frame insertion encoding four new amino acids) has been hotly discussed is because it stood out like a sore thumb in side-by-side sequence comparisons to known bat coronaviruses in early 2020. The llama in a supposed herd of viral sheep. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, and it was something we had not seen before that looked obviously out of place when lined up with bat viruses. This supposed uniqueness, coupled with the misconception that an FCS has the power to turn an ordinary virus into a pandemic pathogen, has since been perpetuated endlessly as evidence of human villainy.

And where there is villainy, there are those who believe they can become heroes.

Enter Columbia University professor of economics, celebrity academic, and political power broker Jeffrey Sachs. He has been an establishment figure for decades, most prominently involved in the economic “shock therapy” doctrine for post-Soviet Russia transitioning away from a planned to a market economy. “He was preaching privatize, privatize, privatize,” Dr. Carlos Morel, a Brazilian parasitologist and former WHO director who was very familiar with Sachs, once explained to me. Unfortunately, Sachs’s shock therapy mainly caused chaos and suffering, leading to millions of deaths from despair as well as seeding the roots of kleptocratic oligarchy, which he was later harshly criticized for, such as in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. Sachs’s role as advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General, working on sustainability goals and poverty, has seemingly aged a bit better. “In 2001, he chaired the macroeconomics and health book,” Carlos explained. “For the first time, in this report, they showed that investment in health is good for economic development,” which shaped thinking and policies for developing nations. However, many of Sachs’s advocated policy initiatives in Africa, such as the Shiny Millennium Villages project, have had mixed results at best. No matter what Jeffrey Sachs gets involved in, he seems to relish exerting influence on world matters and hanging out with celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Bono from the Band U2. According to a profile in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: “Sachs’s ambitions are hard to overstate... His ultimate goal is to change the world—to ‘bend history.’”

Is it any surprise that after a traumatic pandemic, he anointed himself to litigate the origins of COVID-19 as well? The economics professor became the head of the Lancet Commission, which was convened by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet to collect lessons from the pandemic and make recommendations for public health policy. Initially, Sachs was against the lab leak theory, which he believes unjustly blames China, a country he often championed and has some undisclosed affiliations with. Yet it would not take long for him to be taken in by a very specific version of the lab leak myth, forcing Peter Daszak, whom Sachs himself had first invited to head the Lancet’s origin task force, to resign and disband his group.

“He is a very good speaker,” Carlos admitted. “But his role as the head of the Lancet commission… my God,” he shook his head and threw his hands in the air. He was happy to have not been on that commission. In his opinion, Sachs was very authoritarian. “Some of my colleagues who had been in the Lancet Commission said, ‘No, I quit. I cannot be in a commission where the chair orders what to do.” But that seems to be how politics often works these days. With the dissenting experts out of the way, Sachs could exert control over the origin narrative, which, surprisingly for people less familiar with his ideology, ended up pointing the finger of blame not at China but at the US instead, blaming “US biotechnology” for creating the virus. In parallel, he had written an opinion paper for the journal PNAS proposing, based on the most naive and cherry-picked sequence comparison to a human protein called ENaC, “that a ‘molecular mimicry’ between the FCS of SARS CoV-2 spike and the FCS of human ENaC” had taken place. He confidently asserted:

For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung) of the target organism (human)—might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously. Of course, the molecular mimicry of ENaC within the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein might be a mere coincidence, although one with a very low probability.

To experts, the quality of these naive arguments is laughable; they are the equivalent of typing in a random string of six letters into Google and taking the inevitable positive search result as evidence that the word exists. It was the “HIV inserts” level of analysis all over again. “The paper takes a sharp turn and gets into some serious furin cleavage site trutherism,” Prof. Angie Rasmussen commented. Stuart Neil was even more poignant and less indulgent: “All these arguments of intelligent design without any actual evidence to support them are simply creationism by another name.”

Stuart was correct, of course. However, Jeffrey Sachs cared little for the virological details. They were pretense because he had much bigger fish to fry. He gets very explicit about what he wants, arguing:

A US-based investigation need not wait—there is much to learn from the US institutions that were extensively involved in research that may have contributed to, or documented the emergence of, the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Only an independent and transparent investigation, perhaps as a bipartisan Congressional inquiry, will reveal the information.

Sachs has always been critical of “US hegemony” while seemingly being comfortable cozying up to autocratic regimes. In recent years, that has apparently led him further and further towards fringe positions, such as denying the plight of the Uyghurs in China and arguing that NATO is responsible for the Russian invasion and war on Ukraine. Blaming the US and the genetic engineers at the University of North Carolina for the pandemic was very much par for the course. It was rather absurd to propose that US scientists created the virus and shipped or shared it to Wuhan where it broke out of a Chinese lab, even ignoring all the evidence in favor of zoonosis and against any laboratory involvement. But when somebody so influential speaks for the lab leak myth, allies in the media are easily found.

The Intercept would run “Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of COVID-19” as a headline, charitably eating up Sachs’s creationist opinion paper. For them, it was a logical continuation of the DEFUSE proposal coverage, featuring the same story tropes and villains in the form of Ralph Baric’s lab but now adding a supposed “EnAC mimicry” story element as the supposed “inspiration” for the furin cleavage motif used by American engineers. Jeffrey Sachs, in turn, started doing media rounds, using the publicity around the Lancet Commission report and the opinion paper for PNAS that he had shaped for his self-serving cause.

No matter where he went, the skilled orator got away with claiming that he was “pretty convinced” that COVID-19 came out of US biotechnology. He made quite a few headlines, much to the pleasure of Chinese state actors it seems to me, who giddily amplified his message. In such a media environment full of motivated actors and power plays, finding our way back to evidence and fact-based discourse becomes increasingly difficult. But we have to try.

Stuart agreed on the basic tenet of why the FCS is unusual. “What was never seen among the sarbecovirus family, and this is obviously why it’s controversial, is the presence of one of these things in bats.” But he was not overly surprised by that. In bats, all coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS-related family members, are in general found to be gastrointestinal, not respiratory viruses. That is why Shi Zhengli and others have been collecting bat guano pellets in their multiyear surveys. Furin-cleavage sites in the wider beta-coronavirus family are relatively rare, but they do exist sporadically. Yet, so far, none have been found in close bat virus cousins of SARS-CoV-2, making the FCS unique for this particular branch of the family tree. The llama in the flock of viral sheep.

That being said, we already learned about very suggestive insertions at that critical S1/S2 region, which, for example, Alice Hughes and Supaporn Wacharapluesadee had discovered. The alpaca and guanaco within the viral herd, so to speak. Researchers in Germany around Christian Drosten have since discovered that these insertions at S1/S2 can indeed also contain polybasic cleavage motifs; however, they occur both at very low frequencies and do not seem to be maintained very well in bats. So, as best we can tell, these polybasic cleavage sites pop in and out of existence without giving an evolutionary advantage for transmission in bats. They are short-lived in that particular host and gastrointestinal context.

“I always thought that the FCS that SARS-CoV-2 picked up seems to me like it’s very recent,” Stuart argued. “It is a first pass. A first try. It works well enough as a toehold to respiratory spread.” However, that toehold does not come for free. Stuart’s research has found that these advantages come at the cost of protein stability, and the FCS also seems to play a role in how well pH differences are tolerated. This is because the FCS “is not just liberating the fusion mechanism,” he explained; “there can be long-range conformational effects on the whole of that protein” that might be beneficial or detrimental depending on the context. All these nuances and dynamics are incompletely understood and even harder to explain to non-experts.

“You can’t think of these proteins as rocks,” he advised. “They are living breathing things that are moving around like this,” he said as he waved his fisted hands upside down while explaining how spike proteins are configured very flexibly, “and the receptor binding domain sits on the top of that spike and goes up and down.” These dramatic conformational changes can work to a virus’s favor or detriment, depending on the environment.

Stuart elaborated, “But you know if you're going through an intestinal compartment, you're going to be exposed to a much greater pH and temperature, or whatever it might be in the way an upper respiratory tract is not.” This means that maintaining spike stability in the bat gut may exert significant evolutionary pressure on bat viruses; ergo, having pre-cleaved virions around that are less stable just might not work well in the merciless competition for survival these sarbecoviruses find themselves in. They are short-lived because selection does not favor them. However, if this harsh bat gut environmental context were to ever switch, let’s say after spillover into an intermediate animal, new evolutionary pressures would come into play. That’s where Stuart would put his money—that the FCS can start to grow out and become evolutionary favored. Keep this in mind for later. Because the question posed is not whether nature can come up with it, which it obviously can, but rather whether or not humans had their hands involved in creating it.

Here, my own viral vector cloning experience from my PhD came in handy to judge the evidence. Because from a genetic engineer’s point of view, using the unusual and likely ineffective FCS motif (RRAR) we observe in SARS-CoV-2 never made much sense. Why choose this crippled sequence when one could use a perfectly canonical sequence like RRSRR instead, which would guarantee efficient cleavage? Inserting four new amino acids—rather than substituting existing amino acids—is another thing genetic engineers tend not to do because it unnecessarily risks disrupting the overall protein structure, making the virus unviable. In fact, scientists have introduced furin-cleavage motifs through substitution multiple times, for example, in 2006 in the original SARS virus. Other labs have also worked on this over the years, all using substitutions of existing sequences. No one has ever documented a single example of a de novo motif insertion like we see in SARS-CoV-2. Lab leak proponents, such as Jeffrey Sachs, not only propose that the FCS was inserted (which is not even accurate, the staggered nucleotide insertions create PRRA, which forms a minimal FCS motif RRAR only with an already existing R in the viral backbone), but that an extra amino acid up front, a helix-breaking proline was thrown into the mix for no good reason. Beyond odd.

Anybody who knows anything about genetic engineering will admit that the FCS we observe in SARS-CoV-2 was always unlikely to be rationally designed. Because in addition to its odd, crippled cleavage motif and a superfluous proline amino acid that risks the integrity of the whole protein, the insert itself has a very high GC content that genetic engineers try to avoid. Even more tellingly, all the nucleotides are inserted out-of-frame, oddly breaking the insertion in staggered nucleotide triplet ends. No engineer would do that either; there is simply no reason other than to confuse oneself for fun. However, natural mechanisms that can create sequence insertions, such as viral recombination, are completely reading-frame agnostic. With recombination, the odds are two out of three that new inserts will be out-of-frame, too. To me, it all made the notion of a rational designer rather far-fetched. Yet merely pointing that out in my first blog article about the topic in 2021 got me into this hot mess, with lab leak proponents feverishly arguing that we cannot presume to know what Chinese (or American) engineers would do just because textbook genetic engineering and some experts would do things differently. We can never know their motives, they assert; therefore, we can never exclude that the FCS was artificially introduced. Apparently, experimental precedent, basic biology, experience, and parsimony did not count to judge the odds.

Luckily, we do not need to dive into the supposedly twisted minds and motivations of mysterious Chinese or American engineers, because nature is more creative and intricate than our naive human suppositions.

Unequivocal evidence that no human could have designed the FCS emerged from subtle mechanistic studies published in 2022. Researchers from the University of Texas in Galveston had investigated a short amino acid motif called QTQTN right upstream of the FCS motif. It's next-door neighbor, so to speak. QTQTN had garnered curiosity because, when SARS-CoV-2 was cultured in human cell lines, this motif would get lost over time, just as the FCS motif does. This was considered odd.

The two seemed to be a package deal: keep both or lose both. When researchers deleted just the QTQTN motif but kept the FCS intact, they found that the FCS could not be cleaved very well anymore. They discovered that the QTQTN forms a little loop on the side of the spike protein, positioning the FCS motif in just the right spot so that proteases like furin can cut it efficiently. Imagine holding it out like a ribbon so that the molecular scissors can quickly fly by and cut it. As a result, the deletion of the QTQTN loop made the FCS less accessible, reducing the proteolytic processing of the spike protein and, with it, the ability of virions to enter new cells. It was a symbiotic interaction, one genetic element empowering the other.

Further investigation revealed that there is a third component to that particular package deal: a glycosylation site (sugar shield) that would be assembled on the threonine amino acid (the second T in QTQTN). When the researchers in Galveston kept both the QTQTN loop and the FCS intact but removed the ability for the sugar shield to form on it, the spike protein would get pre-cleaved by furin but somehow had trouble interacting with the TMPRSS2 protease on the next target cells, reducing viral infectivity as well. The sugar shield served as a homing device for emerging pre-cleaved virions to find TMPRSS2. It became clear that SARS-CoV-2 needs the full molecular trifecta of glycosylation, loop extension, and cleavage motif to make the FCS efficiency hack work. This finding, although hidden deeply in the nitty-gritty of molecular virology, is absolutely remarkable and devastating to any engineering hypothesis.

Co-dependency and synergy between proximal genetic elements are hallmarks of evolutionary selection. These types of complex interactions are virtually impossible to design even with perfect knowledge of all structural components, which nobody anywhere in the world had in 2019. Also, consider that the QTQTN motif is an uncommon but natural element that is occasionally found in SARS-CoV-2-related bat viruses. So how does a symbiotic interaction—a package deal—come together between a supposedly “artificial” FCS and its natural neighbor? In 2019, there was simply no conceivable way that engineers could have ever anticipated, designed, or stumbled upon the observed, but hitherto unknown, mechanistic synergy in any laboratory setup. For me, this mechanistic discovery was the final nail in the coffin of the “engineered” FCS speculation.

Other differences were also found. While the FCS was one critical element for respiratory transmission that made headlines for its uniqueness, it was only one among many unique genetic elements in an intricate virus full of surprises. Since this discovery, researchers have found other such unique respiratory adaptations, including two single amino acid mutations called A372T and N519H. None of the related bat sarbecoviruses seem to have these, but SARS-CoV-2 maintains them strictly. Why?

We talked about three spike proteins forming a trillium flower; what we have not yet explained is that there is an open and closed state of that flower. When closed, the viral particle is better protected against the host’s immune system but cannot bind to the ACE2 receptor as well. To bind better, it has to adapt to an open conformation. One way to picture this is that the trimeric spike proteins oscillate between open and closed conformations, with mutations defining how much time the trillium flower spends in either. When a virus jumps from its natural host to a new, "naive" species without existing immunity, mutations favoring the open state are often selected. This is what we observe in SARS-CoV-2.

In short, researchers found that, for example, the A372T adaptation (a mutation of a single amino acid, unique to SARS-CoV-2 among the sarbeco bat viruses) destroyed yet another glycosylation site in the receptor-binding domain. This site is basically an anchor for a sugar shield that covers parts of the spike. The loss of this highly conserved (in bat viruses) glycosylation site, in turn, prompted a conformational change in the larger trimeric spike protein assembly, causing the RBD to turn outwards into a more respiratory-infectious “open” position. Great for facilitating ACE2 binding on respiratory cells. In lab experiments, reversing this single mutation decreased viral titers (a mark for infectivity) by fiftyfold. Similarly, another recently discovered respiratory adaptation called N519H is a flexibility mutation, lowering the energy barrier to overcome the conformational change between “open” and “closed” conformation. The closed form in bats protects against the host immune system, but makes binding to ACE2 more difficult compared to the open form, which reduces infection efficiency. Once SARS-CoV-2 jumps from the bat into an immune-naïve host animal, mutations that flexibly favor open confirmation are advantageous for transmission.

None of these 3D conformation-altering genetic kinks could have been anticipated by any engineers, nor could any of these host-context-dependent impacts have been reasonably stumbled upon in any laboratory setup. Apparent “uniqueness” based on limited comparisons to known bat viruses is not a good argument for a genetic element to be “artificially created.” It is a non sequitur. Nature is far more creative and capable of developing these genetic innovations because it runs trillions of such exploratory experiments each day, and when the circumstances are right, some viruses will hit the jackpot. For viruses capable of causing a pandemic in humans, the presence of such unusual genetic elements is fully expected, and it is not suspicious if related bat viruses do not contain them while inside their bat hosts.

Most lab leak proponents are perfectly capable of following the above reasoning based on the emerging evidence. Unfortunately, none seemed willing or able to let the myth of the engineered FCS go.

Since then, conspiracy theorists have proposed that Shi Zhengli must have had an unknown but perfect progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 in her lab. One that not only already included the receptor binding domain found in bats in Laos in 2021 but also had all these other synergistic genetic elements, conformation changes, stabilizing mutations, etc., required for respiratory spread already in place. Basically a perfectly capable human respiratory pathogen where Chinese engineers only needed to splice in an unusual and crippled furin cleavage motif that would ordinarily not even work, for some reason introduce it out-of-frame (something no engineer would do), add an extra proline spacer (that would usually break the whole protein structure) for fun (or to extend the loop length they did not know about), all so they could stumble upon a hitherto unknown mechanism by luck that made the FCS trifecta package deal all work together magically. Oh, and of course, Zhengli has kept all of that amazing molecular virology work worthy of a Nobel prize, as well as the hundreds of intermediate steps in between, secret for years before the pandemic started for no particular reason.

Stuart Neil and his two coauthors, Peter Jacobs, a climate scientist and communicator familiar with the dynamics and arguments of science deniers, and Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive psychology focusing on conspiracy theories, would write in a prominent article for Scientific American:

In normal scientific inquiry, as evidence emerges, the remaining space for plausible hypotheses narrows. Not so with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. One of their hallmarks is that they are self-sealing: as more evidence against the conspiracy emerges, adherents keep the theory alive by dismissing contrary evidence as further proof of the conspiracy, creating an ever more elaborate and complicated theory.

As Stuart Neil would say:

From his voice and expression, I could tell he was exhausted and haunted by the last few years.

Some details may differ, but Stuart’s trajectory has played out with dozens, if not hundreds, of outspoken scientists during the pandemic. It doesn’t matter if they engaged in discussions about pandemic origins, masks, vaccines, or supposed alternative miracle cures like Ivermectin. Their clinging to evidence made them targets of mobs that believing in evidence-free narratives.

In times of crisis and trauma, when myth, manipulation, and motivated reasoning are all too appealing, our ability to have informed discussions is diminished. Yet, following the facts and building a basis for shared reality, even with people we disagree with, seems like something worth preserving. For all our sake.

Somehow, we seem to have lost that ability forever.

§

2022 and 2023 marked two important years in origin research but also brought up the ugly side of science denial and anti-science activism. The lab leak myth had become too powerful to ever let go. Having lost just about every battle on the evidence front and in the scientific literature, lab leak proponents were in dire need of new narratives to justify their beliefs and identity. Yet, instead of trying to integrate new knowledge into their shifting speculations, many switched tactics entirely. They now fully immersed themselves in discrediting science and scientists while gaming the referees of public opinion: journalists, influencers, and politicians. Focused on creating a plethora of new counter-narratives against a consolidating scientific consensus, many seasoned opportunists and clout chasers saw an opening to get their name on the map.

As the dominos start to fall, there is a very real chance that the people we thought were heroes were actually villains. There is also a real chance that the researchers with the most-cited papers are guilty of the worst research conduct of the century [...] they pushed an overconfident narrative to the mass media, lying to the entire world and the scientific community to cover for Fauci.

The computational biologist Dr. Washburne would post this on Twitter on September 6, 2022, in what I would personally describe as his usual delusions-of-grandeur fashion. I had been paying attention after his profile began to rise.

When I first looked into his Twitter history, there was none discernible before 2022, which seemed odd to me for somebody with a sizable following. Despite that, the former postdoc had cultivated an influential network on Twitter. Somehow, he seemed to be connected with many of the contrarian academics, such as Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who had seen their number of followers explode during the pandemic. One for pushing “spike toxicity” anti-vaccine propaganda, the other two for advocating for the mass infection of citizens to supposedly get quickly to “herd immunity”, known under the pompous name the “Great Barrington Declaration”. Two dominant narratives on social media, unsupported by scientific evidence, that caused a lot of harm and confusion to public health.

Dr. Washburne, in contrast, seemed more like a data guy, posting models of epidemic case developments, preprints, and similar information that was somewhat typical for scientific conversations on Twitter. During exchanges, he presented himself as a polite scientist, a “deaf guy who is great at listening.” He constantly posted inspirational quotes about science, portraying himself as somebody who enjoys learning from others and respecting their perspective.

I appreciate folks’ diverse views and respect those who disagree with me. In my life, it’s the folk I disagreed with - but gave benefit of doubt & listened to - who’ve taught me the most. Happy Saturday, and I love you all!

That charitable tone was not extended towards the zoonati, though.

Looking into his Twitter history, it appears that on September 5^th 2022, Dr. Washburne came across an idea that had been cooked up in the conspiratorial fever swamps of DRASTIC and related amateur sleuths that he could turn into something much bigger. For over a year, amateurs had discussed how the FCS could have been inserted or even how the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 could possibly have been assembled by using various combinations of restriction sides. This “discussion” had been inspired by the work of Dr. Ralph Baric, who had developed a protocol to synthesize a known bat coronavirus genome directly from a sequence. Unlike Shi Zhengli’s group, Ralph Baric’s team never isolated and cultured a live coronavirus from bat droppings, so his team needed a synthetic approach to construct a viral genome. The amateur sleuths believed that SARS-CoV-2 was created the same way. Because CoV genomes are large, such a synthesis approach required first creating a handful of smaller pieces that needed to be stitched together, sometimes with the help of restriction enzymes (molecular scissors) and ligases (glues). By the time Dr. Washburne came across the idea, its most fervent proponents, Dr. VanDongen, an associate professor in pharmacology, and Dr. Bruttel, a German cancer researcher at an obstetric institute, already had a rather elaborate speculation in place. Dr. Washburne likely saw an opportunity to bring them to the next level. In my opinion, rather than being scientifically astute, he was an expert in upselling—taking a piece of content, polishing it, and repackaging it to make it look very attractive. The trio would soon set events in motion that would cascade to the top of the attention economy.

“At the time, I had no idea who any of these people were.” Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph told me. He was another computational biologist with a background in microbial genomics and would emerge as their sharpest online critic. Debunkers of scientific misinformation often come from the same field or community as the falsehood spreaders because they are usually best suited to follow the particular vocabulary and methodology used to mislead bystanders.

As a computational microbiologist and sequencing guy, Alex had been around the origin discussions online from near the beginning, starting with the flawed “HIV inserts” preprint that went viral in late January 2020. “That was just a classic bioinformatics error,” he explained. “I wrote a comment on bioRxiv,” the preprint server where it was uploaded. He then commented on Twitter, explaining both the scientific methodology and why some results just did not withstand scientific scrutiny, even superficially. He had his debunking cut out for him. “Then there was this RaTG13 sample… Somebody said it was fake,” he explained, not remembering the details but already involving some known lab leak proponents. “Well, that is interesting,” he thought. “It is actually really hard to fake sequencing data correctly. There are tools to simulate it, but it never really looks like the real thing,” he elaborated. So, he had a look at the raw sequencing data and debunked the assertion. Whatever you might think of RaTG13 and Shi Zhengli, this was a real sample and not fabricated. “They were not happy with my responses,” he remembered.

A major flaw with conspiracy theorists is that they never discard debunked ideas, constantly rewarming them if they fit the larger emotional story. Of course, Scarlett, the supposed bioweapon whistleblower, would later again claim that RaTG13 a fake because it suited her agenda. The next thing Alex recalled was a conspiracy theory that Jesse Bloom and Alina Chan promoted, related to the hype surrounding the Mojiang mine story and supposedly secret viruses named RaTG15 collected there, which they thought could have been SARS-CoV-2. A family tree including RaTG15 had been shown in a talk Zhengli gave, so of course, both Jesse and Alina, as well as most of DRASTIC, thought Zhengli was hiding pertinent sequences, with the latter strongly implicating there was evidence of a cover-up.

Alex challenged them: “But there are totally normal reasons to share incomplete sequences in talks.” He tried to explain to them that their comments were irresponsible because “based on the tree/alignment, these sequences aren’t recent ancestors” of SARS-CoV-2 and “don’t indicate lab origins.” Unlike with journalists, it was harder for the motivated contrarians to bullshit somebody like Alex who understood the flimsy arguments they were making.

“And of course, later they [Zhengli] published RaTG15 work… obviously it was not SARS-CoV-2… and everybody just forgets,” Alex described the dynamic. No accountability for the contrarian falsehood spreaders. No revisiting of previous beliefs. Alex was mostly ignored. But that particular debunking and Alex’s consistent pushback had gotten him a bit more on the radar with a different set of scientists. The serious ones. Kristian Andersen once told me, “Alex has these amazing sleuthing skills.” He explained how they started working together sometime down the road, inviting him as an outsider to work on a critical review of the evidence for the origins of SARS-CoV-2 alongside almost two dozen other scientists. “It is interesting, and it is important as well; that’s how I kinda stuck with it,” Alex explained, describing his continued engagement in correcting the many falsehoods the various factions of lab leak believers would bring forth.

This brings us back to Dr. Washburne and his collaborators.

On October 20th, 2022, Dr. Washburne announced that he had uploaded a new preprint with some rather dramatic conclusions:

We examined whether SARS-CoV-2 was synthesized in a lab.

We studied a common method for synthesizing CoVs in the lab.

This method was thought to not leave a fingerprint.

We found the fingerprint.

That fingerprint is in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

It was a clear, simple, repetitive message with eye-catching formatting. The accompanying material appeared substantiated enough for non-experts, with math and complicated-looking figures that tried their hardest to give the impression that thorough science had gone into it. Maybe it was the fact that some influential names seemed to immediately jump on the preprint, such as the contrarian virologist Dr. Francois Balloux, who endorsed it right out the gate as “an important piece of work” that “looks both solid methodologically and conceptually,” and, of course, Dr. Feigl Ding, who was never shy about amplifying preprints with sensationalist implications and seemed to have learned nothing about the “HIV insert” story. Then there was a set of COVID-19 contrarians and anti-vaccine influencers that also seemed to jump on the preprint right off the bat. Dr. Washburne’s posts and the Bruttel et. al. preprint went viral on Twitter quickly.

“There are many kinds of ‘wrong’ in science, but this preprint is False,” Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph wrote at the time. Alex had seen the same half-baked theories about synthesis floating around for over a year, and he had explained to these same authors that these ideas are entirely contradicted by the fact that coronaviruses undergo recombination, and we had already found informative relatives in the wild.

Yet the Bruttel et al. preprint, as it became known, was quite something else. Polished by Dr. Washburne with shiny statistical figures, it was flashy. It looked really good. It was also scientifically unsound on multiple levels. To many experts, including me, it appeared as if the authors had deliberately constructed it to reach a predetermined conclusion. It started by cherry-picking two restriction enzymes that produced a somewhat evenly spaced pattern among many possible options. Then they applied what many experts and I would consider multiple inappropriate and misleading statistical tests to claim that this pattern is so unusual that only a human engineer could have come up with it. They also deliberately excluded a bat virus named RpYN06, one which Alice Hughes had collected in Yunnan. That “oversight”, if it was one, however would prove that the loss of a particular restriction site happened through recombination and not through genetic engineering. Alex Crits-Cristoph had even told the authors about RpYN06 and how its existence contradicted their assertions months before they posted their preprint, which seemingly purposefully excluded the sample. So it would be hard to come to a different conclusion other than that the authors must have known this genome existed yet chose to ignore it because it contradicted their conclusions. In science, such exclusion acts could be seen not only as highly misleading, but might even constitute deliberate scientific fraud.

Confronted with RpYN06 later, Dr. Bruttel falsely asserted that the virus was fake, that is why they excluded it. Supposedly all part of the cover-up. This behavior was not too surprising to me, given that Dr. Bruttel seems to have rarely encountered a viral genome that he did not believe to be engineered or faked in his mind. In my opinion, he seems to have fallen deep down the rabbit hole some time back. Over the years, he has for example falsely asserted that HIV, Ebola, and the Omicron variant were all man-made viruses, too. Not a trustworthy conduct for a scientist. Add to that cherry-picking, inappropriate methods and statistics, and the exclusion of contradictory evidence in the preprint, and what Dr. Bruttel, Dr. Vandongen and Dr. Washburne put to paper was not science but something else. In essence, it was exactly the same type of motivated reasoning covered in scientific language that intelligent design proponents use to discard the theory of evolution.

Despite the – what I would personally characterize as - “statistical paint job” the preprint received from Dr. Washburne’s efforts to in my opinion obfuscate its pseudoscientific reality, many virologists quickly dismissed the preprint as the nonsense they saw it to be. Kristian Andersen would tweet:

Unfortunately, for the average bystander, the preprint and fanfare around it proved more persuasive than the harsh dismissal from experts. They bought into it in droves, to the surprise of scientists. “That one is always a head-scratcher,” Alex Crits-Christoph rubbed his chin, thinking about the preprint’s impact. “Anybody who is qualified to comment on it thinks it is a total waste of time, and so won't comment on it. They think it’s a total joke.”

“Unfortunately, while that is true, it leaves open a space,” Alex rightly recognized. In the current information environment, if scientists do not immediately refute such bullshit with hard data, which often takes an order of magnitude more work and effort than producing it (a phenomenon known as Brandolini’s law), the bullshit can develop a life of its own. “It also then creates this weird dynamic where journalists think nobody is pushing back on that… especially ones that are just on Twitter, which is a terrible place to get information from,” Alex observed. “And this is a dynamic that happens a lot.”

When Natasha Loder, a science reporter for The Economist and Kelsey Piper, a writer for Vox, saw the waves of engagement and bickering on Twitter, they likely believed there was a genuine controversy at hand around the preprint. On top of that, both seemingly got annoyed by Kristian Andersen’s harsh tone and dismissal. “I don't think this kind of snideness and contempt really serves public communications,” Kelsey Piper tweeted at him. “Ditto,” Natasha replied right under. They decided to take matters into their own hands. After all, if there’s so much smoke around the preprint, there must be some fire.

Natasha was first out with her story. “Controversial new research suggests SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering,” the google headline read, much to the horror of scientists who had seen the pathetic work floated around on Twitter in various forms before. How could a serious news outlet take it up with such a declarative headline? The world reacted, thinking that the renowned British news outlet had gotten a scoop of momentous proportions. Natasha, who I consider a proper journalist, later explained the headline came out unintentionally wrong over google, and had it changed very quickly. Nevertheless, the preprint (that never made it through peer review even years later, unsurprisingly) and its coverage was hailed by many lab leak believers as all but finally proving that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab. But why was this pseudoscientific preprint so successful in the first place?

“It really surprised anybody how much that junk blew up.” Alex rolled his eyes. I believe this might have had something to do with the well-connected Dr. Washburne, who was not an entirely unknown entity on Twitter. I later learned he had inhabited a different controversy bubble before he became engaged in the origin topic. Best I could find, he was part of a network aggregating around a shady think tank called the Brownstone Institute, funded by libertarian billionaire and reportedly pro-child labor advocate Jeffrey Tucker. It was created to oppose various measures against COVID-19, including lockdown measures, masking and vaccine mandates, as well as financing academic contrarians that were involved in the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a public health proposal advocating for lifting all restrictions and letting the virus rip unmitigated through society. Dr. Washburne is listed as author writing for the Brownstone Institute. He had also been sitting on panels with prominent anti-vaxxers and activists affiliated with the think tank, producing what I personally would describe as akin to “merchant of doubt” fan fiction, mixed with ideological talking points that aligned with the GDB authors.

“He was in the middle of a Twitter network, where people would see his stuff,” Alex noticed as well. It seems to me personally that Dr. Washburne was somewhat influential with a certain anti-pandemic measures crowd because he appeared to be this polite, data driven guy that somehow always found a scientific-sounding argument to justify their beliefs. Looking deeper into his “scientific” work, I found that Dr. Washburne had created, as best I can tell, misleading statistics to justify the policy decisions of right-wing politicians in Florida and claiming that the pandemic had reached “natural endpoints” due to herd immunity in the summer of 2021. A bogus claim scientifically, yet possibly contributing to the overall popular libertarian narrative that the danger of the virus was starkly overblown. A fatal misconception for too many Americans in red states, who also simultaneous were manipulated by too many anti-vaccine activists into not taking vaccines, ultimately leading to a large disparity in deaths between Republicans and Democrats. In my opinion, between his scientifically unsound publications, Dr. Washburne was mostly occupied with shaping the public perception of his persona. It appears that he had deleted his Twitter account and posting history multiple times, removing old tweets that aged poorly, partisan predictions, junk science, and outbursts that exposed his persona, seemingly re-emerging with a new angle when he returned. “He kinda gamified the system a bit by posting all types of feel-good stuff that people then followed him” Alex gave his opinion. To me, it appears most followers were not realizing there might be more than meets the eye. With his engagement in COVID-19 origin speculations, the contrarian finally seemed to have found his niche.

“It really caught people off guard and managed to break through in this really unfortunate way,” Alex recalled. While the “synthetic origin” preprint and The Economist news story about it were gaining steam, debunkers like Alex reacted. Within less than 24 hours, he put together a list of arguments and refutations, including code where he reproduced some of the alleged “statistical patterns” and showed how they are non-discriminative nonsense. Multiple others joined in as well. Even virologists at the University of Würzburg, Dr. Bruttel’s home institute, felt compelled to tear down the viral nonsense in a press release that must have stung Dr. Brutal and the institution with embarrassment. Yet the falsehood was out making its rounds.

Much later, even Dr. Ralph Baric, the world-leading expert in using reverse genetic systems to build coronaviruses, the literal inspiration for the “synthetic origin” preprint that went viral, would describe Dr. Washburne and his coauthors’ preprint as “a pathetic piece of work” under oath. Why was he under oath? Because Dr. Baric was called in to give testimony at closed-door hearings by US lawmakers. That a US congressional committee had interrogated him about motivated junk science in the first place might, however, be the most damning tell on how our information ecosystem increasingly shapes reality perception. It certainly confirmed how viral nonsense cooked up by fringe figures can penetrate even the thickest walls of power.

The same cannot be said about the corrections and debunkings by dozens of scientists. Their arguments against the flawed preprint were mostly never heard by the average citizen or policymakers. No newspaper made a story about how The Economist got played by activists not shying away from upselling pseudoscientific nonsense. Instead, all the virologists and debunkers got was more harassment from crowds that saw their belief that the virus had been created validated.

Alex wrote about the experience. A reality of our modern information ecosystems where engaging fictions outcompete elaborate facts.

There are, of course, many reasons why the “synthetic origin” story went viral; it wasn’t just the crafty acts of the media manipulators themselves. Luck played a role, as did timing. The “synthetic origin” preprint was a perfect fit for the mood of the moment. First, it was a narrative sequel to the big DEFUSE story as well as Jeffrey Sachs’s pointing the finger at Ralph Baric’s lab, which he had been promoting for weeks. Second, with the US midterm elections at stake, the right-wing myth-making machinery was ready to give this polarizing origin controversy another go. The politicians realized that they could present themselves as the party of accountability, ready to punish those scientists who demanded masks and lockdowns, who forced vaccines into freedom-loving Americans, and who had created the virus in the first place. The much-hated Dr. Fauci, who smirked and made their president look stupid, rapidly became the focal point of their ire in these overlapping conspiracy myths. All the politicians needed were crafty content creators like Dr. Washburne, who could provide some flimsy support for their vendetta.

“It is often the stupider and simpler stories that really go big,” Alex Crits-Christoph noted dryly. Politicians are masters at recognizing their potential. You don’t persuade the hectic online masses to engage by advancing smart technical arguments, no matter if they are about science or policy. These often make people feel inadequate when judging a topic, and they discourage them from participating.

What works for winning over online tribes are simple messages and slogans—an exciting new angle to a common story trope that makes the complicated seem intuitive. Something that channels our emotional engagement and justifies our biases, where we can signal our allegiance and put our own spin on it for endless repetition. Coincidentally or not, these are the ingredients that can dominate the news cycle, too.

Unfortunately, as the scientific evidence accumulated entirely on the side of a natural origin hypothesis, more and more such motivated fictions completely detached from ordinary scientific inquiry started to gain momentum.

Right after The Economist went viral with the restriction enzyme bullshit bingo coverage, Katherine Eban had another, in my opinion, trope-laden story to sell to the flagship outlet ProPublica. Based on faulty translations of innocuous Chinese memos, Katherine built up a Republican Senate staffer into a codebreaking genius who could read between the lines of supposedly secret CCP party-speak. Together, the duo supposedly unearthed (or, more accurately, just fabricated) that a “grave and complex” biosafety emergency at WIV had taken place.

If this sounds silly and improbable, that is because it was. Countless native Chinese speakers, including Jane Qiu, were outraged by the motivated translation errors and apparent maliciousness of Eban’s story. So were many non-Chinese experts—including translators, sinologists, and China-based foreign correspondents—some of whom are fierce critics of Chinese governments. Even worse, Eban’s fabrication was tied in and coordinated with a later Republican Senate report attacking China, which would also be pulse-giving for a similarly titled “A Complex and Grave Situation” origin report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office. In his political fanfiction, Rubio offered a “political chronology of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak” that blamed the Chinese communist party for creating the virus, again to increase tensions. That supposedly independent journalism outlets like ProPublica had been setting the stage for such blatant partisan PR stunts was a bit too on the nose for many journalists.

They say journalism is what makes democracy work. We should all ask ourselves: Have we helped to make democracy work? Or have we helped perpetuate stereotypes and existing narratives, exacerbate mistrust and polarization, and make the world a more dangerous place?

Jane Qiu, in response to the ProPublica story.

Even worse for ProPublica, they had received a five million dollar “grant” from the cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried in early 2022 to do dedicated biosecurity reporting. Sam Bankman-Fried, as a leading light of the “effective altruism” movement, has dispensed a lot of money to investigative news outlets to do this type of coverage. The effective altruism movement had also been a community that fully bought into the lab leak idea as an existential risk and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the anti-science attack group USRTK, according to their own statements. This of course invites scrutiny. Did any of that “existential risk” money play any role in ProPublica’s choice of coverage or focus? Did it commission or facilitate any aspect of Katherine Eban and Jeffrey Cao’s misleading article?

I don’t know, but the amount of content that was created on the supposed existential risk of virus hunting from various outlets led to public pushback on virus discovery work and grants, resulting ultimately in the cancellation of pandemic prevention efforts such as DEEP-VZN, a program that was previously highly rated before online commentators got wind of it. It certainly seemed from my vantage point that putting large sums of money behind skilled storytellers was well-invested if one wanted to shape public discourse on the supposed existential risk of lab leaks. But is all of this existential risk fearmongering about virology in the field or the lab based on solid factual ground?

Few had time to ponder. Yet another media frenzy was started by The Wall Street Journal end of February 2023, and it subsequently captured the news cycle for days. They reported that the US Department of Energy had internally revised their assessment of a lab leak to likely, albeit with low confidence. No evidence for that assessment was ever provided, and as best one can tell, it was political. CNN learned that the DoE did not, however, blame the WIV; rather, it blamed a lab from the Wuhan CDC that was closer to the Huanan market. What a sensation! Doesn’t that finally explain the Huanan market connection? Two days later, Fox News followed up with FBI director Christopher Wray, who told them that “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” Again, no evidence was offered, but it did not matter. Either way, it cascaded through society, with journalists dutifully reporting about pseudo news events that had little basis in reality.

Some lab leak proponents were already holding victory speeches. On Twitter, Alina Chan claimed she felt “validated” with the intelligence community seemingly on her side now. And they must know, right? Well, a few months later, a dry report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees 11 US intelligence agencies, clarified that the whole of the US intelligence community had no special insights into the origin of the pandemic. They had no evidence of Shi Zhengli ever possessing a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor nor any evidence of WIV workers getting sick with COVID-19. In fact, most agencies agreed that the virus was not engineered, with four agencies assessing that a zoonotic origin was most likely and others not commenting. The FBI and DoE had been more of an outlier in their assessment, which seemed mostly based on their interpretation of Chinese obfuscation rather than any pertinent knowledge or insight. So much ado about nothing.

The only thing to learn from all these episodes is that our ability to create content for a belief has been democratized to the point where anything, no matter how wrong, motivated, or flimsy, can reach the peak of the attention economy and shape the news cycle. Especially when there is some dubious money and political desire behind it. Instead of a battle of facts—or at least interpretations of facts—the origin controversy has become a battle of viral narratives, cascading from the bottom to the top of the attention economy.

This bothers me enormously. Just as with the intricate biology of the furin cleavage site, I believe our incomplete understanding of what makes things go viral is, unfortunately, a problem that haunts us also in the technological realm.

§

We previously discussed how the arrival of the “winner takes all” attention economy has inadvertently changed the way information is valued in society. Instead of using information to inform and educate ourselves, we increasingly treat it as a product—something we consume or share for popularity, persuasion, profit, or power, like the influencers we have come to admire. When information is abundant, we pick and choose what we want to hear, not necessarily what we ought to hear. We have strong preferences to seek and amplify information that either confirms our preconceived notions, provides us with opportunities for social networking, or engages us emotionally. The accuracy, factuality, context, or topical relevance of the information we share is a secondary issue at best. As a result, certain information products (i.e., a funny meme, a tweet we like, an outrageous video, or a sensationalist article) have an easier time spreading through society than their competition.

How fast and how far information spreads is called information velocity. We want some relevant information to have a high velocity; think about an immediate crisis like an earthquake or school shooter warnings, where quick engagement and spreading can save lives. However, information velocity is not related to the veracity of the content of information. Misleading, false, or harmful information about an issue can have a much higher velocity than competing good information on the same issue. A meme showing 2+2=5 might spread a thousand times faster than a meme showing 2+2=4 for a variety of reasons, including sarcasm, humor, and irony. Information velocity is also dependent on the environment. Something that might go viral on TikTok might not go viral on Facebook, given dramatically different audiences and formats.

Perhaps most importantly, information velocity is a property that can be optimized externally without changing the underlying content. Two identical articles can have very different velocities depending on their headline. Two identical videos can have very different velocities by just changing the thumbnail. Two identical tweets can have very different velocities depending on the time they are first posted. Two identical memes can have very different velocities depending on who has written them. Messengers also play a role. If Taylor Swift writes “haha” in a tweet, it will be shared by millions. For most of us, the same tweet will go nowhere.

Today, there are multiple industries trying to figure these dynamics out, most prominently marketing agencies, advertising companies, and political campaigns. They seek to constantly optimize their information products, or the ones of their clients, to have higher velocity on various online platforms. Search engine optimization, keyword rank monitoring, link building, and nurturing are all intended to game the algorithms that curate our feeds. However, the most impactful velocity strategies are the ones that hack our human psychology and get us to participate and share the content we are exposed to. There are more and less legitimate ways to do so, with a big gray area in between. For example, a pro-vaccination campaign might increase the information velocity of its content by making complex scientific information more accessible to laypeople through compelling visualization, simplification of messages, inclusive language, and community engagement. This can really help public health officials get their message about vaccines out. Most of the world is, however, neither that noble nor benign.

A historical gray area is when headline writers use sensationalism or shock to get more people to click and share their articles. “If it bleeds, it leads” is an old adage attributed to William Randolph Hearst about this very phenomenon. With the rise of the attention economy, some of us have gotten very good at figuring out what the algorithms and our fellow humans want to see and amplify. We are a story-telling species, so narrative structures, including heroes and villains, work fantastically to package information products into bespoke worldviews with a unique selling proposition.

No matter how flashy, sharing a shady preprint that supposedly shows how SARS-CoV-2 contains fingerprints of genetic engineering isn’t going to go viral without the proper story tropes, emotional context of a gain-of-function panic in place, and a network of amplifiers giving it the initial boost. I learned that Dr. Washburne had meticulously arranged for sympathetic influencers, such as Dr. Balloux, to have advanced knowledge of the preprint before he announced it and received his endorsement. He had also contacted multiple journalists, including Natasha Loder from the Economist, and provided them with and advanced copy and “expert commentary” from credentialed pro-lab leak academics, making it very easy for journalists to get supportive quotes for their coverage, if they choose to pick it up. All these efforts increased the velocity of the “synthetic origin” preprint, regardless of its pseudoscientific content, in the information sphere.

Most influencers, grifters, snake oil salesmen, activists, politicians, and other media manipulators are brilliant at increasing the velocity of information products that work in their favor. There are hundreds of tricks that help game recommendation algorithms. The most impactful velocity hacks, however, are usually those that target our human vulnerabilities. The most unethical velocity hackers are using moralizing language to steer outrage, capitalizing on trigger words, jumping on hashtags, clout-chasing celebrities, and piggybacking on the news or traumatic events. Some examples include posting partisan talking points right after a school shooting or fabricating violent images with deepfakes to blame immigrants after a horrendous terror attack. Nothing is too toxic, too sacred, or too soon for velocity hackers chasing the next big hit. The velocity of their information product defines who wins, not the quality, accuracy, or truth of the content itself. It is an all-versus-all fight. From self-made influencers to mainstream media, from activist groups to marketing companies, from political campaigns to foreign influence operations, hacking the velocity of their information products has become the key business model for information merchants of all kinds. It is their ticket to popularity, persuasion, profit, or power in the information age. Those who get all the ingredients to velocity right—through luck, timing, and ruthless calculation—will catapult their content into virality.

Unfortunately, velocity hacking is extremely harmful to society and the public good. Virality not only shapes public discourse and what information people get to see, it also has a pernicious side effect that few of us have yet had time to wrap our heads around: it rewires our social networks.

Nobody understood this better than my now embattled acquaintance Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher from the Stanford Internet Observatory who has recently become a target of a smear campaign. We were both trying to make sense of the craft of an overlapping cast of velocity hackers that Renée would end up naming “invisible rulers” in her book. She started innocently enough, trying to understand how propaganda and rumors spread online and shape public opinion. It wasn’t long before she became the target of a propaganda campaign herself.

“One of the things that social media does is you feel like you can trust the things that you're seeing because they’re coming from your friends. Right?” Renée explained. When our network shares something, we are more likely to engage with it, comment on it, and amplify it further. We take their collective behavior as a cue and act in a predictable fashion. In a sense, whether we engage with a piece of content is not fully our own decision; it depends on how others in our environment act and what decisions they made before us. This phenomenon is not new to social media by any means but is well studied, for example, in behavioral economics, and known under the term “information cascade.” The Lehman Brothers Bank is a good example of an information cascade.

In 2008, the US bank Lehman Brothers announced a massive asset write-down as a result of sub-prime mortgages. For Lehman’s management team and the majority of institutional investors (who understand how to value a company), this wasn’t a major problem. ... However, individual investors began to sell shares of Lehman stock as they feared their equity was in danger. Taking this behavior as a clue, more and more investors, seeing the stock price falling as a result of other investors unloading shares, decide to sell shares themselves based not on intrinsic valuation but on the general panic of the market. This eventually led to a massive drop in Lehman Brothers’ stock price over a very short period of time, eventually forcing the operationally-sound company to the point of insolvency and bankruptcy. The end result was the largest bankruptcy in US history and the further descent of the US economy into recession.

From the Dutch Tulip mania to bank runs to sudden cryptocurrency implosions and other investment bubble bursts, information cascades are events when large amounts of individuals take the same decision in a sequential fashion based on the decisions of others before them rather than their own personal knowledge or assessment of the situation.

On social media, we constantly mimic these cascading behaviors by making the binary decision to buy or reject information products in the form of engagement and sharing. When an influencer engages with a piece of content, their followers see this and might be nudged to make the same decision to engage. If a piece of content has been visibly engaged with by multiple people in our social circle, our decision to engage with it becomes more likely. After all, we want to participate in the conversation with our peers and signal our allegiance. At some point, after seeing almost everybody engaging with a specific information product, our supposedly private choice to engage becomes a near certainty. Our social network compels us to engage, and our decision to do so further influences others after us to engage as well. By being part of a specific social group and engaging with a specific information product the same way, we have become part of an information cascade amplifying the information, a stepping stone on its way into virality.

However, information cascades on social media do more than make things go viral; they teach algorithms what content and associated social relationships influence our decisions to engage. And inversely, the algorithms learn which of our connections and friends are less relevant to create ever higher likelihoods of us participating in such social information cascades. This leads to a radical social sorting over time.

Network studies showed that participation in “Tweet cascades increase the similarity between connected users, as users lose ties to more dissimilar users and add new ties to similar users” and that “Twitter users who follow and share more polarized news coverage tend to lose social ties to users of the opposite ideology.” It’s a dynamic system that nudges us towards a social amplification network while trimming our social ties that might interfere with viral amplification; you know, those low-velocity buzzkill people who ask questions, fact-check information, and caution others not to spread false rumors. Debunkers like Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph and other scientists who care about getting it right.

Fact checks, diversity of opinion, nuanced discussion, and appeals to deliberation all create friction and slow down the amplification and spread of viral narratives. Platform and ranking algorithms have long figured out that the social engineering of our networks removes these frictions and compels us to become better hosts in viral amplification cascades. “Think about it as an ecology: The online ecosystem lends itself at a particular moment to a particular species, which thrives and in turn reshape their environment,” Renée explained.

She hopes that “understanding how recommender systems sort people into networks can help us be more cognizant of polarizing factions” that inevitably arise through this social engineering process that makes new information cascades ever more likely. The consequences of such information cascades can be no less dramatic on social media than in finance. Instead of a bank run leading to a historic bankruptcy, we get pile-ons, mobs, and witch hunts. We might also see, let’s say, a vibe shift in media coverage and elite belief that causes a geopolitical escalation with a foreign superpower.

According to Renée:

Talking to Renée, my mind rushed back to Nicholas Wade, whom we discussed in a previous chapter, putting the blame on his peers in the media. “Can you produce a vibe shift by targeting specific journalists and media tastemakers?” I proposed to her. “Yes, I think the answer is yes,” she jumped in halfway through my question. “You even see this in the Russia 2016 data.” Renée had studied Russian propaganda and election interference in the 2016 US election. “Who do they mention in their tweets? Right? They want to get retweeted by prominent people, and so they’re actively soliciting and replying to people who have the power to boost them.” Sometimes, foreign agents even directly pay influencers to boost certain narratives. They do this because they want to reach a critical mass, a tipping point in the discourse. Causing vibe shifts is their game; that’s how media manipulators try to shape social networks in their favor and exert influence that can become relevant on the geopolitical stage. Today, a sizable proportion of Americans buy into Kremlin propaganda that has been promoted by paid American influencers.

All the false news stories about a supposed lab leak that went viral over the years flashed past my inner eye. The motivated and needy conspiracy theorists are tagging scientists, politicians, and journalists, trying to get them to comment and engage. All the carefully crafted pieces by gifted storytellers, multiple genuine disinformation campaigns, and the many plots, ploys, and players who aimed to sway tabloids and news outlets, politicians, mainstream journalists, and influencers to participate in lab leak speculations. How they all found there was something to gain by participating and co-creating these viral narratives surrounding a supposed unnatural origin of the pandemic. In turn, the ensuing virality in our information ecosystem socially aligned them more and more with each other until they became an unstoppable force to be reckoned with scientifically, politically, and socially. “Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel impactful, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, [and] realities,” Renée summarized aptly.

It is a phenomenon bigger than ourselves and individual actors.

Virality is the driving force that shapes the topology of our social networks. It gradually defines our relationships, drowning out acquaintances, friends, or even family that might think a bit differently about some topic. In return, it rewards the most efficient velocity hackers and elevates their network to become our new guiding stars. This leads us further away from reality because, while fiction can be optimized for maximum velocity, facts usually cannot. The best velocity hackers inevitably veer into self-serving falsehoods to win the battle for our attention. Over time, an asymmetry is created where the most efficient information cascades form around the most viral falsehoods supplied by content from the most successful velocity hackers. This is the world we have created today.

Science cannot compete. By the time scientifically accurate information reaches the majority of us, we have already been sorted into polarized factions where we clash about identities and worldviews, often unable or unwilling to concede an inch even when the other side makes a good point. No wonder that Prof. Stuart Neil, “the zoonati they could talk to,” now laments how “gradually, that all got poisoned.”

Renée DiResta has observed that:

However, once we are part of a tribe, we tend to defend our co-created narratives with all we’ve got and subsequently get trapped in a vicious circle. “Participation in factions may lead to entrenchment, more extreme beliefs, or stronger and more belligerent partisanship.” According to Renée, platforms need to be held accountable because their “design decisions now play a huge role in determining whether groups online are going to behave like civil communities or mobs.”

In my opinion, the extreme polarization today is largely a result of “winner-take-all” engagement algorithms, mercenary velocity hackers, and viral information cascades that stoke our emotions and nudge us to participate in conflicting online tribes. Once our social networks have been restructured along the lowest common denominator lines, such as partisanship or conspiratorial worldview, building bridges and good-faith discussions between opposing camps becomes almost impossible. “You don’t consort with the other side while you’re at war! And in the gladiatorial arena of social media, there is always tension,” Renée observes.

All platforms and their ranking algorithms show users emotional and engaging content to keep them hooked, but there are differences in how they are designed to optimize user participation and how they restructure networks. Platforms like Twitter highlight extreme members and representatives of other factions to provoke outrage in users about what despicable opinions others hold. Facebook creates closely knit interest groups that serve as echo chambers, driving people deeper into a niche worldview with ever more radicalizing content and very little contradictory information penetrating that bubble. “At its worst, Twitter made mobs, and Facebook grew cults,” Renée would summarize succinctly. Either way, restructuring social networks is dangerous for society.

Neither mobs nor cults are known to be very amenable to scientific conversations or any type of rational discourse that is necessary to live together in a pluralistic democratic society. Yet because of their “asymmetry of passion” for a topic, these extremist crowds make for great activists and keyboard warriors, who are then favored by algorithmic amplification. They have a disproportionate impact on our public discourse; that is why velocity hacking influencers need to cater to them. These crowds are their ticket to hijack engagement algorithms that boost them to the top of the attention economy—the ultimate social velocity hack. Influencers, no matter if secular gurus, political pundits, heterodox podcasters, or snake oil salesmen, who have harnessed and directed the energy of these crowds have subsequently gathered the biggest platforms.

It does not surprise me that the heterodox- and secular guru-sphere are all connected to Joe Rogan, who constantly circulates its guests among the same group of in-network podcasters. The algorithms brought them together because they all knew how to virally elevate emotionally salient culture war issues created by motivated partisans and conspiratorial crowds. The amplification dynamic in turn shaped public discourse and their own audience and contributors in the process. Increasingly, this builds up a bespoke information reality around us that feels real to us. As Renée puts forward in WIRED magazine:

The consequences for public health were dramatic. “The most prominent influencers in the conversation managed to frame every conceivable aspect of a global pandemic not as a fight of humanity against a viral invader but as culture war battles about identity and values,” Renée writes in her book. “And institutions, unfortunately, were ill-equipped to participate.”

During the pandemic, many scientists and institutions talked about the role of misinformation or disinformation in shaping public perception. The WHO spoke of an infodemic of false and misleading information. Everyone has tried to wrap their heads around why so many false rumors—about the pandemic, NPIs, vaccines, masks, and so on—have sabotaged public health responses in many societies worldwide. Public health communicators often sleepwalked into a fragmented minefield they did not know existed.

The reality is that the deck had been stacked against them from the start. For years, online culture warriors and tribal gladiators have carved up society into factions with the help of algorithms and asymmetrically engaged crowds. Engagement algorithms made sure to remove the friction for information flow within these socially restructured amplification networks while building barriers to them for outsiders. Scientifically accurate information rarely reaches people unfiltered by influencers anymore. The socially engineered crowds, in turn, looked for influencers and conduits who could channel their feelings into viral narratives while their activists and true believers were working to sway, subvert, or discredit the traditional gatekeepers of information flow, such as institutions or media. A remarkable synergy for virality ensued. The ultimate efficiency hack to spread harmful falsehoods: a participatory anti-science ecosystem.

Just like with the genetic trinity of loop extension, glycosylation, and pre-cleavage around the FCS efficiency hack we discussed earlier, the trinity of crowds, algorithms, and influencers achieved together what one part alone could not: creating cascading outbreaks, not of biological agents, but viral anti-science narratives that have developed their own lives and become self-sustaining in our information ecosystem. The bombardment of information cascades, in turn, altered our public discourse and society in ways we do not yet fully understand.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have witness how viral information cascade after viral information cascade about an “unnatural” pandemic has washed over society. How these narratives were rearranging the topology of our social networks, infecting new immune-naive citizens, and re-infecting old bespoke communities alike with ever-new versions of the lab leak origin myth. Just off my memory, the various tales went something like this over the years:

It was a pretense to stop pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong. It was released by the Chinese. Or the Americans. No, it was planned because a vaccine patent was about to expire. Alarm! The virus had HIV inserts. No, it was a bioweapon built around bat viruses ZC45 and ZXC21 collected by a military academy. Or maybe they isolated it from the Mojiang mine, where people died of a mysterious disease we believe was COVID? They must have collected the virus in secret and cultured it. They had poor biosafety. Three WIV workers got sick. Actually, the virus wasn’t collected but a chimera, constructed in a reckless gain-of-function experiment gone awry. Project DEFUSE was the blueprint. Maybe they tried to mimic EnAC’s furin cleavage site since the virus was likely constructed in Ralph Baric’s lab in North Carolina. Actually, a preprint just came out explaining how the whole virus was stitched together in a computer and synthetically assembled with restriction sites. So many possibilities! No matter what, these memos in secret Chinese party-speak tell us that there was a grave biosecurity situation at WIV. Did you know the Chinese military was deeply involved with Zhengli’s lab? Maybe they did bioweapon research after all. Breaking news! The Department of Energy now thinks a lab leak is most likely. But actually, they do not believe it was WIV, but rather a different Wuhan laboratory closer to the Huanan market. Oops. Seems like gain-of-function is off the table. But the Wuhan CDC had moved there in December 2019; maybe something went wrong during the move? Wait, the FBI director claims the agency is moderately confident in an engineered virus leak since 2020, so it’s back to the WIV! What about all those intelligence agencies who have classified information? Did DARPA not fund EcoHealth? When the US military is involved; it goes to the highest levels of the US government. Daszak is likely a CIA spy; that’s why they protect him. They funded EcoHealth to keep tabs on Chinese bioweapon development. But the ODNI report says they have no special knowledge; does that mean the intelligence community is covering up the truth as well?

Nobody bought into all the stories; many are contradictory and deeply steeped in conspiratorial ideation. We are not so irrational. But few of us were able to resist every single one of those compelling narratives. Especially when “the power to create pseudo-events has been democratized,” as Renée would put it. We would always find something in the news that was persuasive to us. The information sphere always delivers, and that includes our own desires. News cycles can be fabricated from thin air to the point where influencers can find apparent media amplification for any remote beliefs, no matter how flimsy, fraudulent, or far-fetched the evidence. Like an economics professor talking about “molecular mimicry,” shady contrarians supposedly discovering “synthetic fingerprints” in SARS-CoV-2’s genome that all the virologists did not see, or Republican staffers being supposedly able to decode secret Chinese party-speak that evaded over a billion native speakers. I guess virality online is no less dynamic and context-dependent than in biology.

As we have seen during the pandemic, those virus variants that spread faster than the competition are the ones that would sweep the world, overwhelm our innate and acquired defenses, and make people sick. Viral narratives are not that different; they just make people sick with false perceptions and beliefs. As a consequence, just like real viruses, viral narratives have the potential to harm our societies severely. Depending on what communities we were part of and what motivated us to participate, our beliefs were gradually shaped as the consensus of our social network was taken over by them.

We started to shift away from rooting our understanding of the world in scientific evidence toward what we wanted to believe. We took our cues from high-status individuals we trusted and believed, whether they were popular gurus, relatable influencers, aligned politicians, or smart-sounding journalists. In that environment, I am afraid, science and institutions can no longer even compete for our hearts and minds.

Without well-connected and influential spreaders who can amplify narratives and make them go viral, without activist crowds creating pseudo-events, and without social media algorithms constantly pushing new, unwitting citizens towards them, science seems at a loss in the attention economy. Even the most worthy and relevant scientific information will have a hard time winning against competition for our attention. Going forward, how would citizens ever learn about real scientific progress? How can they get the context of new discoveries being made? And even if scientists ever had a scientific breakthrough that went viral and reached the masses by lucky coincidence, who would be able to accept new evidence given the hardened and polarized fronts of our fragmented realities?

In March 2023, we were all about to find out.

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

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“Disgusting,” he said, ripping me out of my thoughts. He showed me a meme where Zhengli’s head had been photoshopped onto a bat, her face distorted with an open mouth to reveal vampire's teeth, and the whole frame colored in blood red. I shuddered involuntarily. The dehumanization was not subtle. “I really hate what they did with her ears here; it makes her look evil,” Peter Daszak continued with another meme. The haunted British-born zoologist and I sat on a couch in a remote house near Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, towards the end of 2022. He had pulled up his laptop to show me some of the circulating memes about the “Batwoman” and himself. Indeed, in that cartoonish pop-art picture, the warm Chinese researcher looked like a supervillain, with pointy ears covered by tape, holding bats and releasing a poison virus into the world.

Both Peter and Zhengli have found themselves in the middle of a global media firestorm for over two years now; their decades-long work on coronaviruses has become a vital focus of global attention. Speculations and conspiracy myths about their lives and personas had become a cultural phenomenon, and online memes about them were widespread. These visual statements were sometimes artful, sometimes funny, often tasteless, and always closer to propaganda than reality. Peter had saved hundreds of them on his laptop. He pulled up one of the earlier ones, showing him sitting in a chair with Chinese President Xi Jinping in his lap, who was dressed like a stripper and wearing a tinfoil hat. “You can´t help but laugh at some of these, even when you were the one being made a fool of.” Amongst the countless unflattering, libelous, and grotesque depictions, what seemed to bother him the most were the ones fat-shaming him. “That is just tasteless.” He got annoyed. His face had gotten some color back, at least; he had been pale the previous two days. I was still getting to know the zoologist on that trip to Thailand, trying to understand who he was.

Until the middle of 2022, Peter Daszak was just a random name for me that I would not have been able to put a face to. I came into the origin discourse in the summer of 2021 after Nicholas Wade’s article rubbed me the wrong way. My science-communication colleague Sam Gregson, a former CERN particle physicist from the UK, wanted to do a podcast about the lab leak hypothesis that we both believed credible and underexplored at the time, as our media ecosystem had told us. We invited DRASTIC member and conspiratorial blogger Yuri Deigin, who already had some internet fame on the topic, to have a friendly chat about the scientific evidence for a lab leak. In parallel, I was writing an article for my blog, trying to make sense of the arguments brought forward in the Nicholas Wade piece, and ending up learning much more about the topic.

My writing process includes a lot of reading, and after getting some overview articles on the topic, I usually look into the scientific literature to see what the underlying data for these claims are. I guess this is where my concerns began. I could not find any evidence in the scientific literature that would substantiate any aspect of the various arguments I had read on the supposed “engineered” nature of SARS-CoV-2. On the contrary, many of the oddities that Nicholas Wade or Yuri raised were, in fact, perfectly explainable by available knowledge and scientific papers on the topic. On top of that, I had been working in experimental labs for over 10 years. From CRISPR to Gateway cloning to Gibson assembly, I had hands-on experience with all of these different genetic engineering techniques, partly to construct viral vectors that we used as a delivery method for genetic cargo. So, while not a virologist, I certainly understood the genetic engineering arguments brought forward by lab leak proponents were just plainly naive to outright false. As a science communicator, I thought, “Why not clear up some of these popular misconceptions?” After a few weeks of researching and writing, my blog article was titled “Explained: The hard evidence why SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered,” specifically addressing the RBD and the furin cleavage site, that unusual llama in the supposed flock of viral sheep.

That article came out a day before our scheduled podcast with Yuri Deigin, which put me in a position to push back against some of the naive assertions our guest brought forward. Maybe it was this combination of events, or some vocal messages on Twitter being more assertive about SARS-CoV-2 not being engineered, that somehow put me in the crosshairs of the often-faceless lab leak community on Twitter. By this point, I had written dozens of science communication blogs for over five years, but not once had I gotten a hateful comment for it. Now my timeline was overflowing with insults, from the idea that I was a gullible loser, a “sheeple for the official narrative,” all the way to being a shill for EcoHealth Alliance, big pharma, or even China. Certainly not a pleasant experience.

I guess instinctively, people deal in different ways when having their honesty and character questioned in public. Some might ignore or disengage; others might feel the desire to correct the public record. I learned about myself that I tended to fall into the latter camp, getting more vocal about what I believed to be the reality of the situation. So, I argued more, wrote more, and investigated the topic more. Sam and I soon interviewed King’s College professor Stuart Neil, a virologist and actual expert who seemed to have some healthy and nuanced takes on the origin controversy—what was known and what was uncertain. Thinking Sam and I might clarify the misunderstandings with more evidence, other in-depth expert conversations would follow. Angela Rasmussen, Kristian Andersen, Michael Worobey, Alice Hughes, Eddie Holmes, and others. With every new piece of content we put out, the scientific picture became clearer, yet the animosity against us only increased.

Soon, I noticed—with a mixture of fascination, curiosity, and horror—how we were not alone. There was a pattern. Anytime a new voice would speak up publicly in favor of a natural origin explanation or just for evidence-based assessment of the science, a dedicated group of lab leak influencers and activists would get involved, trying to shut them down or convert them to their cause. If they failed to do so, the lab leak community leaders would start to maliciously quote-tweet—a Twitter-specific way of highlighting someone else’s tweet—with a misleading, discrediting, or ridiculing comment. These quote-tweets, often marked with specific hashtags such as #lableak or #originsofcovid, served as a beacon for their followers to join in the “conversation” with the new voice. They would reinforce the disparaging comment by adding their own insult, thus amplifying it again, over and over. Often, these behaviors would result in so-called “dogpiles” or ”pile-ons”, an argument or attack by a large group of people against one person. Being on the receiving end of such a pile-on can be a disorienting experience because, all of a sudden, a bunch of random people want to fight you like an enemy based solely on an out-of-context tweet or a flippant comment, as well as the less-than-charitable interpretation from the lab leak influencer who highlighted it.

Most friends and ordinary people of the target would miss these pile-ons because these did not play out in the feed of the scientists they might follow but in the feed and community of the quote-tweeter, i.e., the lab leak influencer. Only the scientists targeted saw the full spectrum of abuse, while most of the public, not sharing this particular niche ecosystem, would be none the wiser to what had occurred. Scientists and journalists, especially those with only a few hundred followers, would be mostly helpless against the malicious narratives created about them in the lab leak community. They had nobody to speak up or defend their character because nobody even saw what was happening to them. They had no course of action because speaking up for themselves just created more activity, more harassment, and more abuse in the opposing community. Many contemporary scientists went through this “treatment” a few times before deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, leaving the social media platform entirely. Eddie Holmes and Kristian Andersen deleted their accounts. Others became very selective and self-censored, not speaking out publicly about this toxic topic anymore. The exodus of reasonable voices on the topic, in turn, ceded even more discourse space to the activists. On top of that, the shrinking rational voices remaining in the conversation just became bigger targets for activist communities that seemed to relish in the act of verbally abusing their “enemies” together on a daily basis. A little community ritual, often unprompted by any specific action or offense. Every single day, they just looked for somebody to fight and hate for hours on end. Because of these asymmetric bullying dynamics, even a relatively small science blogger—too stubborn or maybe even too truculent to be silenced by these mob tactics—would suddenly gain a much larger role in the minds of conspiracy theorists. I’ve lost count of the number of pile-ons my words have caused over the years.

Peter Daszak pulled up the next meme, this time showing both him and me together, arranged in a weird, convoluted homage to “The Godfather” movie. It portrayed Dr. Anthony Fauci as the “godfather of gain-of-function research,” Shi Zhengli as the “cook,” and some prominent scientists like Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen, Angela Rasmussen, and Stuart Neil as the “lieutenants” of the alleged “research crime cartel.” At the bottom, there were outspoken science writers, like the brilliant Jon Cohen from Science, and myself, the stubborn blogger. We were depicted as low-level foot soldiers and “propagandists” for the virological crime family. In many heads, we were not independent people with our own motivations and agency, looking at evidence and reaching our conclusions, no, we were all part of the same cabal trying to cover-up the true origins. The enemies to beat.

It was not just the random Twitter accounts who believed and engaged with that. Even established professors such as Rutgers University’s Richard Ebright would participate in and often cause pile-ons, these online harassment rituals, falsely claiming for years on an absurd number of occasions that I was an unemployed moron, failed academic, and an idiotic PR shill who was paid off for my words by various entities like EcoHealth Alliance. Richard Ebright has posted his catchphrase, “Stooges will be stooges,” and variations of it about a hundred times to discredit me. Dozens of other highly engaged lab leak believers would take their cues from him to harass me, some even made dedicated parody accounts of me. Once their emotional energy and obsession with me even culminated in a New York Times columnist taking up a narrative they fabricated about me. This apparently prompted NYT reporters to demand statements from Peter Daszak, trying to supposedly uncover how I am a “paid influencer” for the origin cover-up team or something. Because why else would I be speaking up for science and evidence?

The less exciting reality was that I did not know any virologists and public health scientists before I got lumped in with them by the imagination of conspiracy theorists. The idea that we were all somehow part of a secretive plot or society covering up the origins of COVID-19 was bizarre. Yet ever since I started writing about this topic, I have increasingly become a target for multiple lab leak influencers and the faceless online hate mob behind them, harassing me, trying to discredit me, attempting to get me fired, and sometimes even threatening me. I was not too worried about my physical safety, given that I lived in Switzerland, not the US and nobody could go up to my workplace or university and shoot me. A safety privilege few US scientists possess, and one that made it much easier for me to remain vocal online compared to others. But make no mistake: everybody who spoke up for a likely natural origin, for an evidence-based worldview, no matter if scientists, journalists, or mere bystanders, found themselves facing similar issues online, and not only on Twitter. Many receive death threats or find themselves on dubious “kill lists.” The emotional energy against the fictional “zoonati”—a portmanteau between “zoonosis proponents” and Illuminati—was palpable and omnipresent. Where did the hate come from? Would it ever stop?

Our shared experience with these activist conspiratorial communities was a weird thing to bond over on that couch in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Yet it allowed me to put myself in Peter’s shoes, at least a little bit. He was their arch enemy, a scientist working with WIV and WHO, someone who had been too outspoken for natural origins from the early beginning, who was connected to too many possible villains, who called their beliefs a conspiracy theory, and who refused to be bullied out of the conversation, at least not for a very long time. Conspiratorial activists hold grievances. If one cannot shut up a scientist with intimidation and bullying, one can still make the world believe he is a liar. This is where a lot of their emotional energy went, spamming every comment section with stories and silly memes painting Peter as dishonest, a shill, and a criminal. They created elaborate story arches, making him the main character in their lab leak fan fiction universe. These relentless hate rituals eventually bore fruit.

Renée DiResta from the Stanford Internet Observatory calls it the “asymmetry of passion” that leads to activists shaping perceptions of bystanders on social media. Only about 1% of users on social media create 90% of the content. Emotionally activated conspiratorial communities create a lot of noise, engagement, and one-sided content that citizens unwittingly consume. Algorithms boost such active engagement behavior to the top. This distorts the public discourse and shapes opinions. Most of the media has since followed conspiracy theorists in their accusations against Peter, and politicians have started to threaten, investigate, and sabotage EcoHealth Alliance’s work and Peter personally. When I first met Peter at the end of 2022, he was already radioactive; seemingly nobody would believe his words anymore. He was blamed, on a daily basis, for causing the pandemic one way or another. Would a person like that not lie about everything to escape culpability? Even I, having experienced these pile-on dynamics myself, was unsure what to make of him and whether anything he said could be trusted. The sheer volume of lies, tales, and allegations thrown at him will involuntarily make some suspicions stick in bystanders. We can’t help it. That is how effective this type of online activism was.

Who or what made Peter the main character in the mythological lab leak cover-up universe? What caused the intense global spotlight on him?

On September 20, 2021, shortly after The Intercept’s reporting and document leaks had caused feverish discussions about supposedly reckless gain-of-function grants to EcoHealth Alliance, the conspiratorial ideation-prone amateur sleuths from the DRASTIC collective released an alleged bombshell. They would title their sensational analysis, “Exposed: How EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology Collaborated on a Dangerous Bat Coronavirus Project.” Their exposé was based on a leaked research proposal provided by an anonymous whistleblower, and it showed a project that Peter Daszak had submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency or DARPA.

In 2018, after Ebola, Lassa fever, and Zika outbreaks, the agency under the Department of Defense announced a new program aimed at preventing emerging pathogenic threats, PREEMPT for short. The program aimed to advance understanding of viruses and their interaction with animals, insects, and humans, as well as deliver new, proactive interventions to reduce the risk of emerging and reemerging pathogens. Stopping spillovers would ultimately benefit Americans and the world. Building on their decade-long work, Peter Daszak and his collaborators thought they could contribute to the PREEMPT effort by proposing an ambitious project named “Project DEFUSE: Defusing the threat of bat-borne viruses.” Their idea was to predict pathogens poised for emergence through bat surveillance, human serology studies, and laboratory experiments on SARS-related viruses, much in line with their previous expertise. They also proposed developing a small-scale proof-of-concept intervention strategy, trying to vaccinate bats against viruses they identified as high risk for emergence through an aerosolized delivery method previously developed by US researchers for combating white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungus for bats.

While two out of three evaluators at DARPA found the grant selectable, the competitive nature of such endeavors always entails a high rejection rate. Peter and his collaborator’s expertise and proposed viral work were lauded, but weaknesses included some of the proposed modeling efforts as well as a lack of details with the intervention strategy and whether a simple epitope selection can ever be broad enough to inoculate wild bats against the “diverse and evolving quasispecies of coronaviruses found in bat caves.” Viral biodiversity might just be too broad. For these reasons, DARPA scientists “would not recommend funding at this point,” although “some work outlined might indeed be fundable if new resources became available,” the rejection letter stated. The proposal was turned down.

While disappointing for Peter and his collaborators, that was not unusual. In general, the vast majority of grant proposals scientists write get rejected, with acceptance rates of 16–18% on average for new proposals and around 40% for renewals of existing ones. Depending on the agency, it can even be much more competitive. “People always just hear about the ten million in grant proposals that EcoHealth has been awarded,” Peter told me, “when in reality, we lost a hundred million in equally important research projects that never got funded in the first place.” Resources are limited, especially for work that mainly benefits the public, not some corporation or government. Since the DEFUSE proposal was one of the many ideas not funded, the proposed work was not conducted, and the researchers involved, like Peter, Zhengli, and US virologist Ralph Baric, moved on with different proposals and work.

Yet, for the amateur sleuths at DRASTIC, who were long convinced the virus was created through some nefarious means and high-level government involvement, the rejected proposal provided a treasure trove of new material to inspire new narratives. This proposal, the sleuths alleged, offered insights into a “staggering level of deep involvement of EHA with the WIV, on matters of national interest” and that it contained “unpublished strains that could have directly produced SARS-CoV-2.” On social media, they would alternate between calling it “a smoking gun” and “a blueprint” for the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

“This proposal to DARPA [...] was like the EcoHealth-WIV NIH proposal but on steroids,” Alina Chan would write, referencing The Intercept’s story on alleged gain-of-function research and greenlighting mainstream tastemakers to go in on it. Too many journalists would uncritically jump on the opportunity. The appeal of leaked government documents was almost irresistible to certain journalists, including again The Intercept, which ran its own story about DEFUSE a few days later. Others soon followed. From propaganda outlets like The Epoch Times to tabloids like the Daily Mail and The Times in the UK all the way to the left-leaning The Atlantic, many news outlets ran a story about the old grant proposal that was never funded. There was a large audience demand, given the polarized media landscape and gain-of-function moral panic, which was also commercially irresistible for many ailing newspapers. Lastly, and maybe more practically, coverage of the supposed exposé did not require journalists to do any real work. Too many journalists and amplifiers took reactions from Twitter and quotes from DRASTIC’s analysis to push out their stories. Because DRASTIC had spent weeks browsing through every sentence of the proposal in hopes of finding a hidden meaning or interpretation that would support their emotions, by the time they released their Project DEFUSE interpretation, they had a website running with easy-to-access content. Journalists were offered a thorough, predigested version of the planned experiments. Very convenient for writers who need to churn out highly clickable articles en masse in a drowning industry to stay afloat.

The DRASTIC amateurs highlighted no less than 27 highly salient “findings,” all of which were little narrative angles for news articles and based mostly on negative framing, decontextualization, and misrepresentation of the science within the proposal. Among their “findings” were trivial things the grant actually stated, such as funding allocation and planned experimental work. “They would use taxpayer dollars to pay Peng Zhou and Shi Zhengli,” one of their breathless findings read. Duh. Compensation of researchers for their work is a normal part of most grants, of course, and all federal grants are “taxpayer dollars” in some sense. But given the success the White Coat Waste Project had in 2020—culminating in the live cancellation of EcoHealth Alliance’s grant by President Trump—with exactly this “taxpayer dollar going to the Chinese” framing, DRASTIC probably hoped to raise similar attention. Other DRASTIC “findings” suggested that EcoHealth Alliance was proposing gain-of-function research while “trying to bypass” gain-of-function regulation, misrepresenting that bat viruses were exempt from such regulations. Given what The Intercept had just pushed onto the world stage about Peter’s NIH grant with Shi Zhengli, it was great timing. Conspiracy theorists are very tuned into the news cycle. They had been very excited about these new documents and would not miss their chance to gain prominence and shape the narratives in their favor.

Another “finding” falsely claimed researchers wanted to “mislead DARPA about the risks to the general public” because the DRASTIC amateurs personally disagreed with researchers’ assessment that their work posed “minimal risks,” which was entirely accurate for the experiments suggested. Then came the technical cherry-picking, the taking of individual statements out of context to make them sound nefarious, such as the researchers “planned to identify ‘key minor deletions’ in the receptor binding domain to alter human pathogenicity,” implying that maybe SARS-CoV-2’s human-binding RBD was the result of those suggested studies somehow. A little reminder here that virology is not magic. SARS-CoV-1-related viruses cannot magically produce SARS-CoV-2, nor do these viruses use similar hACE2 binding mechanisms. There is zero doubt that nature was the only force capable of coming up with the observed RBD in SARS-CoV-2, and this genetic element was discovered in SARS-CoV-2-related viruses circulating in bats in Laos.

Perhaps the most dramatic decontextualization from DRASTIC was regarding the furin-cleavage site (FCS), or, as we previously called it, the odd-looking llama in the supposed flock of viral sheep. DRASTIC suggested that the scientists “planned to introduce naturally occurring proteolytic cleavage sites to create novel coronaviruses,” based on a flimsy understanding and a convoluted mixing of different experiments the researchers actually proposed. It was maybe their most publicly effective “finding” when it came to mobilizing against virologists and “gain-of-function” research.

Since the early days, the mystery of the furin cleavage site has served as a beacon, almost a token of faith, around which to rally the lab leak community. Since the outbreak, scientific studies have shown that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is aiding respiratory transmission, and no bat sarbecovirus with such an FCS has been found among the close cousins of SARS-CoV-2. Just a few months earlier, Nicholas Wade, citing Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, had already declared its mere existence in SARS-CoV-2 as a “smoking gun for engineering.” Baltimore later recanted his statement. Suspicions about this short genetic element were certainly widespread. DRASTIC, now unearthing an old proposal—rejected or not—from EcoHealth Alliance just mentioning polybasic cleavage sites, seemingly proposing to introduce them for studying them, was the final nail in the coffin of sealed beliefs. They must be guilty. “Greed. Stupidity. Sociopathy. In equal parts,” Richard Ebright would comment on questions about why EcoHealth Alliance would ever even consider studying these elements.

In more mundane reality, such cleavage motifs have been studied by many virologists for over 15 years in various contexts, including adding them to SARS-CoV-1. It was an obvious line of investigation to pursue and not dangerous given these research setups. But nobody in the media cared about this context. For most of them, if not the murder weapon itself, at least the instructions and intent to build it had been uncovered in the suspect’s closet. Some from DRASTIC would later argue using this metaphor for the research proposed in DEFUSE. To them, the instructions to build the murder weapon had finally been unearthed.

To the trained eye, none of these assertions held any water. However, complex technical documents interpreted by motivated amateurs on the hunt for suspicious words, sentences, and patterns would not allow audiences to get the full picture. The hungry media did the rest. The Intercept would write, “Peter Daszak did not dispute the authenticity of the documents,” as if their existence, rather than their science, determined guilt or innocence. With such dishonest framing, “guilty as charged” was a quick and satisfying conclusion for most of the public.

“It’s absurd; we have been warning about this for over a decade,” Peter lamented. “Now they turn it around and say because our research predicted it, we must have caused it.” He had been jumping between agitation and frustration all day. Indeed, much of his previous research had shown quite convincingly how much danger bat coronaviruses pose to society. Perhaps too convincing for many. “People are especially prone to attributing agency to others for negative outcomes,” a meta-study found when explaining why we humans tend to shoot the messenger. Especially for traumatic events, we “attribute agency to those proximal to the event,” regardless of whether they had anything to do with it.

That unfortunate tendency would put Peter and his people under immense pressure from the early days of the pandemic. His face was sunken in, a haunted look imprinted on it. It had been bad for a long time, but ever since “Project DEFUSE” was mischaracterized a year ago, he has not had a peaceful minute. The conspiracy theorists, from Twitter all the way to the halls of Congress, would make sure of it. He was attacked on every level, channel, or forum. Harassment became unbearable. Now, various memes about him being an obese man in a Batman suit, hanging from a tree like a bat, urinating in his own face, or colluding with Dr. Anthony Fauci flashed on his screen. Since mid-2021, vaccine disinformation campaigns and anti-vaxxers have driven even more hate towards public health scientists and officials. Their narratives merged: SARS-CoV-2 was created to force people to take a vaccine. Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak were behind it all. The two of them were now portrayed as criminals in cahoots with each other; their heads photoshopped in mug shots into a police line-up, an homage to the 1995 crime thriller The Usual Suspects. Culturally powerful memes.

“Why would people waste time doing this?” he asked me again. Hours and hours just to make nasty artwork about him, to forge stories, to write fan fiction, and push them into the world. Nasty memes and simple narratives about him and genetic engineering somehow seemed to have taken over the world. The emotional force of those stories, in turn, energizes the faceless mob that torments him, promises to kill him and his family, sends him white powder letters, disrupts his sleep at night, and calls a SWAT team to storm his house. “The FBI guy has never seen anything like it,” Peter said about the agent who contacted him about credible threats to his life from known domestic terror groups. Private security has followed him ever since. Who are the people that terrorize him like that? What motivates them?

“On the individual level, people are attracted to these conspiracy theories when they have a psychological need that is not met,” Karen Douglas explained to me. The research professor from the University of Kent in the UK has studied conspiracy theories and their believers for decades, even back when it was still considered a niche topic. Conspiracy theories have a group and societal layer to them, but when talking about individuals, she has found that believers are mainly driven by epistemic, existential, or social motivations: the need to make sense of our world and circumstances, the fear for their lives or livelihoods, or the feeling of social ostracism and disconnect. In my observational experience, many of those needs certainly drive the individuals who are part of the DRASTIC collective.

Preferring to remain anonymous unlike Yuri Deigin, the other co-founder of DRASTIC went by the pseudonym Billy Bostickson and used a cartoon monkey as an avatar picture. He explained his motivations:

I wanted to learn what his worldview was. He was a strong supporter of anarcho-syndicalism. “Not the modern nonsense, but the struggle for freedom over 200 years against tyranny by countless dedicated anarchists who sacrificed their lives for freedom against the State in all its forms,” he clarified. “Hence, the words in the DRASTIC acronym, Decentralised, Radical, Autonomous,” he typed with a smiley face. The full DRASTIC acronym read: Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Antagonistic towards any type of government, the pandemic spurred a panic in Billy about the state using biowarfare as a means to control society and kill off dissenters like him.

What worries me, Philipp, is the way the State uses individual scientists when the shit hits the fan in terms of biological research [...] individual scientists may not have known exactly what the outcomes were, i.e., toxins both biological and chemical to murder the enemies of the State.

I argued that scientists, in general, tend to be idealistic, working for the public good and challenging power rather than being in service of it. That is certainly true of scientists who work at customary academic institutions and in areas such as public health, who unfortunately have faced the brunt of their attacks. “Many people [are] working for good, but our institutions crush our hopes,” he elaborated after some back and forth. “That’s the way I see it, and sorry for any insults, all part of the fight going on, but not personal, I hope you understand,” Billy wrote almost amicably after our exchange.

Billy, a self-described radical ideologue, was by no means an outlier within the DRASTIC collective. After interacting with and observing many DRASTIC associates over the years, I believe one can safely assume that there is not a single one of its dozens of members who is not driven by some rather profoundly unfulfilled need for safety, status, understanding, purpose, or belonging. Many feel existential dread about bioweapons or biotechnology; some are paranoid about the state or other shadowy entities going to get them; others feel neglected and ostracized, being dealt a bad hand in life. Almost all exhibit a sense of grievance about various issues and circumstances beyond their control. The pandemic origin controversy just seemed like a fitting outlet—a mission or mystery large enough to match the intensity of their emotional needs with their desire to control their own circumstances. To serve those ends, almost anything justified the means.

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, another cognitive psychologist who has studied conspiracy theories for a long time, stressed that while there are certain individual predispositions for conspiratorial belief, such as narcissism, lack of analytical thinking, hypersensitive agency- and pattern detection, even paranoia, these might not tell the whole story or nor are these traits determinative. While DRASTIC activists express their beliefs and act on them more dramatically than most, we are all susceptible to conspiratorial ideation somewhere on that spectrum. “You could be pushed into this direction by experiment,” he explained. His research has found environmental and societal factors can trigger people into falling down the rabbit hole, meaning they immerse themselves in this often parasitic worldview that is hard to escape. No matter if objectively true or just subjectively perceived, how we saw the world and our role in it was critical. Political or economic disenfranchisement, uncertain or confusing information environments, the loss of a loved one or social status, threats to our identity, tribe, lives, or livelihoods are all factors that can trigger conspiratorial ideation. “If you are scared, disgruntled, feel left behind, resentment… it’s this whole cluster of negative feelings and attitudes and fears that gets people into a space where conspiracy theories seemingly offer a solution,” he elaborated. These theories serve as an emotional band-aid or coping mechanism.

“With the pandemic, obviously, that was just the perfect storm for conspiracy theories. All the conditions were there,” Prof. Douglas elaborated. Contrary to common perception, ordinary believers in conspiracy theories are not necessarily gullible, unintelligent, or cruel. Their only error or misfortune was putting their trust in the wrong leaders or voices during a time of personal or societal crisis. “People were uncertain, anxious, locked into their houses, isolated; it is an event with a lot of information going around and people not knowing what to believe.” In these situations, people tend to seek advice from trusted members of their community, tribe, or environment. “And for a lot of people, that is not going to be scientists and experts.”

Well, certainly not in today’s influencer economy, I offered for consideration, where compelling charlatans, grifters, and entertainers have replaced expert voices and filtered reality for us. Nobody can be too sure anymore if they have the full story, all the pertinent facts, or the right context to understand contested topics. I asked Prof. Douglas her thoughts on where the virus came from. “God, I’ve got no idea,” she laughed. The lab leak proponents show all these signs of conspiratorial hallmarks, she noticed, “but then, I also read these news stories from trustworthy sources seriously talking about it… and I was like, hmm, probably not, but I’m not sure,” she contemplated for a second. “But I guess people just wanted a cleaner answer to where this virus came from. People wanted somebody to blame a bit more,” she offered her thoughts on why a scientific explanation of zoonotic spillover, even if true, felt less satisfying.

The purpose of conspiracy theories is to provide an explanation for a traumatic event or dire circumstances that is emotionally satisfying. To fulfill an unmet need. That these explanations are inherently adversarial to an outgroup is no coincidence either. Believing and meeting other believers can offer a sense of community, forming real social bonds and identities; they are united against a common and often nebulous enemy. The deep state, the scientific establishment, big pharma, the liberal media, the bank cartels, or the Jews would be common tropes for those enemies. None of that is exactly new, but rather much more ancient. Blaming nebulous agents, foreign forces, invisible spirits, ghosts, or gods for our blight is just how we humans have always reacted when we feel powerless to control our own circumstances. All previous pandemics triggered conspiracy myths about their origins and who is supposedly responsible for causing them. Why would this pandemic be any different?

“You cannot just blame this controversy on conspiracy theorists,” Jane Qiu would contest, adding that “not everybody who leans towards lab leak is a conspiracy theorist.” We were disrupted when the film crew brought back the award-winning science journalist, who was also invited to interrogate Peter on our trip. The two had a heated argument about chimeric viruses, gain-of-function research definitions, and his supposed conflicts of interest in the COVID-19 origins debate, which had led to Jane storming off. This had instigated our impromptu pause on the couch, looking through memes and talking about Peter’s conspiratorial tormentors. Jane Qiu was a remarkable writer with unique access to many Chinese sources; she was the only journalist who had access to Shi Zhengli and her lab for multiple weeks. The crisis of public trust in science, she alleged, had a lot to do with mistakes Peter and public- facing scientific institutions in general like China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, the US CDC and WHO made in their communications, their transparency, and their conduct. Jane made it very clear that this trip was just another opportunity for her to investigate the origins. She sure as hell was not here to write a puff piece about poor Peter (neither was I or the documentary team) nor downplay any of the missteps she alleged he and other scientists have made during the crafting of the Lancet letter or any other public occasions. Peter, in turn, claimed that most of the animus against him was driven by right-wing politicians and the conspiracy theorists and journalists who bought into their narratives. Jane was not having it, arguing that there were credentialed, left-leaning experts and journalists on the other side of this issue, and calling any criticism a right-wing conspiracy theory is a self-serving cop-out and damaging to public trust in science.

She had followed the topic closely for years; she had been the one visiting Zhengli’s lab to interview her people, and she had been in Wuhan when the WHO mission came to work with their Chinese counterparts to investigate the origins. She was tenacious in her search for information, sources, and the truth. Jane had even attempted to sneak in with a bottle of wine to get direct access to the WHO mission scientists in Wuhan but was caught by Chinese security, much to Peter’s amusement. In Thailand, their interactions swung between shared laments over neglected risks of zoonotic diseases and heated debates about the root cause of the lab leak controversy, interspersed with rare moments of mutual appreciation in their own unique ways. Peter really got pissed when she suggested his missteps were partly to blame for fueling the distrust of him and his organization. That’s understandable because the distrust was, in my view, partly responsible for the unwarranted death threats to him and his family as well as the attacks on his organization and his character. Jane could be confrontational like that, as I would come to learn.

In my opinion, Jane was immensely critical, bordering on outright distrustful. She would never take anybody’s word at face value, seemingly requiring absolute precision in statements of others as much as of her own. Every sentence she writes in her articles, is mulled over, well-sourced, fact-checked, and verified. At least that is her aspiration. Her skepticism of sources is potentially well-earned. It is difficult to cover a controversial topic with polarized sides and geopolitical implications anywhere, but especially in China, where people are often not allowed to be completely open, honest, or upfront about what they know.

On top of that, there is our messy human nature; we all have our biases and make errors, including scientists who sometimes cut corners or give informed opinions instead of disinterested facts. Especially “big thinkers”-types like Peter Daszak, whose visions tend to win the big grant money but often have a tendency to get some of the minor details wrong. As an experienced reporter, Jane is very mindful of these biases, and her tenaciousness to get to the facts lives within her writing; maybe that is what makes her articles so good. But she can also be opinionated. Peter has been, as she puts it, “fast and loose with facts”, yielding inconsistencies that fuel suspicion, and has on occasion, according to her, demonstrated serious lack of judgement. Why did he portray himself as fully informed about everything happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when it was clear he wasn’t? What was the real reason behind the delayed filing of the NIH report—an incident even some of his colleagues have called a major “fuck-up”? And how could he so blatantly deny having a conflict of interest in the COVID-19 origins debate when it is evident that he does?

Jane considers that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin, but claims to understand why people don’t trust Peter and why they would lean towards lab leak. She thinks that the controversy is not just about facts but an expression of what’s wrong with science: its agenda failing to reflect societal concerns and anxieties, lacking transparency and broad societal dialogues in decision making, and intolerance for dissenting voices. “Some self-reflection is certainly in order,” she says. In my opinion, she demanded an almost superhuman perfection of scientists, which are imperfect humans like the rest of us, while bracketing out the concerted efforts by motivated actors to discredit them and sow doubt about science in the general public. Neither perfect communication nor conduct on the part of scientists would move the needle on public distrust created by these merchants of doubt, best I can tell. The three of us have been fighting about this topic and its derailment from facts for days. Peter mostly blaming right-wing politicians, Jane seeing fault in scientists and institutions making errors, and me condemning our modern asymmetric information ecosystems for eroding trust, spreading conspiracy theories, and causing public confusion.

Despite primarily focusing her criticism on Peter, Jane was equally critical, if not more, of me and my approach. At the time, she considered me a science blogger with—according to her—no domain expertise, who attributes everything to social media algorithms and attention-seeking grifters eager to boost their profiles or sell a book. An outsider lacking journalism credential, supposedly cherry-picking facts to fit his narrative. An uncritical “cheerleader” for science and scientists, unable to see the forest for the trees. Her lashing out at me had stung a bit because I truly admired her reporting on Zhengli. She was the first, and perhaps only, journalist who managed to humanize Shi Zhengli while reporting eloquently and accurately about her scientific work and the controversy. Writing like that is much more an art than a craft. Honestly, deep down, I wished that her meticulously chosen words would suffice to inform citizens. Yet for all her award-winning reporting, the needle of public sentiment has been steadily moving against what she and virologists, to the best of their knowledge, considered most likely true: that SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population not via a laboratory but via zoonotic spillover. So why were facts and science not good enough?

Maybe helping to understand this growing rift between science and society that emerged with our information age is where I felt I truly had something to contribute. But for that, I had to disconnect from the emotional haze of our current struggles and conflicts. The world is so much bigger than our pet peeves, ideological positions, and even the hectic, multifaceted tug-of-war between geopolitical superpowers. Assumptions of why others act and believe the way they do are always bound to be incomplete. The pandemic was a traumatic event that impacted every community on the planet in varied ways. The best we can do is not get lost in our differences but seek connection in our shared human condition.

§

Covered by lush green forests below cloudy skies, the secluded mountains within the picturesque Thai and Myanmar border regions are home to various ethnic groups such as the Lahu, Karen, Ahka, Khamu, Lisu, and Lua. These ethnic mountain peoples in Thailand, commonly categorized as hill tribes, were traditionally migratory and have settled everywhere in the Karst region, ranging from the southern Tibetan highlands and Myanmar to Yunnan in China, Vietnam, Laos, and Northern Thailand. Living mostly isolated for centuries, the modern world has made them outsiders, infringing on lands that had become property with the emergence of nation-states. War and border disputes in the region have seen many forceful migrations, with Thailand being among the safer havens for hundreds of thousands of refugees. Yet the animalist and spiritualist tribal peoples still face many challenges, disadvantages, and discrimination among the Buddhist-Thai majority. “Nearly a million hill peoples and forest dwellers are still treated as outsiders—criminals even, since most live in protected forests. Viewed as national security threats, hundreds of thousands… are refused citizenship although many are natives to the land,” a compassionate article in The Bangkok Times would write about their current struggles. Economic development and wealthy travelers entering the magnificent Karst landscape to harvest its bounty or explore the many mesmerizing caves have seen the Thai government build out road infrastructure, which also connected traditionally isolated hill tribes to a new source of income: village tourism.

When I stepped out of the van in Ban Jabo, the first thing I noticed were Chinese tourists taking selfies over an ocean of fog. The remote mountain village of the Lahu Na, or Black Lahu—a subgroup of Lahu based on the color of their traditional clothes—was just a few kilometers away from the Myanmar border. An armed military outpost was stationed not far from the village. Ban Jabo has recently grown because of tourism; the wooden houses on stilts were contrasted by modern green tents of adventurers. As I strolled along the village on the ridge of the hill, free-roaming chickens were crossing the street while the smell of garlic and lemongrass began to fill the air. Traditional Lahu food has been on the list of cooking influencers eager to increase their YouTube and Instagram followers; the colorful wok dishes would contain local forest ingredients such as mountain rice, pak choi, bamboo shoots, and indigenous banana varieties. These developments seemed to benefit the local communities, who could not only send their kids to school but also increase their income and escape poverty. But such improvements can be fickle. During the pandemic, tourism crashed globally, and schools, governmental, and developmental programs stopped. The hill tribes were once again left to their own devices, traditions, and leaders to deal with crises and threats to the community.

“These guys still remember the stories of smallpox,” our local translator pointed out. This morning, we had the opportunity to meet with two spirit doctors from the Karen Hill tribe. They had locked down their village for over a year, preventing foreigners from entering, and erected an array of spirit guards to prevent the disease from entering. Wooden spears pointed to the outside; a magical spirit deflector in the shape of a six-sided star was attached to the electricity cables; a scarecrow-like figure with a huge phallus stood imposingly; and something thorny was stuck into the ground. These and a few other seemingly purposeful decorations reinforced the spirit barrier. The idea was that no matter how the disease moved, be it through the road, ground, water, air, electricity, or sexually (thus the phallus guard), the barrier would prevent it from entering the village grounds. Spiritual defense was clearly very important to the tribe. “The Karen have like 37 personal spirits or souls,” our translator explained. All the hill tribes practice their own animistic and spiritual religions, and within the Sino-Tibetan roots of the Karen, traditional culture and rituals are related to ancestral spirits, house spirits, forest spirits, farm spirits, land spirits, and others. They believed that people get sick when they lose these, or they are stolen, and one has to recover them. Various rituals, prayers, and offerings would be conducted by the spirit healers or shamans to communicate with that magical realm to treat the sick. If the sick person improves or even recovers their health, as is often the case after a peak of symptoms prompted actions by the shamans, the rituals were deemed to be responsible for the cure. Without controlled clinical trials, regressions to the mean of symptoms, placebo, subjective reporting, or normal recovery would nevertheless create the appearance of efficacy for their rituals.

Whether effective or not medically, I think these ritualistic acts are foundational to the human condition to show that we care. In times of hardship and suffering, we all feel better when being cared for, and any action on our behalf seems more appealing than doing nothing at all. It lifts our spirits, for lack of a better term. However, this is not to say that knowledge of the traditional shamans and spirit doctors is always rooted in medical misconceptions about correlation and causation. For the treatment of sickness, the hill tribes depend on a large body of traditional knowledge about medicinal plants, especially herbs, for the treatment of stomach aches, diarrhea, coughs, fevers, and infectious diseases, as well as plants for tonics and refreshment. The Karen are specifically known to cultivate useful plants in their house gardens. Some modern medicines, such as antimalarial drugs, were discovered and are based on the traditional medicinal plant knowledge of ethnic peoples. Science is not dismissive of that; quite the contrary, science tries to integrate useful knowledge no matter where it comes from. Especially in one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots, like the Karst region, ethnobotanists have warned that the rapid erosion of traditional knowledge is of global concern. Many scientists express an urge to document and conserve this valuable knowledge before it is completely lost. What science struggles with is when magical explanations claim supremacy over material phenomena.

Hidden behind their spirit barrier, the spirit doctors proudly announced how they thwarted the pandemic. “When they closed the village, nobody got COVID for a year,” our translator would describe the success of their approach, which probably had more to do with community isolation than the wooden barrier in front of us. Sometimes traditional actions, rituals, and community guidelines might be beneficial for purely practical rather than spiritual reasons. Conflict arises when science is discarded rather than integrated into community worldviews. This is, however, not inevitable. While fervent religious beliefs can often be a barrier to adopting scientific measures, Karen spirituality did not interfere with modern practical solutions like vaccination to protect themselves. “Now that you survived the first wave, did you get vaccinated?” Peter asked. “Everybody,” they replied proudly. I guess for a tribe that puts up multiple different barriers and layers of protection against an unknown disease, adding one more just seemed natural to them.

But what comes naturally to one community might be a deadly sin for another. Distrust in vaccines has been a morbid and cultivated luxury of the West in recent years, and with the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine mandates, dedicated anti-vaccine groups and contrarian influencers saw an opportunity to harness fears and uncertainty into windfall profits. Especially online, citizens found themselves emotionally manipulated by rhetorically gifted snake oil salesmen and grifters who promised them that they could do without vaccines, all while selling useless supplements, false miracle cures, and fake science to the masses. While I have tried to avoid this topic—one could write multiple volumes about its complexity and still not do it justice—in this specific case, I cannot avoid it: the anti-vaccine movement has everything to do with the leak of the DEFUSE proposal, the amplification of the gain-of-function panic, and the crusade against Peter Daszak.

In the summer of 2021, the heterodox podcaster Dr. Bret Weinstein, who previously pushed Yuri Deigin’s conspiracy theories to the world, has found his footing as one of the biggest anti-vaccine influencers online. He hosted a cadre of fringe doctors and activists to push the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin as a 100% prophylactic that could “save the world in three weeks,” while fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines are very dangerous to young men, he would claim, knowing his audience mostly consisted of them. The spike protein that would be encoded by the mRNA vaccine, even without the dangerous virus, was cytotoxic in itself. Worst of all, he claimed, was that the vaccines would make it more dangerous to get COVID-19 through an obscure mechanism called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) that may actually increase the ability of a virus to enter cells and cause a worsening of the disease. All these assertions are contradicted by the available evidence and scientific consensus. Yet within one month of his pivot towards attacking vaccines, his paying Patreon subscribers doubled from around 1,800 to almost four thousand; his YouTube videos received ten times more views than his previous videos, suddenly reaching millions; and his Twitter followers steeply increased by the hundreds of thousands as well. In this cultural moment, pseudoscientific rationalizations against vaccines were lucrative, and fretful audiences were seemingly willing to reward them handsomely, either with their hard-earned money, precious time, or emotional engagement.

An Australian psychologist and professor, Dr. Matt Browne has been researching anti-vaccine psychology long before COVID-19. “At the time, it seemed like a relatively niche topic,” he explained, echoing what Karen Douglas had told me about conspiracy theories. COVID has caused a wider section of the population to come together into strong online activist communities. “Vaccines, more than any other health technology, seem to spark a certain type of psychological resistance in people,” the laid-back professor with curly gray hair and a constant tone of amusement elaborated. “There are multiple reasons for this. Fear of needles. Nobody likes needles. Needles involve a bit of trauma; you are having your bodily integrity violated,” he explained. “You also understand that some type of foreign contaminant has been injected into you, and humans have an instinctive abhorrence of contamination; these are somewhat general reactions.” Furthermore, the prophylactic aspect is problematic for us. “The fact that you have a procedure done to you for a disease you don’t have” does not go well with our gut intuition. He explained:

People generally accept procedures when there is a problem. If your tooth hurts, you go to the dentist to pull it out. Though the experience is unpleasant, you know there is a problem, and there is relief from getting it fixed. For vaccination, it is different; you are feeling healthy, and only afterwards that you might be a bit sick or hurting. So the subjective, intuitive gut feeling of the whole thing is negative.

We humans tend to go with our lived experience much more than abstract theoretical knowledge. “It takes an intellectual leap that getting a vaccination is actually a good idea. And you have to trust. Trusting what you’ve learned and what you’ve been told.”” Dr. Browne concluded.

The Australian psychologist has recently teamed up with cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Professor Christopher “Chris” Kavanagh at Rikkyo University in Japan to study the “secular guru sphere,” a new online phenomenon where persuasive influencers create sealed realities for their followers, not all that dissimilar to cults. In their podcast “Decoding the Gurus,” they analyze a specific blend of anti-establishment, heterodox, and anti-science influencers that claim to bring guidance to secular issues of science. The professors explained:

Jordan Peterson, Bret and Eric Weinstein, James Linsay, Robert Malone, etc. We were all trying to conceptualize who these people were because they were not like your Tucker Carlsons or your typical political pundit. They presented themselves as academic, heterodox, free-thinking types who were doing public communication of science, and yet they seemed to be doing something different.

All of these academically credentialed contrarians held a “great antagonism against the institutions” while relying on them for their credibility. They apparently also believed themselves to be so incredibly smart and unjustly scorned by “mainstream” science; both Weinstein brothers, for example, claimed to believe they had been cheated out of their rightful Nobel Prizes in Biology and Physics for revolutionizing nothing less than evolutionary theory and the standard model of physics, the grand paradigms of the time, all without having published any papers in more than two decades. Dr. Robert Malone claimed to have been the inventor of the mRNA vaccines because, as far as I can tell, he was involved in some lipofection assays with mRNA back in the nineties that any graduate student could perform. Much later, one of these papers would become one of many steps in the long and arduous way of delivering the lipid nanoparticles of the mRNA vaccines. That one little contribution did not stop him from claiming he was the “father of the mRNA technology” in his Twitter bio and using his supposed authority to discredit the vaccines with their alleged spike protein toxicity and so on. Narcissism and grandiose claims about a secret understanding of the world do not run short among the “secular gurus.” In fact, it is one of their defining features. Pushing vaccine disinformation, fake miracle cures, useless supplements, and pseudoscientific hot takes about such as theories of “mass formation psychosis,” “woke mind virus,” and “mRNA gene therapy,” they have found a way to commercialize contemporaneous anxieties and elevate themselves beyond the masses.

“They all have their pet issues, but what really gives them the boost is when there is a great anxiety in the popular zeitgeist,” Chris Kavanagh explained. These modern influencers build online communities around them because they pretend to have all the answers and give authoritative-sounding guidance on complicated scientific issues. Chris Kavanagh explained about our human predilection:

An old-fashion guru tells you they are in touch with the secret forces. They understand things that you don’t. They are a conduit between the mysterious world out there and you. And they’re going to tell you what is going to happen in the future and how to prepare for it.

Secular gurus, in his opinion, fulfill a very similar role. Their narratives make the complicated world simple; they eloquently and persuasively explain where science has gone wrong and who is to blame. They define what we should do, often in bombastic language and with far-reaching moral implications. “People are basically being swayed by language which sounds grandiose and technical,” Matt Browne added. We tend to assume with such language that “there is a profundity to it. It signals wisdom and great knowledge. The actual depth of the speech is often, you know, relatively irrelevant.” We are attracted to gifted orators who exude authority in their tone and demeanor. Throughout history, gurus have always been in our midst and garnered the admiration of willing followers. “My speculation is that our evolved psychology is trying to identify high-status individuals,” Chris offered in response to my probing into why he believes secular gurus garnered so many acolytes. We are social animals; we try to orient ourselves in society, and our relationship with high-status individuals matters. We either seek their protection or just try not to get on the wrong side of somebody who is powerful because they have influential social coalition partners. Some might follow gurus to become like them or “copy various heuristics that would make sense just for social learning.” In one way or another, these evolved social dynamics inspire acolytes into collective action, and I believe that this mobilizing influence of gurus has become an underestimated force to be reckoned with.

In the summer of 2021, Major Joseph Murphy from the US Marine Program Liaison logged into the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), a secure intranet system utilized by the United States Department of Defense. He was looking for something, best I could tell reconstructing a timeline from reporting about his actions. Like many in the armed forces, Maj. Murphy appears to be right-leaning and consuming content from the corresponding media ecosystem. An avid listener to Bret Weinstein and his ilk of anti-vaccine influencers, Maj. Murphy seemed to have been taken in by their anti-vaxx narratives. He believed them and seemed subsequently scared about the impending vaccine mandates for the US military. Possibly motivated to find a way around being vaccinated, he went looking for any information the government might have about this topic. In DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) directory, part of the JWICS intranet, he likely browsed through the compartmentalized information folder that contained information about various projects, including PREEMPT, the DARPA program that aimed to identify emerging disease threats. According to him, the folder had been empty for a year, but sometime in the summer of 2021, documents began to fill it. There were files related to a rejected research proposal from EcoHealth Alliance and WIV. Could these be the “something” he was looking for?

Why these files suddenly were put into this folder is unclear from previous reporting, but it did not seem like much of a mystery to me. The Biden White House had given the intelligence community 90 days to investigate the origins of COVID, and someone had probably stumbled upon these old DEFUSE grant application files and decided to put them into the BTO folder. Since these files were irrelevant to the origins probe, the intelligence community probably did not bother to seek further action, nor did it bother to classify them. However, when Maj. Murphy stumbled upon them, the non-scientist likely believed he had found a smoking gun against vaccines. What seems to me inspired by pseudoscientific concepts from his favorite podcasters and driven by fear of mandatory vaccination, he performed his own magical interpretation and analysis of the DEFUSE proposal, and his conclusions are quite telling.

He believed that:

SARS-CoV-2, hereafter referred to as SARSr-CoV-WIV, is a synthetic spike protein chimera engineered to attach to human AcE2 receptors and inserted into a recombinant bat SARSr-CoV backbone. It is likely a live vaccine not yet engineered to a more attenuated state that the program sought to create with its final version. The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm.

Because of the inherently “synthetic” nature of the spike protein, he believed that mRNA vaccines based on the same “synthetic” spike protein are inherently dangerous. Even worse, the mRNA vaccine:

…instructs the cells to produce synthetic copies of the SARSr-CoV-WIV synthetic spike protein directly into the bloodstream, wherein they spread and produce the same ACE2 immune storm that the recombinant vaccine does. The vaccine recipient has no defense against the bloodstream entry, but their nose protects them from the recombinant spike protein quasispecies during “natural infection.”

If you were confused about the concepts here, don’t worry. It is scientifically nonsensical gobbledygook mixing different buzzwords Maj. Murphy probably heard from his favorite anti-vaccine gurus online and tried to assemble in his own head. Just for some clarity: SARS-CoV-2 is not a “live attenuated vaccine,” as these would look very different; spike proteins are not “hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm,” whatever that was supposed to mean; and spike proteins do not cause an “ACE2 immune storm,” which does not exist. What does exist is an immune reaction called a “cytokine storm,” which is basically when our immune system goes all out and destroys our own cells to defeat an invader. The mRNA vaccines do not cause this. But a severe COVID-19 infection, like any life-threatening infection, might. Also, the idea that a “natural infection” does not cause spike proteins to “circulate through the bloodstream” because the nose magically protects us from that outcome is absurd. In reality, natural infections can produce multiple orders of magnitude more “spike protein to circulate in the bloodstream” than inoculation with the mRNA vaccine. And on top of that, the viral spike proteins from “natural infection” come loaded with a deadly virus cargo. That is just a basic fact.

But for anybody utterly captured by an anti-vaccine community, reason has little chance against emotion. On and on Maj. Murphy’s telling analysis goes, arguing that the impending “mass vaccination campaign actually performs an accelerated gain-of-function” on the virus, making it more dangerous. Again, this was totally confused nonsense. For Maj. Murphy, the vaccine somehow mimics the disease, but that mimicry makes it worse than the disease. The vaccine also somehow makes getting the disease worse than it would be for oneself and others, and the vaccine is ineffective anyway since the disease itself gets mostly deflected by your nose. Sorry if my eyes rolled backward a bit here.

When the Department of Defense announced mandatory vaccination for the armed services on August 23, 2021, Maj. Murphy was seemingly driven to more dramatic action. He sent this analysis, from which I quoted verbatim above, to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) with a short letter and a very clear recommendation: “DoD now mandates vaccines that copy the spike protein previously deemed too dangerous. To me, and to those who informed my analysis, this situation meets no-go or abort criteria with regards to the vaccines.” Like his favorite heterodox influencers, he advocated for using Ivermectin instead, an anti-helminthic drug that works on invertebrate worms but not COVID-19. As one might expect, his letter and “analysis” were politely ignored as ramble by the OIG. Possibly frustrated by the lack of official response, Maj. Murphy then contacted his military friend and DRASTIC member Charles Rixey and leaked the DEFUSE proposal files to him to give to DRASTIC. That is how the rejected proposal that would haunt Peter Daszak came into the hands of people who considered him their archenemy. The motivated amateur sleuths, of course, would perform their own “analysis” of the leaked technical documents that was completely contradictory with what Maj. Murphy had cobbled together. While they had much greater success with it on the world stage, their scientific interpretations were no less self-serving and at odds with reality than the ramblings of a confused and scared anti-vaxxer.

For me, it seems pretty apparent that the DEFUSE proposal was never secret nor classified, nor that interesting to society. The scientists involved and the intelligence community knew about it but deemed it irrelevant to the origins of the pandemic. Independent virologists agree. It was entirely irrelevant to the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The only reason why society seemingly had to wrestle with it was because a dangerous misrepresentation was pushed onto the peak of the attention economy by motivated activists. As we observed before, the information sphere tends to deliver for the powerful and popular sentiment alike. The man-made myth came in various shapes and forms over the years; it morphed from supposed HIV chimeras to bioweapons, from alleged RaTG13 offshoots to chimeric virus assembly or vaccine trials gone wrong. Our desire for a more satisfying explanation to this pandemic is equally responsible for bringing this misrepresentation about, as are the actions of activists who deliver for our emotional needs. Without DEFUSE, I am sure something else would have taken its place.

In fact, time and time again, other versions and origin myths have surfaced. For example, one such myth implicates not WIV but rather a laboratory of the Wuhan CDC that happened to open not too far away from the Huanan market. Yet the most powerful myth, the one that tells the most emotionally compelling story and offers us somebody concrete to blame, tends to win. Political elites and lab leak influencers soon moved away from Wuhan CDC speculations and back to Project DEFUSE and WIV as their favorite narrative. This would be the unfortunate nail in the coffin for Peter Daszak and his organization.

On the plane, I sat next to Peter. He was hovering over his laptop again. He was redacting personal information from thousands of documents requested by Republican politicians in the US Congress, as well as the Office of the Inspector-General of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS-OIG). For months now, the DHHS-OIG has been auditing EcoHealth Alliance and NIH, investigating whether they were in compliance with federal grant requirements, turning over every stone, and checking every receipt about the research conducted at his organization. No matter if conspiracy theorists, media outlets, or political elites—all assumed the answers to the origins of COVID-19 could be found in EcoHealth records and past research. By the end of 2022, the idea that SARS-CoV-2 could have come about by natural mechanisms had turned into a faraway memory in their heads. Zoonotic origin science and scientists, like Kristian Andersen and Michael Worobey, had been successfully discredited in the public’s eye. That is the asymmetric power the attention economy wields over society; it distracts us from the boring and nuanced evidence while keeping us on our toes for the newest shiny nugget that fuels our intuition, outrage, or desire.

Yet our needs for emotionally satisfying explanations of our world and our role in it constitute our biggest vulnerability. During a traumatic and isolating pandemic, the idea that some nefarious agents created the viral blight was just too much of an intuitive, engaging, emotional, and powerful narrative not to do well in our popular discourse, evidence be damned. It plays into our tendencies to blame diseases on others, to assume agency behind catastrophe, and to fear what we don’t understand. It also offers the sweet illusion of control: if we can only stop those evil virologists, we can prevent the next pandemic. Emotionally compelling. Compare this with the alternative: a zoonotic spillover that could have happened anytime, anywhere, and to anybody. A process we don’t fully understand, but that involves intricate host biology, genetics, evolution, the vast and unknown viral diversity in nature, our ravaging of ecosystems, evolving transport hubs, unsustainable economic incentives, and our human collective decisions in between. Truly believing in a zoonotic origin leaves the uneasy feeling that we are all somewhat to blame for the escalation of the pandemic, that we are partially responsible for our misery and yet not in control of our circumstances. That the next pandemic virus might emerge at any moment, and we might be unable to stop it again. It is outright distressing to think about these scientific realities, and our fears and anxieties, in turn, drive us into the arms of those who know how to soothe them confidently.

Shamans, sages, gurus, and other prophets have existed throughout all of human history and cultures to channel our moral, spiritual, and practical anxieties into actions. Prof. Chris Kavanagh offered his perspective:

“The lab leak is a good example,” Prof. Matt Browne agreed. We have a deep-rooted tendency to assume agency when we see something dramatic impacting the world. “It is not that there is a flaw in our cognition or reason. We’re social creatures. When we see strong consequences, we look for an agent,” he elaborated, adding, “I sort of love the fact that it is not an error but just intrinsic to an agent in the world.” That is how evolution has wired our biology. Civilization is however partially the result of negotiating and reigning in our most primal instincts to give air to our analytical thinking and not always follow our intuitions wherever they might take us. Otherwise, we are easily fooled by our desires. Anthropologist Prof. Chris Kavanagh explained:

All humans want to have the feeling of control over our lives and circumstances; that is why we invent agents to substitute for nature, randomness, or bad luck. “We want an agent that did it. So we can negotiate. We can either punish that agent, or if it’s a god, we can at least negotiate… do something to appease it. So it’s not gonna do it again.”

For us social creatures, agent-based explanations will always feel satisfying and compelling after tragedy, often leading us to worship or witch burnings. That is as true throughout our history as it is today.

“Here are the bad guys! We hate them! Whatever,” Prof. Matt Browne play-acted a little bit of what we find emotionally compelling in times of crises and disease. “But nobody wants to admit to that, like with Daily Mail stories. Nobody wants to think of themselves as an idiot. Everyone likes to think of themselves as someone who’s considered, who’s logical, who’s well educated… a critical thinker, right?” he argued. “What we want is a nice, logical, scientific-sounding thing that elevates that intuitive explanation. And I think that’s what the secular gurus provide.”

Both Matt and Chris believe that the secular gurus they analyze became powerful in popular discourse because they served up pseudoscientific rationalizations for emotional judgments we intuitively hold to be true.

The thing that you see from their audience is that their frustrations and intuitions have been given a voice, but an intellectual voice. They respond to the fact that this person has said the thing that I’m feeling in a better way than I ever could.

People flock to and feel a parasocial connection with those high-status figures who validate their beliefs with eloquence and good-sounding arguments. Especially when in a position of social ostracization and isolation, existential fear, or epistemic confusion; in times of upheaval, trauma, and death, their allure can become irresistible. We need a grand narrative to explain our grand misery and deal better with it. “The secular gurus often suffer from the same psychological maladies as their audience does. That is a good thing from their point of view,” Matt Browne concluded. With their authenticity, intuition, and shared anxiety, secular gurus co-create these pseudo- and anti-scientific narratives with their audiences, making them more than just their opinion but rather a basis for community, a form of therapy, and even a shared identity.

“Trauma narratives offer meaning and coherence to feelings of pain, suffering, and confusion. These narratives tell a story of what happened to ‘us,’ who is culpable, and what should be done to repair ‘our’ collectivity,” Professor Petter Törnborg, a computational social scientist who studies the formation of online extremist communities, writes in his academic book.

“Narrative construction is an evolving and emergent process, an interpretive action, that comes into being when persons, along with others, attempt to make sense of the world.”

Humans are a story-telling species. According to Törnberg, our shared narrative-forming processes go back to tribal times when we sat together around the campfire. These acts are fundamental for socialization with our tribe. “By participating in the process of co-creating these narratives, we simultaneously become part of the community. In this way, the formation of narratives is intertwined with identity construction.”

Petter Törnberg argues that social media platforms have made social participation in narrative construction possible like never before, thereby becoming machines for identity formation around countless new digital campfires. His work studying the language in extremist communities with computational methods identified that with our increased digitization, human social dynamics and belonging rituals have not ceased to exist but have taken on a more verbal character as well. We now seem to experiment online with discursive elements to show our social allegiance, to use it as a status symbol, to indicate our belonging and who we are in relation to others.

“Stooges will be stooges,” the Rutgers professor and conspiracy theorist Richard Ebright would tweet out obsessively over the years regarding about two dozen other scientists outspoken for a zoonotic origin given the available evidence. Over time, he has evolved this catchphrase as well as variations of it, such as “Sociopaths will be sociopaths” and “Imbeciles will be imbeciles,” at truly an astonishing rate to attack virologists. For him, commenting on his enemies—the zoonosis proponents—like that became almost ritualistic. When I did a cursory count of his use of this discursive element, it went into the thousands of replies to dozens of scientists, often in bursts of ten to fifty tweets with that catchphrase within a short span of time. For Ebright, this discursive style was impactful, gaining a large following of over seventy thousand, mostly conspiratorial ideation-prone citizens who feel he speaks authentically to their feelings. His verbal signaling has, however, not only attracted similarly minded people, but it has also elevated the status of the accuser and increasingly radicalized him and his followers. “When you take figures like Matt Ridley, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright… whenever they were commenting on things in the early days, they were stated [to be] more reasonable,” Chris Kavanagh again observed. Nowadays, Alina Chan posts poll questions on Twitter asking her followers, “If #OriginofCovid was a lab leak, who do you consider most responsible?” before listing options for her audience to choose who they would rather see hung by the court of public opinion. Co-creating narratives indeed.

Influencers shape audiences, but because they are emotional conduits, they are also shaped by their audiences. Desires mingle, worldviews align, and a radicalization spiral starts.

Chris Kavanagh would be proven correct. Richard Ebright, a formerly respected microbiologist and media darling for years, has since fallen from grace. National news stories and formal complaints to Rutgers University have been written in response to his increasingly extreme verbal outbursts poisoning the discourse. Despite this, he continued unabated under the applause of his conspiratorial followers. For example, he claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci “is likely a murderer and provable felon” and repeatedly compared various public health scientists with Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator responsible for a genocide that would kill 70% of his own people in one of the bloodiest tragedies of history. “With Pol Pot gone from the scene, where else, apart from an EcoHealth gala, can one meet persons whose actions likely caused millions of deaths?” His verbal outbursts were often followed by pile-ons and death threats from the lab leak community directed toward his targets. When a credentialed Rutgers professor at an elite university legitimizes such destructive behavior, community radicalization is given free rein. Evidence doesn’t matter. Morality does not matter. Belonging matters.

“Digital spaces are innovative spaces for discursive experimentation, providing fertile soil for the growth of fringe worldviews and conspiracy theories,” Petter Törnberg would write. The stories we co-create online build the basis for community and identity, yet the shared stories might not align well with evidence and reality. This is because new or contradictory information is processed based on whether it supports community values and goals, and the community leaders of our fragmented online tribes often play a role in vouchsafing it.

This is also something Prof. Matt Browne and Christopher Kavanagh have noticed playing out with the secular gurus. Despite supposedly being all about science and facts, secular gurus know and talk remarkably little about any technical details. They constantly flatter their audiences with certain discursive rituals, such as calling them “free thinkers” who “deserve the full story” or how they are special compared to others. “A lot of people won’t be able to look at this. But you know I’m gonna present it because I know that the people here have the bravery to look at this issue and not judge it,” a secular guru would say, according to Matt Browne. It does not stop there, of course, and “this is perhaps more nefarious,” he explained: the secular gurus also punish people who disagree with them and threaten to ostracize them from the group if they “believe what the mainstream” tells them. They create a community environment that evidence and reason cannot penetrate. “Every [contradictory] technical detail becomes recast as a kind of Shakespearean play,” Chris added. If you question the guru too much, “then you know there’s no hope for you, or if you think that those people are making good critiques of me, I don’t want you in my community anyways,” the cognitive psychologist and guru decoder played through the discursive dynamics in some of these influencer communities. Dissenters and moderate voices are converted or cast out. The remaining community becomes more radical and cult-like.

The reason influencers use these almost ritualistic discursive formulations and social manipulations is because they are powerful at driving user engagement. Shared narrative formation, community rituals, and “fighting” against a common enemy create emotional energy that is experienced as a hit of dopamine. It is addictive for participants.

“Large social media platforms seek to support and supercharge the social processes leading to emotional energy,” Petter Törnberg observed. That is why social media became “organized around identity-oriented content, emphasizing processes of group belonging.” Liking, commenting, sharing, cross-posting, notifications, even doxxing, insults, pile-ons, and hate campaigns are all little and large rituals we engage in to show who we are and where our allegiances lie. This creates a tribal identity for us, and because information is our medium and currency online, the difference between information that is “good” for our side and information that is “true” becomes nearly impossible to distinguish. Members must believe something is true to keep their connection with the community. Accepting information that goes against community belief and that is not vouchsafed by community leaders comes at the predictable risk of ostracization and exclusion. This tribal epistemology is, however, dangerously limited, Petter Törnberg concludes. “Our very ways of knowing become defined by identity and belonging; and what we know is reduced to just another expression of who we are.”

Is it any surprise that the secular gurus, these verbally gifted emotional conduits for our deep-seated anxieties about science, became anti-science conspiracy myth superspreaders? That they would be shaping the discourse of hundreds of millions with regular appearances on the biggest platforms the world has to offer, such as “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast?

“People always believe that others are more swayed by these conspiracy theories… But what they really don’t know is that those conspiracy theories are influencing them as well. They are just not aware of it,” Prof. Karen Douglas had told me towards the end of our conversation. Narratives got more powerful in the information age, and those who get to shape them often influence reality perceptions of willing and unwitting audiences alike.

As Renée DiResta from the Stanford Internet Observatory succinctly puts this dynamic. Our information environment shapes our thoughts and beliefs, as well as who we trust and associate with, even who we ought to fight.

During an isolating and confusing pandemic, the biggest attention stealers that lured us to engage in a topic, to participate and comment, became our social reference points to construct our own online identity. What we value and who we trust, how we want to be perceived, and what enemies we need to mobilize against. We are social animals in need of a tribe. Creating stories together to make sense of our chaotic world and circumstances gives us agency, purpose, and belonging. For most of us, the conspiracy myths we co-created were a quick band-aid to our bleeding emotional needs in a traumatic crisis, but they proved corrosive to our society and humanity in the long run. Is there no way back?

We passed another Lahu village on our way up to the spirit cave, where we planned to watch a local shaman perform a ritual to ward off evil spirits. The Lahu kids ran around the village square, with the more adult men playing a very skillful game like volleyball, but without hands, only feet and heads. A little crowd, including us, began watching them. They were really good; sweat started dripping, the moves became more stylish, and their smiles brighter. They enjoyed being the center of attention for a bit. It was mesmerizing. A nice little reminder that no matter how far and remote humans live, we all share similar passions and social dynamics.

I struck up a conversation with one of our local assistants, a talented and kind young woman belonging to the Shan ethnic minority. She had left conflict-ridden Myanmar when she was 14 to work in China in some dubious waitressing arrangements, probably considered exploitative. When she returned at 16, she wanted to get an education that only military encampments provided. She would be sent out to remote villages to teach children how to read. After four years of this, she somehow managed to get a scholarship to study. But it was not enough for what she wanted to do. She then managed to get a full scholarship from a charity in Thailand (that was specifically for women from Myanmar) that allowed her to study in Bangkok, a world city. Even when the pandemic hit, she would study hard despite being isolated in her dorm room for over a year. After her studies, she managed to find a job in Chiang Mai at a film company, working as a production assistant. A decently paying job. Throughout this remarkable trajectory of a Myanmar village girl, she would keep sending money back to her family and sisters, never using any for herself.

She had even bigger dreams of becoming a filmmaker one day. She produced her own short videos on the side. She shared one of her short videos with me, which she directed with her student friends. It was about a well-known but serious topic: a girl being taken advantage of by her best friend after drinking too much and then committing suicide by taking pills. “Based on a true story,” she assured me ominously. I leaned back to take a breath. We humans are not so different from each other. Our fondness for games and spectacle, our showmanship when attention falls onto us, our sense of duty to family, even our most quiet hopes and dreams are all facets of a larger, indescribable total to what makes us human. No matter where we are from and what paths we take, I believe we have so much more that connects rather than separates us. And yet, all we ever get are these small fleeting glimpses into the richness and depths of others. This is if we are fortunate enough to even find somebody to let us in on something real, if only for a second. Online influencers were arguably great at exploiting that desire to connect.

Nobody has yet wrapped their heads around the full picture of what happened to us during the pandemic, individually and collectively. With our new information ecosystems, where the world seems at our fingertips, it would be good to remain humble and remember that our perspective is still very limited. Humanity is much larger than our neighbors, followers, or community leaders and their naive presuppositions about how the world works. We are modern hill tribes living in fragmented digital realities, with our own rituals, community beliefs, and cherished gurus guiding our worldview.

In times of technological disruption, pandemic trauma, and grand myth-making, I believe our collective confrontation with science was inevitable. Science is a myth buster; it disrupts the soothing stories we tell ourselves and the profitable narratives of those who seek to manipulate with fictions. That’s why it has become a nuisance, even an enemy, for many tribal communities out there.

Yet my belief is that science can also be a tool for diplomacy between warring digital factions if we allow it to be. The tree of scientific knowledge shares its fruit equally, no matter who we are or what community we choose as our peers. It provides a necessary cool against the heat of public discussion, the haze of day-to-day commentary, and our hot-headed human immaturity that has resurfaced with the new information ecosystems. Science can unite us by solving our informational conflicts and creating shared facts for a shared reality in which to root our understanding of the world. Scientific answers might not be as engaging, fast, or satisfying as we would like. Yet the scientific method might be the only process we have to come together around a much bigger digital campfire to co-create a shared common story of the world and our role in it. This seems to me much more enjoyable, rather than burning down rivaling villages who do not agree with our worldview.

Staring at the peerless sky over Asapa, our remote mountain retreat, something slowly clicked in my head. How the puzzle pieces of our broken years full of distrust, hate, and suspicion have been assembled before. Wee Chee, the young virologist from Malaysia who lost her father to Nipah, raced back to my mind. She has not lost her way. If only we were to rediscover our compassion for our shared humanity and step away from blaming or fearing those outside our tribe, we could create lasting change together.

Because the true uphill battle to reclaim our agency from ever-new viral threats, no matter if biological or digital, still lies before us.

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

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Independent and interdisciplinary science is important. When evolutionary virologist Michael Worobey, a professor at the University of Arizona, got involved in the search for the origins of COVID-19, he had no idea what he got himself into. With a “soft spot for wild theories,” at least according to a former colleague, and a track record of tackling hotly debated theories around dangerous viruses, the renowned scientist is a force to be reckoned with. NPR even called him the Sherlock Holmes of origin investigations for his work on identifying the origin of HIV by hunting for chimpanzee samples in Kisangani, Eastern Congo. A dangerous trip where Mike developed a life-threatening infection after he injured himself and where his mentor, Bill Hamilton, contracted malaria. Only one of them survived. Yet it was critically important work. Mike’s field sampling and phylogenetic analysis, together with that of Prof. Beatrice Hahn, was instrumental in debunking the widely propagated notion that HIV came about from a contaminated polio vaccine trial in the 1950s. They discovered that HIV had its origin decades earlier, before the turn of the 20th century, and was spawned by at least four separate human-chimpanzee contacts that seeded the outbreak near Kinshasa (called Leopoldville in colonial times) and would spread for decades before it was recognized scientifically in the 80s by making people sick in Los Angeles in the US. Based on Worobey’s data, they reasoned that somewhere around 1910, HIV-1 emerged in humans during a period of rapid urbanization and demographic change (Leopoldville was the largest city in the region at that time) and thus was a “likely destination for a newly emerging infection.”

In a 2022 podcast conversation with Kristian Andersen, the YouTube science communicator Sam Gregson, and myself, Mike recalled how he had been frustrated by the inconclusiveness of the WHO mission report. The WHO mission opened more questions about the origins that it answered, or at least that had been his impression given the media environment. “I never had a moment where I thought the furin cleavage site needed a non-natural explanation… As an evolutionary biologist, evolution can certainly deal with that pretty aptly,” he explained where he came from. “What was a bit of a curveball to me is that quote here: ‘Market authorities have confirmed that no illegal trade in wildlife had been found’” he elaborated on a different occasion, explaining why he grew hesitant about the market hypothesis.

At the time, he was unaware of the struggles the WHO mission had in getting their Chinese counterparts to admit to wildlife being sold at the market. “I have been amongst the most open scientists to this idea that at least some form [of] a lab incident, maybe even with a virus that has not been characterized by the lab, could have infected someone,” Mike Worobey admitted. “So, I sort of initiated this fateful letter in Science magazine.” Mike reached out to virologist Jesse Bloom, a well-known lab leak proponent on the origin question, to organize the letter titled “Investigate the origins of COVID-19” to the journal Science (published in May 2021). They, along with 16 other authors, such as Alina Chan, Ralph Baric, and David Relman were arguing for giving the lab leak theory a “proper” investigation that should be objective, transparent, data-driven, and “subject to independent oversight.” The letter to Science made a lot of waves internationally and contributed to the vibe shift that legitimized the lab leak theory, ultimately prompting the Biden administration to start their 90-day intelligence investigation.

Despite giving the impulse, Mike was not involved in drafting the wording of this letter, which came out way more accusatory of China, specifically Shi Zhengli, than he was comfortable with and retrospectively regretted. “That letter then took on a life of its own,” he recalled. All he wanted was to give the origin investigation another look. “I was pretty naive about how that letter would land,” he said with chagrin. “I should not have been and regret the tone.” Politics aside, Mike was a man of his word and no-nonsense scientific rigor. Evidence mattered to him, not political implications. The lab leak community was energized by believing scientists of such a caliber were now on “their side.” Mike was celebrated as a hero. However, soon enough, his work would become a target of their ire, and he would be cast as the greatest traitor to their cause.

Like any good scientist worth their salt, Mike set out to poke holes into the natural origin hypothesis, starting by trying to falsify the outbreak association with the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. Wuhan is a huge place, one-and-a-half times the size of the five boroughs of New York City. “It has a whole lot of places where you might notice the first cluster of a respiratory infection,” he said. “Think about all the places where it could have emerged if it did not start at the Huanan market. We have to think about what are the chances it would pop up there?” That would be a remarkable coincidence indeed. If one were to make the case for a lab leak, that wildlife market and the early patients associated with it had to be explained somehow. Was the market maybe just an amplifier event? Did the Chinese authorities just look there preferentially but not in other places in Wuhan? How did the doctors decide which patients to test for COVID-19? If market affiliation was a criterion for testing patients, then maybe the patient association with it would be a mere mirage, something called ascertainment bias.

These are all scenarios that could potentially explain why the case epidemiology looked like the virus came from the market when, in fact, it might have come from somewhere else entirely. After all, in the wake of SARS, China had set up an early warning and reporting system for detecting unknown viral diseases, which kicked in on January 3rd. This system might have led to an undue focus on the Huanan market. “There is, however, a way to step back to a period before any such bias could have crept in, by considering what happened in the hospitals that first pieced together that a new viral outbreak was underway,” Mike would state in his paper titled “Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan,” published in Science in late 2021.

“I was focused, largely by myself in my basement, for month after month after month at what is going on in Wuhan spatially,” Mike explained how he spent his summer of 2021. Not only did he analyze the WHO mission report and all the scientific papers in Western and Chinese journals, he was also “reading news reports [and] digging of the web archive [for] some of these reports that had gone out by Chinese public health officials before the national authorities even knew the pandemic.” In the quiet of his isolation, following up on every single patient’s history and how, when, and where they were diagnosed, he reconstructed what happened.

On December 27, Dr. Zhang Jixian, a clinician and respiratory specialist at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine (HPHICWM) near the Huanan market, noticed characteristic lesions in CT scans of the lungs of two pneumonia patients that reminded her of something she had seen almost two decades ago. The patients were a couple brought in by their son, who looked “ostensibly healthy.” Nevertheless, she asked him to also do a CT scan, and sure enough, his lungs were full of lesions as well. Lesions she had seen before—with SARS. “At that point, she figured it was probably related to SARS and that it was transmissible to humans because it had infected all three members of the family,” Mike explained.

She also realized that patients could be potentially asymptomatic, running around and spewing the virus all over the place. From that point forward, she paid attention, and while the initial three patients did not have an association with the Hunan market, the next four patients who came to her hospital with the same symptoms all worked at the market. “At that point, on December 29th, she and the administration of her hospital got in touch with municipal and provincial health authorities.” The hospital administrators called other hospitals that were not close to the Huanan market for pneumonia of unknown etiology patients; it turned out that most of their patients were also linked with the market. The Hubei Provincial Hospital “identified both the outbreak and the Huanan Market connection and passed on these fully formed discoveries to district, municipal, and provincial public health officials by 29 December,” he concluded. They were not the only ones. Mike would write in his paper:

A notably similar situation unfolded at Wuhan Central Hospital. On 18 December, Ai Fen, director of the emergency department, encountered her first unexplained pneumonia patient, a 65-year-old man who had become ill on either 13 or 15 December. Unbeknownst to Ai at the time, the patient was a delivery man at Huanan Market. [...] By 28 December, Wuhan Central Hospital had identified seven cases, of which four turned out to be linked to Huanan Market. Notably, these seven cases, like those at HPHICWM, were ascertained before epidemiologic investigations concerning Huanan Market commenced on 29 December.

These findings are important because they highlight how the unknown pneumonia cases before the 29th of December were independently picked up by various hospitals. The market link became known only after, thus dispelling any notion of “ascertainment bias” being responsible for the diagnosis or discovery of SARS-CoV-2 patients. So, while Mike had set out to disprove the market theory, he dramatically strengthened its case. Many of the earliest patients fell sick at the Huanan market.

But maybe it was just an amplification event while COVID-19 was spreading throughout Wuhan more sporadically. Mike wanted to test the idea that the market was not the place where the human-to-human transmission chains actually started. He did this by looking closely into all of the patients who fell ill in December 2019.

Out of 164 early patients (December 2019) within the city boundaries of Wuhan that the WHO mission had identified, he was able to reconstruct precise geolocation data for 155. “About two-thirds were not epidemiologically linked to the market,” he explained, which means that when the WHO mission did the questioning, these patients did not work at the market, did not visit the market, and did not have contact with anybody who shopped or worked at the market. Some lab leak proponents jumped onto that, arguing that the market was just an amplification event but cases were already spreading in Wuhan at the time.

“But there are two types of associations: epidemiological and geographical,” Mike continued. All the unlinked patients—sick people who were retrospectively identified by doctors as having COVID-19 with no market association—were not randomly distributed over Wuhan either. After having identified their place of residence, the unlinked patients seemed to live remarkably close to the Huanan market “compared to what you would expect by chance,” Mike elaborated. This was remarkable.

Their geographic relationship to the market held even when Mike started controlling for all possible alternative explanations, such as demographic data. Was it a very populous area? No. Was it age-related? Since “COVID-19 does not affect all age groups proportionally, you are more likely to end up in the hospital” when being elderly, he explained his reasoning. So maybe there were just a lot of old people in that particular part of town? Again, demographic data said no. No matter how he sliced the geographic and demographic data, the early cases were “ridiculously centered on the market.” He tried to put some numbers to show that the low likelihood of chance caused the clustering. “We also did something called kernel density estimates”—a statistical method to build a probability density function, the equivalent of a bullseye— “and ask what is the peak area with the highest density of cases?” The kernel density method is entirely agnostic of anything but the geospatial position of those patient cases on a two-dimensional map. The absolute bullseye of those cases, when overlaid to the Wuhan city map, gives a radius of a bit more than 300 meters. What is within that radius? The only thing it really includes is the Huanan market. Remarkable again.

He tried to make the point of this result clear. “You are not looking at where the market is in this picture.” He had calculated the density over a two-dimensional space. It was only after determining the bullseye that the 2D map was overlaid onto a city map of Wuhan. Where did the bullseye sit? Right on top of the Huanan market. “If you understand that analysis, that it has nothing to do with where the Huanan market is,” yet still hitting the market exactly, that result is just uncanny. Furthermore, Mike found that this “bullseye” is not just a statistical artifact coming from weighing patients with a known epidemiological association to the market; in fact, he removed all those linked cases and found that the unlinked patients—those that had no epidemiological link with the market—lived much closer to it than the linked cases. An incredible finding again.

I think this is worth emphasizing: the only people sick in December 2019 in Wuhan were those who either worked and shopped at the market (no matter how far away they lived from it) or those epidemiologically unlinked cases who lived in direct geographic proximity to it. All these early cases were picked up and diagnosed independently by doctors in seven independent Wuhan hospitals before the various Chinese CDCs or other authorities ever heard about an outbreak. The Huanan market was the unequivocal epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan. This is where human-to-human transmission chains started to take off.

Any other study published since Mike’s has upheld his findings. Outside of cases somehow associated with the Huanan market, there were no other clusters, no indication of the virus spreading anywhere in the world. A retrospective study of over 34,000 pre-pandemic blood donors that the WHO mission had asked for (and was performed by Chinese scientists) also showed the same thing. No positive cases in September, October, November, or December of 2019. Very few people were infected, and the virus was just not widespread in Wuhan before December 2019. The only case cluster in December was the Huanan market. These findings also indirectly disproved the Trump State Department’s fabricated claim that three WIV workers had been hospitalized with COVID-19. If, indeed, three young WIV workers had been sick with COVID-19 in October of 2019 to the point of being hospitalized, as the State Department alleged, then hundreds of other people would have had to be infected as well, many of them hospitalized with severe disease. This is what epidemiology and demographics would predict, because the hospitalization rate for young people is multiple orders of magnitude less likely than elderly. There was no way the Huanan market was not involved in the outbreak.

So, what exactly was going on inside the market? Who could help him figure this out? Mike’s investigation into the early outbreak would bring him together with a colleague who had fiercely disagreed with his Science letter. Disagreed to a point that almost tainted their professional and personal relationship. For months, the two of them had worked together on a different project related to how the pandemic spread in America, but the origin question still loomed in the back of their minds. Both had pursued investigations into it after the WHO origin report came out. While Mike was focusing to understand the epidemiology and what happened to cases outside the market, Prof. Kristian Andersen had dived into a different facet of the outbreak, looking at what was going on inside the Huanan market. “The genomic data has always been inconsistent with the idea that it [the virus] was widespread by the time it was detected,” Kristian clarified, explaining why he did not think that the outbreak was going around in stealth mode for a long time. When Xiao Xiao and Zhao-Min Zhou from the Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation Laboratory published their paper on wildlife sales from 2017-2019 in the summer of 2021, Kristian was inspired to drill down through what information could be gathered and confirmed on activities within the market. How was the layout of the market? Where did the sick vendors sell their merchandise? What merchandise was sold? Where were live mammals held and butchered? What samples did Chinese scientists take?

One of the key pieces of evidence was a Chinese CDC report from January 22, 2020, which protocolled the collection of environmental samples from the Huanan market—this was George Gao’s team. That report, which included a table with what environmental samples had tested positive, had been made public in the summer of 2020 by Chinese newspapers, namely the South China Morning Post and, funnily enough, The Epoch Times. Early Chinese CDC updates, and Chinese newspaper articles had reported about the market sampling at the time before geopolitics and blame games made it all controversial. Kristian knew that some of these data existed throughout 2020, but they were all in Chinese, so he put them to the side. The pandemic demanded all of his attention, especially when the alpha variant exploded in the traumatic winter of 2020/2021, and he, along with his colleagues, became so occupied with the pandemic that he forgot. Months later, in the annexes of the WHO report, some of this data was published in a low-key fashion. While Kristian had seen the data in the WHO mission report, it wasn’t until a Twitter user running by the name of “Babar” (@babarlelephant) put up a website that they created with pictures of the Huanan market in a type of virtual visit click-through tour that Kristian was jolted into remembering that there were some data to be followed up on.

Kristian would write to his colleagues at the time. (They offered Babar authorship on the scientific paper they were working on, but Babar declined. Later, the paper would thank Babar for their contributions). With all the ingredients in place, excitement quickly took over.

“How could I have missed this?” he asked, raising his hands in response to the forgotten data. “All the details are in there. What stalls were positive, what stalls were negative… so I started looking at that.” He looped in Eddie Holmes again, who was still interested in looking deeper into the emergence and origins of the virus. Babar also put the photos Eddie Holmes had taken of the Huanan Market in 2014 online and geolocated them to a specific stall on the western side of the market.

In the meantime, Kristian had gotten serious about having these early Chinese media and CDC reports translated professionally. Finally, with the help of contemporary translations of the market sampling efforts from Chinese news reports, the WHO mission data annexes, and the visual support from photos and videos “Babar” had collected from social media and all over the internet to help them orientate virtually around the market, Kristian and Eddie made some important discoveries.

One of them was that the environmental samples within the market were not evenly distributed. There seemed to be a cluster in the corner of the western side of the market where multiple environmental samples tested positive for the virus. The corner happened to be where Chinese sources and contemporary evidence had identified wildlife stalls and merchants. Interestingly, no human case was associated with that particular stall. “I was like holy smokes! This cluster where we have these animals being sold, where they had reported on in 2020, right? This was the shop that Eddie visited,” Kristian recalled how suddenly the pieces fell together for him. A lot of virus positivity seemed to aggregate in this one small corner on the west side of the market—the same shop that Eddie Holmes visited the Huanan market in 2014 with his collaborator Zhang. Eddie’s first-hand experience and documentary evidence proved invaluable. “All this [virus] positivity stuff is like right on top of this shop that Eddie visited in 2014, and guess what—took photos of raccoon dogs.” The raccoon dogs, a species involved in the first SARS outbreak, were held in very specific cages. The early reports from the CDC, almost forgotten, indicated that environmental swabs of these very cages were positive, as well as two carts in the same stall. And then Eddie was like, “Yeah, if you look at the back of my photo, you can see two carts.” Kristian recalled their excitement. “And then there was this feather remover” that was found positive as well from environmental swaps. Why a feather remover? “Eddie was like, ‘Zoom into my photo and look at those raccoon dogs… what are they sitting on?’” They were sitting on top of cages that held some unspecified bird species. “You got to be kidding me,” Kristian exclaimed, his excitement still vivid.

Within that tiny corner of the market, where no human case was reported, not only were machines, carts, and cages testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, but samples taken from the open sewer under and the sewage downstream of that stall had environmental swaps that had tested SARS-CoV-2 positive. It all fits with the idea that not only had SARS-CoV-2-susceptible wildlife been held in this corner, but they might have contaminated their environment and what they came in contact with. Isn’t that highly relevant to follow up on?

I remembered what Peter Daszak and Marion Koopmans had told me about their WHO visit and how they came to a similar conclusion. These wild animals provided a direct link back to the bats. That they were never tested, nor even acknowledged as being there by Chinese authorities, was a direly missed opportunity. Chinese authorities aside, most Chinese scientists were not oblivious to what had likely happened here. George Gao’s team returned multiple times to take more samples from the Western side of the market, specifically that corner. In my interview with Shi Zhengli, I learned that she had also visited the Western side of the market in early February to take around 30 environmental swabs herself. At this time, it had been over a month since the outbreak and subsequent decontamination, so one would not expect to find any viral material anymore. Yet, surprisingly, she confirmed to me that five out of her thirty samples were still positive by PCR, albeit at such a low abundance and quality that sequencing those samples would have been impossible. These events certainly enforced the impression that the market, and that particular corner, was awash with viruses. This was not true for other places in the market.

The big irony is that the WHO mission had meticulously collected much of the sampling location data, which Kristian and Mike now carefully re-analyzed. However, because of pushback from Chinese authorities, these loaded inferences about wildlife trade were not allowed to be made and spelled out explicitly in the WHO report. Nor was the clustering around the market discussed, although the WHO members had created one figure. But most of the data was there, just waiting to be taken seriously by independent scientists if one cared to look into the evidence and not just the politically negotiated conclusions of the report. That is why Kristian had been utterly frustrated by Mike’s and Jesse Bloom’s letter to Science, to put it mildly. “The message around ‘we should keep an open mind, we should keep investigating,’ nobody disagrees with this,” Kristian explained. If that had been the only argument, he would have also signed the letter if given the opportunity. But that was not the real message, spirit, or impact of the letter. He objected to its grandstanding tone and many open insinuations, which were already prevalent in the media at the time. It implied that we know nothing about the origins, that we have no data to inform our opinion, that the WHO mission was a failure and tainted, all while grandstanding Western scientists were explicitly accusing Chinese scientists of lying and a lab-origin cover-up. All without evidence. He saw the Bloom et al. letter, instigated by Mike, as enforcing a false narrative that was not only unjust but was also putting scientists in danger, including himself.

Ever since his proximal origin paper, Kristian Andersen has been under severe harassment from the lab leak conspiratorial community. An escalation happened in 2021, when FOIA requests of Anthony Fauci showed how Kristian had first raised the alarm about the possibility of an unnatural virus, only to then change his mind with the emerging evidence. The conspiratorial fever pitch of 2021 media narratives contorted these events beyond recognition, leading to allegations of Kristian being paid off by Fauci to cover up a lab leak. Kristian understood sooner than most what it entails to become a target of conspiracy theories. The last thing he needed was his scientific colleagues and friends, who should know better, to pour gasoline on the fire with a poorly thought-out letter and bestow purely conspiratorial notions with a veneer of scientific legitimacy. Which, of course, happened in the most dramatic fashion. The fact that the contrarian non-expert Alina Chan was on that letter and indicative for much of its tone should have been a red flag in the first place. Mike stood behind what he saw as the letter’s main thrust—a call to keep an open mind on the origins until more data came in. A personal conflict.

It got worse when Jesse Bloom published a preprint under great media fanfare, alleging he had recovered “deleted sequences” of the early Wuhan outbreak that Chinese researchers had uploaded to the SRA sequence database but ominously requested to have deleted after. Kristian, who collaborated with Jesse and still does on other matters, had a run-in with Jesse about the preprint, which he saw as unsubstantiated, riddled with scientific errors to create a self-serving story, and unjustly accusatory towards innocent Chinese scientists. Chinese scientists are not a faceless prop of the state; they are human beings that Jesse was accusing based on nothing but his own faulty reasoning and biases. Nevertheless, Jesse pressed ahead with the allegations that would catapult him to fame and sharpen public criticism of China. Ultimately, his insinuations proved to be baseless and highly misleading. On top of that, Jesse deliberately took data that was published in a different format and used it for his own purposes. It polarized the debate even further, making the conflict between Kristian and Bloom et al. authors like Mike even bigger. It didn’t help that conspiracy theorists would insert themselves into the conversation, elevate the renegades as heroes, and use their words and actions to attack and discredit the embattled Kristian as dishonest.

Yet despite the polarized environment and personal obstacles, both Mike and Kristian had found something relevant, one outside the market, the other inside of it. Both scientists had a separate set of skills and knew that they could challenge each other critically if only they could overcome their ill will about the Science letter and subsequent media frenzy, which came with the predictable death threats towards Kristian personally. Not that any of this was Mike’s fault. Some lab leak activists love to decontextualize the words of one scientist to attack another, to instigate coordinated harassment and hate campaigns against their enemy, and this distorting effect is often hard to shake off.

“Professionally and personally, this was not a high point,” Mike said, admitting to how the Bloom letter he instigated had strained their working relationship. Scientists argue all the time about evidence, sometimes bitterly, so it is nothing new. “It’s always good to have that heterodoxy up front rather than just having the same voices in the room,” Kristian acknowledged. But the personal dimensions and media frenzy were harder to ignore. Scientists are also humans. “Kristian sent me an email, and the subject heading was ‘Compartmentalization’,” Mike explained, meaning to just decouple from all the personal feelings and focus on the science. Today, both of them were able to laugh about the pragmatic email. But that is exactly what they did at the time—put feelings aside and focus on facts. Kristian explained how they bridged their divide:

“To come together and do this work” was also something Mike was proud of. “Whereas in a lot of other cases, it would have been like a flame war and the end of a relationship, and then this scientific work that we did would never have happened.”

Once the two scientists teamed up, with a promise to scientifically challenge the market origin hypothesis any way they knew how, they started recruiting from a wide array of talented scientists with varied expertise. Their goal was to systematically collect, analyze, discuss, model, and interpret all data that somehow stood in relation to the Huanan seafood market, as well as what epidemiology, phylogenetics, demography, geography, and statistics could tell them about the early outbreak. What does the totality of verified evidence tell us about what happened here?

This team of independent scientists was a force to be reckoned with. Especially the work of a talented graduate student named Jonathan Pekar, a computational biologist, and his supervisor Professor Joel Wertheim at the University of San Diego. They would offer crucial insights into how the early Wuhan outbreak likely unfolded. Jonathan specialized in creating epidemic simulations on his computer, essentially rerunning the outbreak virtually tens of thousands of times to look for repeating patterns.

The goal of these simulations is to test and learn crucial parameters about the outbreak dynamics, such as the rate of spread or the timing of the first infection that started the transmission chain. By starting with a wide array of possible parameters, the simulations produce a wide array of virtual epidemics that all unfold a bit differently from one another and are then compared to the observed real-patient data that was collected and verified by Chinese scientists, the WHO mission, and Mike Worobey. Those epidemic parameters that gave rise to simulations that matched the real data would give a good estimate of the conditions of the initial outbreak in Wuhan.

Doing this, Jonathan and his supervisor Joel found something quite surprising. Many of his epidemic simulations would burn out after infecting a few people, rather than take off and start a sustained outbreak. It turns out that the original SARS-CoV-2 virus that spilled over in Wuhan actually was not extraordinarily infectious (certainly compared to later variants such as alpha, delta, or omicron), meaning there was a decent chance it would have burned out by chance, unable to sustain human-to-human transmission. This is because pandemics are not just about the virus but also about the hosts. They also have a social dimension. One of the most crucial parameters in Jonathan’s simulation was the likelihood that an infected person would come into contact with other people, as well as how many people. In a remote village, where population density is sparse and a single infected person can only meet a handful of other people, a virus like SARS-CoV-2 would have burned out with an over 99% likelihood. But in a crowded city like Wuhan, where there is a high population density, the odds of the virus causing an outbreak increased dramatically, to around 30% if started by a single infected person. No matter if a lab leak or a spillover event caused the first infection, these were the rough odds of SARS-CoV-2 causing an outbreak in Wuhan, given the virus properties and environment. However, did that not imply that humanity had a 70% chance to dodge that particular bullet? Did we just get massively unlucky?

Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. This is what the careful work of Mike, Kristian, Jonathan, Joel and around twenty other talented collaborators would make clear. I apologize to the coauthors and readers for not being able to go into the details of their individual contributions, which were often highly significant and can be found in the primary literature. Science is a highly collaborative endeavor, and no single book can do that reality proper justice.

There was one more fact that puzzled the researchers since the early days that needed to be cleared up for the outbreak data to make sense. From the very start of the first few hundred cases in Wuhan, there had been two separate virus lineages, named pragmatically lineage A and lineage B. They differed by two mutations from each other but seem to have spawned independent transmission chains, with lineage A accounting for around one-third of all early cases and lineage B for two-thirds. Lineage B would be the one that exploded into the world and give rise to subsequent variants such as alpha, delta, and omicron.

What was so odd about two lineages? Usually, whenever a new mutation happens, the phylogenetic tree of the virus gets an extra branch—a bifurcation on the tree that can potentially spawn a new lineage. Most of these branches are limited to a few people and die out. Others are successful and propagate forward, acquire more mutations, branch out again, and so on, making the family tree grow. While the genetic diversity between branches can be extremely high, the genetic diversity at the root of the tree, from which all subsequent branches spawn, is, by definition, zero. It is the starting point before the diversification of that particular tree. The most dramatic illustrative case example would be a super-spreading event, such as what happened in the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, Daegu, South Korea, in 2020. In that superspreading event, 5,200 cases would be traced back to a single infected woman. By analyzing the viral genomes of hundreds of infected patients at the time, researchers could reconstruct that all genetic diversification they observed started from one particular starting point: the woman in the church. She was the root of that outbreak, the center from which all other branches arose (in technical terms, this would be known as a “polytomy” or multifurcation of the genetic tree). The sum of genome sequencing of the genetic diversity of patients involved in an outbreak can usually be used to identify the root or starting point of an outbreak; this is what phylogenetics is often about.

Surprisingly to Jonathan, Joel, Mike, and Kristian, doing the same exercise for the early Wuhan patients showed a different picture. Phylogenetic analysis could not identify a single clear genomic root from where the diversity started. At first, because lineages A and B were just two mutations apart, researchers just presumed that there was an intermediate genome between the two or that one lineage branched out from the other early before being noticed. However, the particular branching pattern (polytomies) of lineage A and lineage B told a different story: It appeared that one genome was at the root of all diversity from lineage A cases, and another genome was at the root of all lineage B cases, while these root genomes were not directly connected but rather separate from each other. Somehow, the early patient cases in Wuhan were not branches from a shared root but belonged to two independent trees. How was this possible? Did scientists miss swaths of early patients that held an intermediate genome connecting the trees? That seemed unlikely, given the complementary data that Mike unearthed. So, where or how did this early lineage split happen? And why did these two large polytomies suddenly explode almost simultaneously?

Jonathan Pekar, Joel Wertheim, Kristian Andersen, and Mike Worobey explored plausible epidemic scenarios with computational methods that would recreate this particular early diversity pattern, and they ended up with a surprising discovery: SARS-CoV-2 most likely spilled over multiple times into humans.

The reason why there were two early lineages has to do with the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population not once, but at least twice, from an animal reservoir that had diversified the virus by these two lineage-defining mutations before it spilled over. The moment an animal infected a human, the virus took off and started the human-to-human transmission chain, diversifying from the genome that spilled over, which was lineage A root or lineage B root, respectively. That’s why the lineages were associated with two separate large polytomies. Their calculations based on lineage-specific epidemic dynamics also showed that the timing of these spillovers happened close to each other but not at the same time. They were at least a week apart from each other, with lineage B spilling over first sometime in late November. This scenario best explains the totality of phylogenetic data, the progression of cases, and the family trees of the viruses we observe.

The multiple spillover explanation also solved another important riddle that had tripped up scientists previously: how come lineage B is the predominant version when lineage A is ancestral to it? The epidemiology showed that lineage B cases came first, but genetics indicates that lineage A was closer to SARS-CoV-2 relatives found in bats. If it was a single spillover event or lab infection, and lineage B simply arose from lineage A, how come lineage B got a head start and seemed to have caused sickness earlier, further, and wider than lineage A?

The observed genetic, timing, and patient case data are very hard to explain by proposing a single introduction event. However, the multiple spillover scenario neatly solves this conundrum. All it required was a pool of sick and infected intermediate animal hosts at the market, with a certain amount of viral diversity in circulation. If that condition was given, then lineage B just happened to make the successful jump into humans first, and lineage A spilled over a week or so later.

I could not help but be reminded of what Linfa Wang and Peter Daszak told me about the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia. They also first believed that it was a single freak spillover event from bats to pigs, but later (once genome sequencing technologies were invented and became much cheaper), they found out that the genetic diversity of the viral genomes also suggested multiple independent spillovers from bats to pigs. It makes sense; with a single introduction, the virus would have run through the farm and likely burned out. Instead, the immunity from the mother sows, in combination with the rapid piglet breeding and weaning practices, meant that little piglets would become susceptible to new spillovers at this risky bat-pig interface the moment they were about to be sold. That is how a few pigs ended up propagating Nipah forward to cause the sustained outbreak. Retrospectively, outbreak investigations always only get to observe the survivors, those viral lineages and transmission chains that cause outbreaks, never those spillover infections that burn out by themselves after a few days in a new host and do not successfully transmit to others.

Back to the Huanan market. By necessity, the observation of two distinct lineages—two survivors—provides a lower range for how many spillovers happened at the market. At least two spillovers were required, but it’s likely there were more that were not observed because they burned out. Given how quickly the cases exploded from the market, epidemic simulations are consistent with up to almost two dozen independent spillover events shared between A and B. Around three-quarters of them were always expected to die out within the infected human hosts, as the characteristics of the virus and population dynamics predicted. Over 99% die out in a village; over 70% die out in Wuhan. Yet we observed that not only one but two different lineages successfully established themselves in the human population. Either we were dramatically unlucky with two freak events, or there were just a lot of spillover events we did not observe because they burned out. In their totality, these multiple spillovers likely made the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in the market pretty inevitable. Once infected animals shedding the virus were brought into proximity with many, many immune-naive human hosts, once this very risky animal-human interface was put in place, we had sealed our fate.

Jonathan, Mike, and Kristian’s computational modeling work would come to support the latter notion. Here is the relevant statement from the scientific paper published in Science (2022):

The extinction rate of our simulated epidemics (simulations that did not produce self-sustaining transmission chains) indicate that there were likely multiple failed introductions of SARS-CoV-2. Similar to our previous findings, 77.8% of simulated epidemics went extinct. These failed introductions produced a mean of 2.06 infections and 0.10 hospitalizations; hence, failed introductions could easily go unnoticed. If we treat each SARS-CoV-2 introduction, failed or successful, as a Bernoulli trial and simulate introductions until we see two successful introductions, we estimate that eight (95% HPD, 2 to 23) introductions led to the establishment of both lineage A and B in humans.

In other words, we were not unlucky victims of one or two single freak spillover events; rather, we ignored a very risky animal-human interphase at that particular wet market in Wuhan, which allowed for SARS-CoV-2, already circulating in animals, to spill over repeatedly until two of those human infections took off to take humanity by storm.

The multiple spillover theory explained the available data pretty perfectly. But could it do more than that? What implications does that theory entail? With this multiple spillover model in mind, the team around Mike and Kristian could ask some more interesting questions about the Huanan market. For example, if multiple spillovers from infected animals were true, then by necessity, some other testable data would need to line up. For example, one would have to show that sick patients from both lineages A and B independently centered around the market. While the earliest patients might have been retrospectively identified and tested for PCR, full genome sequencing was scarce. Only two lineage A genomes had been sequenced, and neither patient reported any association with the market. But when Mike looked at their geographical location, both were significantly closer to the market than expected by chance, with one spending five days in a hotel next to the market before symptom onset. Certainly supportive of the multiple spillover theory.

Then came another breakthrough from a surprising source. George Gao’s team from the Chinese CDC finally published a preprint about their analysis of environmental samples from the Huanan market. They found both lineage B cases and a single lineage A genome at the market, which contradicted the common notion that the market was a mere amplifier or super-spreader event. It confirmed Mike and Kristian’s suspicions. “Our analysis predicted that both lineages would be at the market,” Kristian explained. And behold, their prediction was correct. With the identification of the third lineage A genome, both lineages were now spatially centered around the Huanan market and radiated outwards into Wuhan from there. Both lineages were now found and confirmed inside the market by environmental swaps. As Mike explained:

These results also contradict one of the last naive cop-outs from lab leak advocates, who have long been on the defensive about the market: the idea that an infected lab worker might have brought the virus into the market and caused an outbreak there, but not anywhere else in the city. This was a magical assumption, given how far the lab was away from the market and about 10,000 other more likely places in Wuhan where an outbreak cluster would happen than the semi-open Huanan market. Yet it was challenging to disprove because it is theoretically possible that an infected lab worker somehow went to that market by chance and started an outbreak there. But if the virus came from a lab infection, why would it show up at the Huanan market first and nowhere else? One of only four places in Wuhan that actually sold wild animals known to be highly susceptible to SARS-related viruses? Lab leak advocates had no scientific explanation for the Huanan market association even before lineage A was confirmed to be at the market.

With both lineages confirmed inside the market, any idea that SARS-CoV-2 could somehow have been carried in twice, causing a low-probability sustained outbreak twice, in the same market but nowhere else, was rather absurd. “You don’t get a super-spreader event and have two lineages associated with that,” Mike concluded. On top of that, it would require that both lineages come from two different lab workers who were independently infected by slightly different viruses a week apart from each other, and both decided to go to the Huanan market far away from their work or place of residence on the other side of the Yangtze River. All while infecting absolutely nobody else at work or in their personal life yet still being so highly infectious as to set a wildlife market ablaze twice in a single visit.

“You look at all the evidence; it points straight to a market in Wuhan,” Kristian Andersen was very clear about this. “It is not a single line of evidence we are using here,” he elaborated on their work. Indeed, taking the multiple overlapping lines of epidemiological, phylogenetic, geographic, forensic, and statistical evidence together, a single picture emerges: Infected animals were brought to the market, likely kept there for weeks in unsanitary conditions, giving opportunity after opportunity for circulating SARS-CoV-2 lineages to spill over into immune-naive human hosts visiting the market. While many of these spillovers likely burned out, at least two of them started sustained transmission chains about a week apart in late November 2019 that would radiate outward from the Huanan market into the city and from the city into the world. “I think it is important when we talk about what are the most likely scenarios; you gotta take all the evidence,” Kristian emphasized again. The power of the scientific method comes from triangulation—finding that multiple different experiments, methods, and scientists all converge on a single hypothesis, theory, or conclusion that can explain all different types of evidence parsimoniously and coherently without internal contradictions. Ideally, a scientific theory also has predictive power that can be experimentally tested, such as the supposition that if those environmental samples taken for the market were ever to be tested, lineage A would most likely be found.

The market theory would also predict that SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animals must have been present in the western corner of the Huanan market in November 2019. Something Chinese authorities vehemently denied and that neither photographic evidence from random social media accounts in 2019 (or outdated photos from Eddie Holmes in 2014) nor the Xiao Xiao general survey could conclusively prove for that particular shop. Yet, in due time, unequivocal genetic evidence would be found to substantiate that prediction.

No matter how one looked at it, all the scientific evidence to date told a very one-sided story about where SARS-CoV-2 came from. It pointed away from the lab and toward the Huanan market.

For Mike and Kristian, their two dozen international coauthors, and large swaths of the scientific community, the picture arising from the totality of the evidence on key issues surrounding the origins of SC2 became pretty clear. The lab leak idea was a mirage, wholly unsupported speculation contradicted by evidence, running up against a compelling zoonotic spillover explanation with strong, albeit not perfect, evidentiary support. A naturally evolved virus caused the first known outbreak at a wet market. However, this recognition does not mean that there are no more questions to be asked or no more mysteries to be solved about where the virus came from. “This is not the end of understanding the origins of COVID-19. This is the beginning; it gives us the necessary focus that we need, which is that market in Wuhan,” Kristian added. What animal species were physically present at the market in late November? Were they really infected? Who brought the animals into the market, and from where? Where were the Wuhan animals exposed to a bat virus that could infect them? Did the wildlife traders have antibodies against COVID-19? Where’s the original bat reservoir? How long did the virus circulate in intermediate animal populations before it emerged in humans? We need to follow up on these questions if we want to prevent SARS-CoV-3.

Mike, as best I can tell, hoped that their scientific breakthrough would infuse the public discourse around the topic with some much-needed reality check and lead to follow-up investigations into the wildlife trade, both in China and abroad. While no amount of scientific evidence was likely to change the minds of entrenched lab leak believers, there was a reasonable expectation that journalists, elites, and mainstream media would do their part in correcting the record. Indeed, the few remaining science journalists who had not yet lost their jobs in the new information ecosystem (which increasingly values commentary and op-ed desks over science desks) dutifully reported about the scientific pre-prints and later papers that would be published in the renowned journal Science after peer review. CNN, the BBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times all had a story running. So did National Geographic and Scientific American. The message about a scientific breakthrough in the origin case was out.

In ordinary times, this should have been enough to bring lab leak speculations back on solid evidentiary ground. But I am afraid we do not live in ordinary times anymore.

§

The market origin papers were followed by an explosion of activity from lab leak proponents to denounce the independent researchers, to deny any type of breakthrough happened, and to deceive citizens about the new evidence. Many revenge plans were set into action, not dissimilar to what happened in the Trump orbit after “proximal origin” was published in 2020. The only difference was that this time, loud and powerful voices from both the left and right—crowds, journalists, and politicians—all seemed to do their damnedest to smear the work, ethics, and character of independent scientists in the process. A relentless campaign against the mainstream outlets that reported about the papers would also ensue, advocating to retract or correct their reporting or give lab leak innuendo equal space to peer-reviewed science. Many such efforts would eventually succeed. As always, it is impossible to map out all the plots, ploys, and players, but if I had to put my finger on one pulse-giving narrative, it would be a brilliantly crafted but extremely misleading article by Katherine Eban. A special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a magazine covering fashion, popular culture, and current affairs, she became in my opinion one of the most fervent crusaders for the lab leak narrative, providing motivated rationalizations to justify the feelings of elites in both media and politics alike.

Katherine is an investigative journalist with a very specific beat and style. Years prior to the pandemic, she had written a book to supposedly highlight bad practices and dirty secrets in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, relying heavily on selective quoting from leaked documents and utilizing quotes from real and self-proclaimed whistleblowers to tell the – in my opinion – most sensationalist and damning story possible. If one thing can be said about Katherine, it is that she is a truly gifted storyteller who always knows how to create heroes and villains from ordinary people and extrapolate their conflicts into world-sweeping battles of global relevance and moral saliency. In her corporate crime thriller Bottle of Lies, Katherine tells the story of Ranbaxy, an Indian generic drug manufacturing company that was found liable by the FDA for producing subpar medicines and fined $500 million USD in 2013. Her book, leaning heavily on what appears to be real fraud on the part of Ranbaxy and some oversight failure by the FDA, did however not stop at one company but framed the whole overseas generic drug manufacturing industry, from India to China to African Nations, as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. In her book-selling pitch, her investigation supposedly “reveals how the world’s greatest public health innovation [generic drug manufacturing] has become one of its most astonishing swindles.”

I have my fair share of criticisms of pharmaceutical companies and capitalistic business practices, but painting a whole life-saving overseas industry with an overall too broad and sensationalist brush as a mere “swindle” is quite dishonest for my taste. There is no proportionality. The reality is that generic drug manufacturing serves hundreds of millions of patients all around the world, multiple layers of regulation are in place, and the vast majority of generic drugs are entirely safe and effective no matter where they are produced. That is the big picture. So, while alleged or real cases of negligence or misconduct unquestionably happen, they make for rather thrilling books but are hardly representative anecdotes. Kathrine’s broad, sensationalist framing, however, hit a cultural moment. “A new book argues that generics are poisoning us,” The New York Times would pick up her tale uncritically. Others would follow. The fearmongering about “overseas” drug manufacturing was convenient for elite newspapers at a time when geopolitical tensions increased. Such narratives about “foreign-manufactured medicines are poisoning us” are bound to make waves in popular discourse, especially with Trump’s trade war against China and public demands for companies to bring back American manufacturing jobs through onshoring supply chains and related industries. As an author, I tend to see that mainstream success in books is often reliant on hitting the sweet spot between popular appeal and satisfying the agenda of the powerful.

Kathrine’s book became a New York Times bestseller and was quite impactful because it convincingly portrayed an overseas manufacturing industry as “a Wild West environment, where being first mattered more than getting it right.” Who doesn’t like to read a well-crafted thriller about the brave underdogs unearthing corporate corruption and governmental failings? I certainly do, and I am rooting for the underdogs every time. Those are the stories and tropes we readers want to engage with; nuance and context are secondary at best. Especially emotive narratives about foreigners striving to surpass us technologically with their recklessness (or lawlessness) leading towards mortal peril for citizens hit a deep tribal fear in us. It would not be a surprise to me that when Katherine Eban started hearing the same tales about allegedly reckless and unregulated “gain-of-function research” overseas, she potentially saw another opportunity to write a sweeping thriller.

Correspondingly, she made her first foray into the origins topic in 2021 by mainstreaming various conspiracy theorists and political actors deeply involved in lab leak mythology. She portrayed shady Trump operatives pushing the bioweapon myth within the State Department as underdogs against the National Security establishment and conspiratorial activists on social media as either neglected whistleblowers or brave scientific renegades. These were her heroes, lavished with generous embellishments to enhance their credibility or abilities while downplaying or outright withholding their flaws, political entanglements, and activist nature from readers.

In contrast, she was decidedly less generous about describing her villains, deliberately constructing dubious story arcs from cherry-picked documents, out-of-context quotes, and poignant insinuations from their adversaries. For example, she painted the warm and candid Shi Zhengli as compromised and untrustworthy for the pure fact that she was a Chinese scientist in China. Katherine would also rehash just about every major story trope for the lab leak myth: the alleged biosafety issues, the supposedly sick workers at the institute; the imagined hiding of the Mojiang miner connection when Zhengli published RaTG13; Alina Chan’s flawed preprint about “pre-adaptation” that never made it past peer review; the “risky gain-of-function research” Zhengli allegedly conducted with Ralph Baric; USRTK’s FOIA’d private messages; the Lancet letter that Peter supposedly crafted to suppress any inquiry into the lab leak theory;… on and on her 12,000-word article goes. Her story needed Zhengli, as well as people in contact with her, to be the villains—researchers who lie about many things either because they were coerced by or involved with foreign governments. The more mendacious her villains were, the brighter Katherine’s heroes would shine. In my opinion, she would utilize any and all misleading interpretations and one-sided comments from conspiracy theorists and motivated actors to craft the most sensationalist and thrilling story about how the lab leak underdogs had triumphed over the suppression of the lab leak hypothesis. In her retelling, it was allegedly suppressed by conflicted scientists and shadowy government bureaucrats. That was in 2021, and she was just getting started.

When the market papers driven by Mike and Kristian received their first media coverage at the end of February 2022, her “sources,” that seemingly consisted largely of conspiracy theorists, activists, and power holders, were outraged about the results. Science had just destroyed their favorite narrative. They were incapable of challenging the meticulous papers on scientific merit, and the wide media coverage made it so they could not deny these papers existed. In this conflict with scientific reality, many lab leak believers would transition from being advocates for investigating a potential lab leak origin into outright science denial. Rather than simply changing their mind with the evidence, they opted instead to attack, smear, and discredit the independent scientists in the public’s eye. All they needed was a good counter-narrative to discredit the market papers. Something that would allow the world to ignore facts and focus on the messengers instead.

“When I go out to report, I am not looking for expert voices; I am looking for sources,” Katherine Eban would explain in a panel discussion about her investigative approach to scientific controversies. It seems, from her own description, that she did not pay attention to scientific evidence or bother to understand contested science to differentiate between competing expert opinions. In my subjective experience, she also appeared to be very proud of that, as if scientific literacy on the issue would bestow a conflict of interest on science reporters that would color their judgment. In the panel discussion, she would allege that science journalists were conflicted by relying on experts as sources, and that would disqualify them from being critical in their reporting about scientific controversies. In contrast, her investigative approach focused on sniffing out human intrigues and interpersonal conflicts through a mix of contradictory testimonies, speculations about motivations, and human idiosyncrasies. The human angle. On that part, there was no shortage of conspiracy theorists and motivated actors who could provide ample ammunition to Katherine Eban in the form of insinuations, innuendos, and opinions against the authors of the market origin papers, even some of the science journalists who covered them.

From these building blocks of human intrigue, the gifted storyteller could, in my opinion, fabricate a larger narrative that would not only implicate Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli in a supposed origin cover-up, but basically all of virology, the NIH, and a very prominent public health scientist, somebody who US Republicans have long sought to hang in the court of public opinion. About a month after the market papers made news, Katherine had her next thriller ready: “This Shouldn’t Happen”: Inside the Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak Controversy.

The counteroffensive began.

Her piece started with what I would classify as a maliciously misrepresented anecdote about a conflict between Kristian Andersen and Jesse Bloom. Since 2021, Jesse has gained a large media presence based on his contrarian stance and what I consider a willful falsehood about Chinese researchers having deleted pertinent sequences that he recovered under much media fanfare. In reality, the Chinese authors did nothing wrong. It was later found that Jesse manually deleted the sampling date of “30^th January” and replaced it with “early in epidemic” to create the appearance of relevance to the origin question when there is none. Kristian had challenged Jesse, with whom he collaborated on other projects, and said that Jesse’s accusations against Chinese authors were baseless. This was the root of their conflict.

Enter Katherine Eban, who crafted the “bespectacled, boyish-looking 43-year-old” lab leak proponent, whom her article described as “the most ethical scientist I know,” into the underdog trying to get the word about Chinese duplicity and cover-ups out into the world. In contrast, Kristian was painted as his irascible detractor, attempting to silence Jesse, all while also in cahoots with Anthony Fauci somehow. Why this odd construction? She would let the reader find out soon enough.

“Fauci and a small group of scientists, including Andersen and Garry, worked to enshrine the natural-origin theory during confidential discussions in early February 2020,” she would state, referring to the February 1, 2020, conference call that Jeremy Farrar arranged after Kristian and Eddie Holmes began raising suspicions about the viral genome. First, notice her use of the evocative word “enshrine,” ascribing a malicious agenda to the meeting. Second, none of that happened; it was a completely fluid situation, as we have read about before. After Katherine set the tone, she pressed on to describe that these events were mere examples of a “wagon-circling” that “reflected a siege mentality at the NIH” when it came to the origin topic. Again, this was baseless best I could tell. But in my opinion, Katherine did what she knew best, creating heroes and villains through subtle insinuations, word choices, and framing of events, breaking context and truth when necessary to advance her story.

Her construction worked well. Readers were wondering why there was a supposed “siege mentality at the NIH?” What were they defending? Katherine was ready to let them find out. Because in her thrillers, the cover-up conspiracy seemingly must go all the way to the top.

“Of all those high-level people, almost no one ranked as high as Fauci, a scientific kingmaker who dispensed billions in grant money each year,” Kathrine would write, completely mischaracterizing the role of the former agency head as if he personally dispensed funds rather than the scientific committees at NIAID assessing the grants researchers submit to them. But she needed this inappropriate “kingmaker” framing to advance her thriller’s main villain plot: How Peter Daszak was supposedly circling Dr. Fauci to get grant money for his nonprofit that would ultimately be instrumental in giving the Chinese money and knowledge to create SARS-CoV-2 and cause the pandemic. By itself, I found this insinuation not only naive but also pretty paternalistic, if not outright Sinophobic, as if Chinese researchers were incompetent and only able to do great or terrible things with an American mastermind behind them. Then, Kathrine laid out her case for blame. Dr. Fauci, as head of the NIAID, was supposedly not upholding his oversight responsibilities. Peter Daszak was cast as a ruthless mercantile researcher for whom being first mattered more than doing it right. Shi Zhengli continued to be the dishonest foreigner operating in a regulatory Wild West, possibly in cahoots with the nefarious Chinese state and military. How could the reader take anything else away from this forced constellation, but that disaster was about to strike? Readers inclined to believe that a lab leak happened were fully on her side, but Kathrine found a way to tune the emotional force of her narrative to up the stakes even further.

Because this alleged grant-outsourcing setup to fund risky research between Fauci, Daszak, and Shi that Katherine Eban constructed was supposedly not just a single incident, she assured her readers. No. As her article’s skillful framing alleged, these types of setups around grant money are characteristic of wider problems in virology and reckless gain-of-function research. It’s about power and corruption, her article alleged not so subtly in my opinion, and the whole scientific industry was supposedly the problem here, according to its tenor. That is why seemingly independent scientists are all “circling the wagon” around the NIH and its “kingmaker,” Dr. Fauci (who only headed the NIAID, just one of the 27 institutes under the NIH).

Now Katherine could take us back to Mike, Kristian, and their market origin papers that made the news recently. Katherine would write, “Worobey, Andersen, Garry, and their 15 coauthors rushed their preprints into the public domain”, ostensibly implying in my opinion that this was to protect the “king” who dispenses grant money to them or to obstruct the public from finding out how the scientific gain-of-function industry has worked unregulated for years. Notice the framing again by using the phrase “rushed… into the public domain,” implying a hidden agenda or agency. Without ever arguing over the scientific analysis or evidence contained in the papers, Kathrine had created a compelling story framing that implied the market papers were a product of biased authors who had something to gain by pointing the finger away from the lab. Again, a casual reader might be excused to take from this a conclusion that either implied conflicts of interest or, worse, scientific fraud on behalf of the market authors. Too deepen this conclusion, Kathrine’s article also highlighted Kristian’s involvement in “proximal origin” using a “just asking questions” framing technique:

Why top scientists linked arms to tamp down public speculation about a lab leak—even when their emails, revealed via FOIA requests and congressional review, suggest they held similar concerns—remains unclear. Was it simply because their views shifted in favor of a natural origin? Could it have been to protect science from the ravings of conspiracy theorists? Or to protect against a revelation that could prove fatal to certain risky research that they deem indispensable? Or to protect vast streams of grant money from political interference or government regulation?

For a storyteller, the purpose of these types of questions is to frame emotions, not give answers. Eban’s thriller tale ends predictably, with a salient quote from a biased source that expresses a strong opinion she wants the reader to adopt as the take-away message: “The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin, he says, ‘want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.’”

The moral implications of Katherine Eban’s thriller were sweepingly broad and on the nose. Just as with “generic drugs were poisoning us,” her—in my opinion —carefully constructed narrative hit a checkbox with the elites in media and politics. It gave permission to discredit anyone and everyone—not just Mike, Kristian, and colleagues—whose research would end up supporting a zoonotic origin. Katherine’s narrative, supported by accolades from conspiratorial influencers and crowds, made those in power believe that all virologists, in general, must have an agenda and be conflicted about the origin topic. Certainly, the market paper authors around Mike and Kristian were not to be trusted. This is, of course, extremely dishonest and ignores the reality of how Mike Worobey fell into the investigation and how, by trying to disprove the market origin hypothesis, he and two dozen independent coauthors uncovered evidence that would end up supporting a zoonotic spillover much more than a research-related accident.

“If it had been otherwise, I would have published a different perspective in Science, and we would have published a couple of papers showing … that it was a lab leak,” Mike stated matter-of-factly. If that had been the outcome of their research, he believed he would have gotten away looking much better. He had been the animating force behind the Science letter that contributed to the vibe shift. He could have been the renegade, the maverick underdog, sitting in his basement for months tracing all those early cases to prove the WHO mission assessment wrong. He certainly would have saved himself a lot of harassment and trouble afterward. Alas, the evidence fell the other way, and conspiracy theorists have had a special ire for him ever since—a betrayer. Staying true to science can be inconvenient like that.

Unfortunately, Katherine Eban’s article was not an outlier; rather, it served as the opening shot of the hunting season on the market paper authors. Alina Chan and Matt Ridley were not far behind, penning multiple opinion pieces for various mainstream outlets to discredit them. The cottage industry of conspiracy theorists around DRASTIC would post a barrage of pseudoscientific criticisms, none of which held any water, but collectively, they polluted the clarity of the scientific findings in the public domain; as if Twitter threads and blog posts could debunk peer-reviewed scientific articles. With Dr. Fauci as a potential trophy at the end of their crusade, soon, Kristian Andersen would be subpoenaed by Republicans, asked to come in front of US Congress together with Robert Garry (which they did voluntarily), and later smeared by Republican representatives and their client propagandists. The political witch hunts against public health scientists, virologists, and vaccine researchers had started, and the market papers put a target on scientists back.

Quality newspapers that had previously covered the market papers often buckled under mounting political and popular pressure too. Fear of losing popularity with readers, perceived legitimacy, and access to elites prompted many editorial teams in big newspapers to run op-eds to counter the reporting of their own science journalists. They platformed contrarian scientists and fringe figures to give their opinions versus emerging facts, creating the impression that there is a vivid dispute, “alternative science” and high uncertainty among experts. They framed the origin question as a conflict between two warring factions, at best equally likely to be right on the issue.

But at the same time, discarding the lab leak myth as baseless became a sin, punishable by character assassination and potential political persecution. An asymmetry where every garbage argument for the lab leak narrative was treated as newsworthy, and any counterpoint treated as possible conflict of interest dictated media coverage. The reality was that an overwhelming majority of scientists felt the body of evidence for zoonosis was strong, and any evidence of a lab leak was lacking. Yet in the press, remaining uncertainties not addressed or addressable by the market origin papers were played up, amplified, and repeated ceaselessly. Both-sidesism, false equivalency reporting, and “teaching the controversy” took up the majority of news coverage.

Mike was outraged and disillusioned. He was not alone; most scientists with a front-row seat to the spectacle became overwhelmed and increasingly lost trust in government, the free press, and the chattering classes. Many retreated from social media and mainstream media alike, unable to shout against the tornado yet in constant danger of being its next victim for speaking up. The rift between scientific knowledge and societal knowledge on this topic seemingly became insurmountable. Those scientists who were most knowledgeable about the topic had been tainted and could not get the evidence out to the public anymore. Their scientific breakthrough had been contained. Most citizens will never get to hear their story, the conflicts and obstacles that stood between them, and the excitement when the clues they unearthed started forming a coherent picture.

Which is tragically unjust for the scientists who just did their jobs, but even worse for society. Independent science is important because the true power of the scientific method is unleashed when multiple different lines of evidence, created by different methods and by different people in different nations, all converge on one hypothesis. By 2022, various viral discovery programs, bat researchers like Alice Hughes, and the scientists around Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang, and Peter Daszak had collected enough data to show that only nature’s neglected gain-of-function laboratory, not genetic engineers, could bring about SARS-CoV-2’s intricate mosaic genome. This has been the work of hundreds of scientists for more than a decade.

On the other side of the world, dozens of independent scientists, spearheaded by the efforts of Mike and Kristian and their international collaborators, established the Huanan market as the unequivocal epicenter of the first outbreak in Wuhan. Chinese scientists created a lot of good data despite the obstacles, often working behind the scenes to get the word out to their international collaborators at great personal risk. The WHO mission experts also added crucial insights about what happened in Wuhan, as did the rest of the scientific community that worked on molecular virology, epidemiology, or viral evolution to contribute knowledge about the nature of this virus. Any lab or research involvement, especially various ideas that the virus was created or heated up at WIV, was now easily refuted, contradicted, or made highly implausible by the available scientific evidence in 2022. Like with SARS-CoV-1, all carefully acquired and analyzed evidence pointed to the biodiverse Karst region of Southern China and Southeast Asia, with the wildlife industry possibly serving as a conduit to create the right circumstances for a natural virus to cause a sustained outbreak in a Chinese megacity.

Scientifically, the situation was much clearer than for most outbreak investigations. This virus had nothing to do with gain-of-function research or any research labs. It took more than two years for the evidentiary basis to be established and for science and scientists to converge on actionable certainty around the topic.

So why wouldn’t the world take this as an answer? Why would establishment media continue with false equivalency reporting, platforming media-hungry contrarians, and ignoring scientific evidence while running character assassination campaigns against independent researchers? Why do false and mutually contradictory myths about a man-made virus, a gain-of-function flask monster, still persist today? Why are baseless speculations and fact-free innuendo still allowed to distort our politics, sabotage our pandemic prevention efforts, and put biomedical science as a whole under pressure?

At this point, I became intrigued as a science communicator. A chasm was opening in front of me in real-time. Where do our modern rifts between science and society come from in the first place? Were we always so divided, or did something change?

My suspicion was that our current conundrums and crisis of trust in science emerged from another neglected biodiverse ecosystem. One that increasingly exerted a malicious force on our public perception of the pandemic that matched, if not surpassed, the biological virus itself in emotional energy and societal friction.

During the pandemic, this neglected but dangerous ecosystem grew in power and now aims to rewrite the history and reality of how the virus came to be and who society ought to punish for creating it. Using a more intriguing narrative full of heroes and villains, outrage, and hope, the myth of a man-made virus that leaked from a lab became much grander than the mundane reality of multiple zoonotic spillover events at a wildlife market. And crowds were all too eager to buy into it.

Unfortunately, as we should have learned from history, such periods of myth-making and grand narratives always bring forth leaders, sages, and prophets who seek to shape, subjugate, and weaponize them to impress their political worldview onto others. Their victory lap over science and society would have its roots in 2021, with the release of a rejected grant proposal Peter Daszak had sent to the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA for short.

His life would never be the same.

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

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