Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information.
“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:
Well, now, since you asked, it is to uncover the truth about COVID-19, to challenge scientific authority and expose corruption and cover-ups in China and elsewhere, to promote citizen monitoring of virology and high level BSL labs, expose the history of State biowarfare, and finally without wishing to sound pretentious, to promote my anarchist philosophy.
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.
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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:
When you live in a world where things are unpredictable, there is a psychological but also practical desire to control our lives. When people try to infer causes, such as a disease, it makes sense to pose invisible agents. That’s how social primate brains would work about these things.
“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:
There is a tendency to look down on, let’s say, Burmese supernaturalism or Azande witchcraft, where people are seeing misfortunes and illnesses as being caused by witches and invisible spirits that are doing harm. [We like] to flatter ourselves in modern environments, that all pre-modern people are not rational like we are now. But with the lab leak, I think it’s the exact same incentives.
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.
But specifically for Ebright, the thing that I was noticing as somebody from the outside was that he has been quoted immensely. Every time I came across an article favorable to the lab leak, it was him. So I messaged Matt and others at the time and put a pin down that he would become a leading conspiracy theorist.
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.
“If you make it trend, you make it true”
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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