Exclusive: Inside the WHO mission to Wuhan
An exclusive excerpt from "Lab Leak Fever", the inside story behind the search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and the manipulation campaigns around it
Last time, I revealed the inside story of Chinese scientists in Wuhan racing to understand the new virus that started overwhelming the city; and how the bioweapon myth started through inauthentic amplification of a Hong Kong postdoc by Steve Bannon and Miles Guo’s media operation, which ended up fueling a billion dollar fraud scheme. This sum was calculated by the US District Court, Southern District of New York. Due to worries about retaliation, we can currently not go deeper into the mechanism, motivations and malice of their story described in my investigative book, released on the 20th April only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. (German readers, you are in for a wild ride! Get the ebook or paperback [link coming soon])
I wished publication circumstances had been easier, the book should have been out already in the US but the publisher deemed it too risky after the election and the return to power of many antagonists whose manipulative actions the book exposes, and that very much includes Steve Bannon and Miles Guo.
For now, English speakers can find a longer Q&A with me in BigThink about the book and what it is all about. I will also make myself more available for live Q&A sessions in the near future; with a chill Twitch live stream on Saturday, 4pm CET.
I always strongly believed that citizens should have access to good information. While I currently can not release the full story here about how bad actors brought about the vibe shift in the origin’s discourse, at least I wanted to take you inside the WHO mission to Wuhan in 2021 that I reconstructed by interviewing several members of the international team.
They lend me their eyes and ears so I can share their story with you:
Chapter 6: The Vibe Shift
“I thought to myself, you could not script a better place to have an outbreak”
Dominic Dwyer, University of Sidney
and member of the WHO mission to Wuhan
“That is the missing piece; they could have traced the animals…
Why did they step away from following up on that?”
Marion Koopmans, Erasmus University Medical Center and member of the WHO mission to Wuhan
“If people trust, they trust. If they don’t trust, they don’t…
So we just do our job and leave everything on the side… to the times.”
Shi Zhengli, Wuhan Institute of Virology
Heavy breaths followed a claustrophobic chase around the hotel room. Peter Daszak was doing his workout run from the showers through the bedroom to the antechamber and back, again and again and again. The Chinese hosts in Wuhan had placed him in quarantine for two weeks, and the pressure, isolation, and restrictions were difficult to deal with at times. He was an outdoor person. Twice daily, a team in full hazmat gear would knock on his door to take his temperature. “It really makes you feel dirty. Contagious,” he remembered thinking. He was not the only one.
Marion Koopmans was two rooms away. “It was amazing; they were so strict. I really thought, ‘Okay, this is how plague victims must have felt.’ You really felt like contaminated waste, almost.” She showed me photos she’d taken at the time. “It’s dystopia; they have made a plastic corridor for us.” Plastic sheeting completely covered the hallway from top to bottom. They were sampled as per instructions: 5-second swabs and not a millisecond less. Everyone was suited up except them. Warning signs and restriction bands were everywhere. China had been COVID-free for months. She just hoped she would not get a fever from anything else because it was not clear what would happen if she did. And yet, they, along with eight other international experts, were finally there, where it all happened. “We had been asked before to be quiet about where we would go before,” she laughed, “then we landed in China and had an escort everywhere and a charade of media following us.”
Peter Daszak and Marion Koopmans were two obvious scientists to reach out to when the WHO was assembling a mission to Wuhan in January 2021. Peter, the British zoologist, and head of the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, had worked for decades on understanding viral spillover from bats, identified the origin of SARS with Shi Zhengli from WIV, and worked together with various emergent disease collaborators all over the world. He would be on the WHO’s animal and environment working group, trying to make sense of what happened at the Huanan market.
I did not particularly want to serve. It irritated me. My big grant was canceled by Trump, and we went through months and months of misery. And I thought, “Why the hell should I help WHO? Doing the work that we should be doing for them?” That just seemed cruel, and then I am asked to volunteer for them?
On the phone, he told Peter Karim Ben Embarek, who had assembled the mission, that he didn’t want to do it. On top of that, his participation would invite terrible political attacks on the WHO. Embarek just replied, “What’s new?” The WHO has been under attack on a daily basis; he naively believed it wouldn’t matter. Then, the WHO mission chief reiterated the enormous significance this work would have for the world. After some back and forth, Peter said that he would be available to the group, but he did not want to do fieldwork. “Ben said okay, but he did not take this as an answer; he kind of treated me like I was on the team.” Peter shrugged at how he ended up on the mission. The WHO team knew what they were doing and why they wanted him. “They wanted access to Chinese scientists, not just [because of] the lab issue, but because George Gao and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were investigating the outbreak… so the WHO needed somebody close to them.” Reports suggested that Beijing had indicated he would be a good person to have on the team. As best I can tell from Embarek’s comments, the suggestion came from Shi Zhengli herself. “It’s obvious if you got a researcher who you’ve been working with for 20 years who has not ripped you off, who had been honest with them,” Peter explained the likely rationale. It is worth retelling how Peter came to be on the WHO team because many conspiracy theorists claim that he inserted himself purposefully to aid in a possible cover-up. His private email records with Ben Embarek tell a much different story: one of hesitation and duty. Until October 2020, he still did not want to go to Wuhan.
It was only on our first call when I saw the list that I had to begin to consider it. Fabian Leendertz was there, and a bunch of other people I had heard about. It was a very impressive team. Marion Koopmans was there too, and she is fantastic.
After that first video call, he decided to commit to the mission.
In the end, you just get carried over by the feeling of duty. This is what a scientist is supposed to do. If the outbreak of a global pandemic happens to be from a virus family you have been working on for years in the place you have been working, probably from the animals you have been working with, of course you should be sitting on that committee, trying to do everything you can.
The Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, who was scanning me with a gazing look behind sharp spectacles and white, spiky hair as she listened in on our conversation, agreed with that sentiment. She has investigated countless outbreaks in her career. She had started with noroviruses, hepatitis A virus, bird flu, and arboviruses. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, she was responsible for the deployment of mobile laboratories in Liberia and Sierra Leone. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone more knowledgeable and experienced to study novel outbreaks. She was very quick and to the point. “Every virus, and with it every outbreak, is different,” she explained. However, “with every spillover, you have a couple of key questions.” Hospital records, patient samples, and molecular and sampling data tend to be spread out over multiple locations, times, and people. Her job was to make sense of it. For her, the WHO reaching out and wanting her on the team was “the honor of a lifetime.” She did not hesitate to say yes.
“I was leading the molecular epidemiology interaction. That collaboration actually was nice." She lauded her team and the Chinese collaborators. They basically had to figure out, from all the available data, which person, which genomic sequence, and what time. Putting that puzzle into place was challenging. The team made recommendations for analysis, and the Chinese side actually had scientists performing the work in real-time. “I think this group was maybe the least political because what you could do with genomics was not clear yet,” she laughed wholeheartedly. Indeed, the early epidemiologically linked sequences her team helped to establish and verify would hold incredibly important clues to the virus’s origin.
She was not a fan of the simple narrative that took hold that the Chinese were not sharing data with them. “Yes, there can be more transparency, but look at all that was shared.” She continued, “It was remarkable. There were no agreements in place. If somebody came to us and said, ‘Give us all your hospital and patient data,’ there is no way this would work.” Yet, as she says, the Chinese scientists tried hard to make much of it work.
That does not mean everything went smoothly, either. The WHO mission had two delegations: one of international scientists and one of Chinese scientists. The latter was constantly monitored and assisted by members of State Security, Foreign Affairs, and translators. “It was clear it is going to be this China-style process—you have these meetings where there is the director’s director, the director, the subdirector, and blah-blah—and everybody has to say something, and only then can you get to business.” Marion rolled her eyes. Working day and night analyzing data and being on group calls and meetings while in quarantine had been a strain, but their schedule afterward would not be much easier. The first two days out of quarantine, January 29th and 30th, they visited the Xinhua Hospital to interview doctors and staff and learn about patients.
There was the obligatory political visit to the “Anti-Epidemic Exhibition Hall,” a memorial to the “heroic” actions of Chinese authorities in defeating the virus in Wuhan. Like in my interview with George Gao from the Chinese CDC, their Chinese hosts felt it was incredibly important to stress to foreigners how well they handled the outbreak. Peter Daszak showed me some footage he shot with his phone, and it was every bit as red communist propaganda as one might imagine. Life-size statues of doctors in various poses, heroic background music, and testimonies running on screens about the greatness of the leaders winning the war against the virus. Not exactly subtle. However, he still found it to be “really moving.” That was the point. The Chinese authorities wanted to convince the WHO mission, as well as the world, of a different perspective on the outbreak. Not of failure, blame, and death, but of heroic strife, folk bravery, and overcoming the odds. China had been COVID-free for many months, while the US and other countries were suffocated by the virus. Doesn’t that show Chinese superiority?
Any hubris that they might have signaled fell short of reality when the WHO team arrived at the next stop.
On January 31, 2021, more than a year after the outbreak emerged from there, the WHO mission finally visited the Huanan seafood market.
“You walk into a dark hall; it is smelly. It still had white patches of disinfectant powder. It was eerie, like ground zero.”
Marion Koopmans lent me her eyes for this visit. She found it really impressive to be there. “There were these assumptions that, oh, this was a very modern market… This idea went out the window fast,” she elaborated.
“This was a wet market like any other I have ever been to,” Peter Daszak concurred. It had a mix of seafood, vegetables, restaurants, and live animals, all “stacked on top of each other; cages, freezers, [and] tools to move or process animals.” It was not that different from many other wet markets in China and Southeast Asia. Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist from Australia, also elaborated on his experiences. “I thought to myself, you could not script a better place to have an outbreak.” He had been part of the WHO team that investigated the first SARS outbreak in 2003. “Dark tunnels, open drains, cages, people’s… you know. You could see sleeping quarters next, or a perfect place to start an outbreak of anything; doesn’t matter whether it’s a virus or salmonella or whatever.”
The international scientists were allowed to go around by themselves. Marion was still taken in by the experience. “To see how messy the place was. There was an open sewer channel with stuff floating through there.” In wet markets where animals are handled, they are often butchered alive in front of the customers by skilled vendors. The open sewage is for the animal guts that splash on the floor; they just get swept into the sewer. “Sometimes stray cats have a go at it,” Peter offered as an amusing anecdote.
The market had been shut down and decontaminated before the arrival of scientists from the Chinese CDC. The CDC investigators found a hastily abandoned place with no live animals, stocks of frozen food, and few vendors from which to take testimony. Yet that does not mean Chinese scientists didn’t try to figure out what happened.
“People who had done the environmental sampling showed us what they did, what they moved, and it really gives a feel for the place,” Marion Koopmans explained. It was more or less a standard outbreak investigation for the samplers. “Of course, they should have collected and sampled animals; that was a missed opportunity. But the message was that the animals were not there,” she lamented the lost chance. It was an obvious falsehood because everybody involved knew that live mammals, including certain wildlife without the necessary permits, were sold at that market. Peter Daszak elaborated on the “logic” presented by their Chinese counterparts:
Look, wildlife trade is often illegal in China for certain protected species. Certainly without the right permits. If something is illegal in China, it is not happening in China, according to the authorities, because it is illegal. So officially, there was no illegal wildlife at the Huanan market, because that would have been illegal.
But does that logic even hold? At the time of the WHO work, Peter Daszak had some of his staff, including those with fluent Mandarin, check the city, provincial and federal laws. None of them would make trading live mammals of the type that carry coronaviruses illegal. The next day he argued with the Chinese delegation for over 19 hours over the draft of the animal section of the WHO report which he drafted. Despite his repeated requests that the Chinese team cite the law that would have made selling live mammals illegal, no law was ever shown.
He had also been trying hard to get photographic evidence of possible wildlife at the Huanan market accepted by the Chinese counterparts but to no avail. They told him the photos were “unverifiable,” despite their origin being from Chinese social media in December 2019 and the floor tile pattern in the photos matching the floor tiles of the Huanan market. Professor Eddie Holmes, who visited the Huanan market in 2014, also had photographic evidence of SARS-susceptible illegal wildlife locked in the dark metal cages on top of the same checkered floor tiles they had just visited. “I offered… to call Eddie Holmes and verify with him,” Peter explained. But the authorities did not want to hear it. A dispute broke out. “Really argy-bargy here in Wuhan,” Dominic Dwyer, the medical virologist from Down Under, would write in best Australian fashion to his countryman, Edward Holmes, at the time. The international team was fighting hard to get the Chinese scientists to acknowledge that live wild mammals had been sold at the market. “The head Chinese guy said your photos might be synthesized,” he informed Eddie about the ridiculous infighting over something so trivial. Everyone knew that these animals had been there. But in the end, the hands of their Chinese counterparts were bound; they were not to admit anything untoward had happened at the market. “There were no illegal animals when we came,” the Wuhan CDC investigators repeated again and again.
In a narrow sense, I guess that simple retreat was likely true. The animals were gone by the time investigators arrived. “There has been a one-day notice period for merchants to remove them a day before the Wuhan CDC came,” Marion reiterated a rumor I have heard multiple times, although independent substantiation of who gave the notice has been hard to come by. Peter blames the corrupt manager of the market, who told the vendors that the national CDC was going to arrive. “I had asked this guy twenty times whether there were live mammals sold at the market. He lied twenty times.” Back in the last days of 2019, the Huanan market manager had to be notified in advance by the Wuhan CDC and was likely aware of their imminent plans for a market visit. “He probably told the vendors to clean up and get rid of everything,” Peter speculated. Some scientists assumed the warning to vendors came from within the Wuhan CDC itself. Others suggested that social networks relayed the message of an imminent inspection to get vendors to move or cull their animals. After all, clinicians already suggested the market link to the new outbreak on December 27, 2019, and rumors of another SARS linked to wildlife also spread on social media. Yet another set of possibilities are random market checks in December that might have triggered a clear-out of animals. The Associated Press reported about a recording of a confidential WHO meeting that the local authorities had independently visited the market for a spot check on December 25th, before the virus was even sequenced; albeit this date was likely a human mix-up between Christmas and New Year.
Irrespective of who or what told or warned the merchants to remove their animals by December 31st 2019, multiple lines of evidence support the presence of SARS-CoV-2-susceptible mammals until late December at the Huanan market. By the time George Gao’s national CDC arrived, these mammals were gone—and thus were never tested. “That is the missing piece; they could have traced the animals,” Marion lamented. “Why did they step away from following up on that?” To her, it would have been the obvious thing to do. But for Chinese scientists, this course of action had not necessarily been a politically desired one.
As we heard from Alice Hughes, most likely the vendors and wildlife were not tracked by the authorities because they wanted Chinese scientists to find a blameless reason for an outbreak that increasingly resembled the original SARS. Given the emerging facts, that option quickly became untenable. Unbeknownst to the WHO, in early 2019, “multiple vendors at the Huanan market had been fined for selling live animals by the local forestry, market supervision, and quarantine [AQSIQ] authorities,” the freelance journalist Michael Standaert, who was in Wuhan shortly after the outbreak checking official records, would later find out. He wrote:
These are minimal, slap on the wrist fines. The authorities giving out the fines would have been aware of the continuous sales of these and other animals, especially forestry bureau officials. Their office was only a few hundred meters west of these stalls.
Independent Chinese researchers Xiao Xiao and Zhao-Min Zhou from the Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, would publish a study in Scientific Reports shortly after the WHO mission. By chance, they had surveyed the Huanan market between May 2017 and November 2019 for a project on tick-borne diseases following an earlier outbreak in Hubei in 2010. They surveyed 17 shops in Wuhan, seven of which were at the Huanan market, and found that over 30,000 live animals had been sold. They also noted:
Almost all animals were sold alive, caged, stacked and in poor condition. Most stores offered butchering services, done on site, with considerable implications for food hygiene and animal welfare. Approximately 30% of individuals from 6 mammal species inspected had suffered wounds from gunshots or traps, implying illegal wild harvesting. [...] None of the 17 shops posted an origin certificate or quarantine certificate, so all wildlife trade was fundamentally illegal.
To sum up what we know today, from as early as 2014, when Eddie Holmes visited the market, to at least the end of 2019, we know with certainty that there was risky wildlife activity occurring at the market, with at least part of it likely illegal. The local authorities were keenly aware of it but decided to turn a blind eye, which sounded reckless but should not surprise us. The wildlife trade is a 73-billion-dollar industry in China and is culturally accepted by the population. With the right permissions, most wildlife trade is not illegal, even for rather exotic animals. Pre-pandemic sales activities at the Huanan market were not that unusual for authorities. Huanan was just the largest of four similar markets in the same city, and it sold wild animals that might not have undergone thorough source vetting or had vendors whose products did not always fully align with prevailing legal permissions. Everyone can understand this messy human reality. Putting the onus solely on the government to stop any infringements or blaming them for a failure to prevent illegal trade completely seems to follow unreasonable expectations and hindsight bias. No government has the power to completely prevent illegal activities. Offering transparency about wildlife activities and animals at the market, maybe paired with some lax local enforcement to get rid of it, seemed like a small concession to make for any government.
Yet by January 2021, Beijing had no interest in giving even that tiny admission of responsibility, certainly not after many months of blame games from the Trump administration. Especially when the Trump administration started to demand reparations for the pandemic from China in June of 2020, even admitting any bat-to-wildlife-related outbreak became unthinkable in Beijing. Geopolitics had taken over, and thus Beijing fought tooth and nail to deny any susceptible wildlife—illegal or not—had been there. Their new official position was “the virus came from outside of China.” Under the upcoming auspices of the WHO investigation, Chinese scientists found themselves cornered into a position where, really, any alternative scientific theory was desired by the higher-ups. They wanted a blameless reason for how the virus might have come to the market. In preparatory calls with WHO members a couple of months before the Wuhan mission, they had already converged on the idea that the virus did not spill over via any illegal wildlife trade but via various imported cold-chain products. A scientifically flimsy but possible hypothesis, and a politically desired one. If this theory were true, it would make the Huanan market just the first innocent victim of the virus coming from far away instead of being ground zero, with the exotic and live mammalian wildlife trade potentially fostering its maturation and emergence. This cold-chain narrative became the official scientific story during the first call with the international team.
“Right then and there, I knew they were going to make our life difficult"
Peter Daszak remembered. To support their cold-chain assertions, Chinese scientists performed studies showing how the virus could persist in the cold and remain infectious for days on frozen products like fish. Even Zhengli had soaked chicken, pork, and beef meat in virus culture supernatant and stored it in the freezer to sample every month. Even 3 years later, those meat samples still test positive, she told me. George Gao also led a study that provided some data that aquatic animals, including whales, might have ACE2 receptors susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection. “So, who is really to say how the virus came to the market?” he asked me. While some leftover frozen animal carcasses tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, environmental samples taken from leftover fish at the Huanan market were contaminated with the virus. The latter is not surprising, given that the market was awash in virus particles from the outbreak before all open surfaces were sprayed down for decontamination. When environmental sampling was performed—spread out over multiple weeks in January 2020—multiple places, including those associated with cold chain products, they found that some viral particles persisted there to nobodies surprise. This is not to say the cold-chain theory was completely baseless per se. In fairness to the sanity of the Chinese scientists, they traced a different SARS-CoV-2 outbreak back to supermarkets via cold chain products imported from outside China after China locked down and enforced its Zero-COVID strategy. So, from a possibility standpoint, the cold-chain narrative cannot be discarded. Plausibility is another question. The cold-chain-related outbreak occurred at a time when the virus had already infected much of the world, and was subsequently on many important products.
However, for the cold-chain theory to be true, the virus needed to get on those frozen products somewhere. This would require a gigantic outbreak of COVID somewhere else that went unnoticed, and it still fails to explain why the first cases would show up at the Huanan market and nowhere else, nor does it account for a host of other correlating lines of phylogenetic, epidemiological, and geographic evidence pointing to the market and wildlife. Chinese scientists were not oblivious to these gaps in their story, but at the moment, the international scientists were not able to disprove the cold-chain theory, which was good enough for Beijing. They really needed the blameless cold-chain alternative to the unwelcome wildlife theory to save face and escape demands for culpability.
Peter Daszak, as part of the environmental and animal team, felt the Chinese pushback on the wildlife trade the most. “We came here almost as diplomats,” he once said, trying to explain how he understood his role. They tried everything they could to get their Chinese counterparts to agree with them. He asserted, “They knew that we knew that they knew this was BS, but there was not much to be done.” Marion Koopmans also understood that some of these cold-chain arguments were flimsy and motivated but took it very pragmatically. “To me, the solution was to stick to what I know and can investigate,” she explained.
They didn’t get to spend more time at the market because the next days were fully booked with visits to the Hubei Provincial CDC, the Wuhan CDC, and the Animal CDC, followed by a visit to the Wuhan Blood Center. In a megacity of over 11 million, there were a lot of labs and researchers involved in the response, after all. Again, the idea was to interview scientists, collect data, and give recommendations for further studies. “We asked them all sorts of questions, such as how did they handle the samples, what samples they took, because part of our strategy was to get those samples to be re-tested in other labs, maybe even in the West.” They also recommended testing samples in the blood bank to see if, in the months leading up to the outbreak, any remnants of SARS-CoV-2 infections could be discerned. This would be informative for both the timing of the outbreak and whether the virus had been circulating for a long time, unnoticed, before it caused a lot of sickness around the Huanan market. Based on these recommendations and contrary to the increasing geopolitical tensions, that lab work was indeed performed and later presented to SAGO, another WHO expert body tasked with understanding the origins of the pandemic. The blood bank study showed that there were no early cases detected in over 34,000 pre-pandemic samples leading up to December, arguing against any asymptomatic or silent spread much before the market-centered outbreak. Yet almost no raw data or samples have been shared with international scientists.
“Clearly, from the get-go, Beijing did not want this to happen. They did not want an investigation, international people to come”
Peter Daszak explained. Not to the market, not to the various CDC offices, and not to WIV. “At first, they said the lab would be impossible,” Peter Daszak elaborated, “but then we got it to happen; I got it to happen.” Dr. Embarek had been adamant that they could not go all the way to Wuhan and not visit Zhengli’s lab, and he knew he could leverage Peter to get it done. They strategized. “What do you want me to do, call Zhengli?” he offered. When he called Zhengli, she had no objections to her lab being visited. But how to get the authorities on board? “My idea was to get her to give a scientific seminar. Marion suggested they all do to make it a research seminar day while we were still on lockdown. Marion gave a talk; I gave a talk; Zhengli did too.” They quietly held the seminar with all WHO and Chinese scientists involved while in quarantine at the Wuhan hotel. It softened things up and built trust. Ultimately, it got them access to the lab a week later.
I personally find this little snippet fascinating; it shows how science can be a tool for diplomacy. Even during the height of the Cold War, scientific collaborations were the channels that often bridged seemingly insurmountable geopolitical chasms. In the end, Peter’s idea and the WHO team succeeded where belligerent grandstanding and virtuous posturing from Western actors failed. They got access to the lab.
On February 3rd, the WHO mission visited the WIV. In this much-anticipated event, reporters who had laid siege to the academic institute began chasing the WHO mission cars all along the street. Once inside, the international team interviewed scientists and took a tour, including the BSL-4 labs. Discussions were in the usual setup, however: a big room with their Chinese counterparts and an entourage of translators. They were allowed to ask ad hoc questions of Shi Zhengli and other staff, including the director of the Institute. “We asked them nasty questions about how they do their work, what protections they use, what viruses they had, what experiments they did,” Peter Daszak recounted.
They also inquired about rumors. “We asked them why they took down the database. What about these rumors of a missing person? What about the three scientists who were supposedly hospitalized?” According to the prevailing conspiratorial narratives, Zhengli had allegedly taken down her virus database as part of a cover-up. In addition, one of her students named Huang Yanling had supposedly gone missing from her lab website, possibly “taken care of” to shut her up. Other allegations had circulated, including one about three sick workers at the large institute potentially being patients zero of the outbreak. Despite these insinuations and their implications, the answers the WHO team got from Zhengli were quite candid. On the database, she admitted that it just never worked that well. “We took it down to make it better and more user-friendly. And then, when we put it back on, they were hacking us, so we had to take it back down again.” Peter tried to recollect the gist of it. On Huang Yanling, “she just moved to a different province and did not want to be contacted.” That's why they took down her profile from the lab website. Regarding the sick workers, she said that all team members had been tested for COVID antibodies in the spring, and all tested negative. “We had the chance to ask unscripted questions; we could catch them in a lie,” Peter said. “The answers seemed to be straightforward and not coordinated.”
Beijing did not admit to this officially, but Zhengli’s lab had been audited twice in the spring of 2020, by both WIV people who were concerned it might have come from their lab and by the Chinese authorities. “Of course, they were, you know, and they were obviously horrified that something could have happened,” Dominic Dwyer explained. “Well, tell me what you did about investigating your staff. Did you collect blood?” he asked them. They did blood tests, and they were all negative. They monitored staff health. They explained the procedures in the lab, and they had a good biosafety lab built by the French.
“We couldn’t find any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was in the lab before the outbreak. They only started culturing after the outbreak started”
Dominic Dwyer said. He added, “They generally published as quickly as they could with anything, you know. So why would they hide that they had SARS-CoV-2?” Before the pandemic, there would have been no need to do so. Research projects are iterative; they take years, and “generally laboratory accidents happen when you're culturing,” which makes the idea of hidden or secret viruses even more untenable.
There was no indication that Zhengli’s lab had anything to do with the outbreak. “All the coronavirus scientists felt pressure, not only me. At this point, the only thing you can do is show your work to the people who want to know.” Zhengli also told me about this stressful period when her lab was under intense scrutiny by authorities in 2020.
“They checked everything. Electronic records, sequences, experiments. We were transparent; we had nothing to fear.”
Since then, her lab has been free to operate. By the time the Wuhan mission had arrived, Zhengli was no longer treated as if under suspicion by Chinese authorities and thus was free to talk. The opposite was happening in the West, where the default assumption was that she couldn’t be trusted no matter what.
That being said, a deeper investigation into her statements always seemed to corroborate, rather than refute, her story. For example, records of her database server activities have been uncovered, showing not only that the database was not taken offline in September 2019—as conspiracy theories still allege to this day—but that it was online sporadically until February 2020, when hacking attempts finally brought it down. “There had been thousands of hacking attempts since the beginning of the pandemic,” Chinese journalist Jane Qiu would learn from Zhengli, independent of the WHO mission. “The IT managers were really worried somebody might sabotage the databases or, worse, implant virus sequences for malicious intent,” Zhengli had said. So, I guess it was no mystery why they never brought it back online again.
But what happened to Huang, Zhengli’s student? Some of the Western press had confidently declared Huang “COVID-19 patient zero” and “missing,” but the technician had left the lab years earlier after graduation to work for a biology company in Sichuan Province. Chinese journalists quickly traced her whereabouts in 2020; she was doing fine, and they even got a statement from her company that she was never sick or anything suspicious.
Independent people and facts seemed to corroborate every explanation offered by Zhengli. Overall, I found nothing suspicious about Zhengli’s lab or actions, and she also did not culture any secret viruses nor hide them in her database. We know this, again independently, because she was working on a publication pre-pandemic that would contain sequences from all the SARS-related coronaviruses she ever sequenced. The study came out in the middle of 2020, despite strong pushback from Chinese authorities, and there was no suspicious viral cousin closer than RaTG13 in that set, confirming that she did not possess anything that could have been transformed into SARS-CoV-2. Zhengli had submitted the first draft of that paper pre-pandemic—before there might be an incentive to hide or cover up sequences—and her collaborators on that study did not observe any changes, removals, or similar alterations made between the first version and final publication. “The real scientists in the field, they trust me,” Zhengli gave for consideration. “I attended a lot of meetings before COVID-19. I discussed my unpublished work with a lot of scientists. They know everything from my lab.”
These facts of academic minutiae should make us confident she was not withholding any pertinent sequences and certainly not engaged in secret culturing programs. Unless all her collaborators, many of whom weren’t even Chinese, were also in on the cover-up. Which is, of course, what conspiracy theorists would immediately allege after she was allowed to publish all her sequences in mid-2020. But allegations of such a broad international cover-up are unrealistic, to say the least. “If people trust, they trust. If they don’t trust, they don’t,” Zhengli sounded resigned today. For most of 2020, she had been furious; it was taxing on her. “So, I said okay. I gave up pursuing every person to trust me. So, we just do our job and leave everything on the side… to the times,” she waved her hand in a dismissive motion to the side.
Irrespective of trust, in 2022, almost incontrovertible proof of the veracity of her words arrived when a set of embargoed sequences from 2018, belonging to a forgotten manuscript, appeared on a Western database. A student had uploaded them with a standard embargo of 4 years, but the paper was never accepted by a journal, so the principal investigators forgot, and the student moved on without removing the sequences. In 2022, that lucky oversight suddenly unlocked sequencing samples from 2018, showing that at this time, Zhengli’s work focused exclusively on SARS-CoV-1-related viruses, again, not RaTG13 or any other known or unknown SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses. Exactly like she told everybody.
But merely being innocent is unfortunately a poor excuse when the world is looking for somebody to blame. Far too many continue to assert, without any basis, that Zhengli must be lying about a lot of things, regardless of how much evidence is presented to the contrary. To this day, Zhengli has not given a reason to doubt her words, but because she is a Chinese researcher in mainland China, the prevailing assumption in the West seems to be that she is not to be trusted, no matter what.
This does not imply that we should not be suspicious of Chinese authorities and politicians trying to control the narrative. Take the WHO mission, where opaque Chinese politics and a lack of transparency often seeded justified distrust, no matter if it was about market animals or what happened to staff at the lab. The panel discussion got a bit more heated with the director of WIV—a communist party member, in contrast to Zhengli, who is not—when it came to rumors about the three sick WIV staffers. Just a week before, the Trump administration’s State Department put out a statement claiming intelligence reports found three workers being hospitalized in late 2019; the implication was that this proved that WIV had started the pandemic. Because of these accusations in the news cycle, the topic was highly sensitive. The WHO members really ruffled some feathers, just raising the subject. Rumbling went through the back desks. The director, Wang Yanyi, and the assembly of their Chinese scientists with the lead negotiator, Liang Wannian, claimed that “nobody got sick at the WIV” in that period. This caused Thea Fisher—Professor in Public Health, Virus Infections, and Epidemics from the Nordsjællands Hospital in Denmark—and John Watson, an epidemiologist and public health researcher from the UK, to become quite enraged. “Are you seriously saying that, during the peak of flu season, no one would have gotten sick at all?” WIV is a big institute with many people; epidemiologically, this did not make sense. “I just find that very, very hard to believe,” they said. Some more rumbling ensued. “But those guys were smooth,” Peter Daszak explained. Especially the head of the Chinese delegation, Prof. Liang Wannian, the architect of the Zero-COVID strategy, was a seasoned politician. “He clarified that people may have gotten the flu, but then they would just not come into work. But nobody from the lab was hospitalized,” unlike Trump’s State Department memo suggested.
Again, this did not mean that nobody from WIV ever visited a hospital in the autumn of 2019. In China, it is common to visit a hospital as an outpatient, much like someone would go to a house doctor or general practitioner in other countries. There is a difference between being hospitalized and just visiting a doctor in the hospital. After that heated exchange, the mission’s goodwill began to wane. Asked by the WHO scientists whether WIV has been audited in response to various conspiracy theories, they deflected by saying that annual external audits were routinely conducted. A contradiction to what Zhengli had told Peter Daszak—that her lab had indeed been under intense scrutiny. Beijing seemingly did not want to admit that a laboratory leak was a real possibility they themselves had considered. Geopolitically and domestically, they now preferred to project the image that there was never any concern that the virus could have come from the lab.
“It’s too political,” Zhengli had told Peter. He, of course, had already observed that at the time of the audit in late spring 2020, Zhengli and her lab had been under immense pressure. The reality was that, at the time, Beijing was very worried the virus came from WIV, and they not only had everybody serologically tested for COVID antibodies—all negative—but they also investigated the clinical records of all staffers. Nothing to point to COVID, but it was likely that some workers had visited a doctor as an outpatient in the hospital for unrelated illnesses back in 2019. Maybe the US spy agencies picked up those records. Again, the Chinese delegation did not admit to any of it. The WHO epidemiologists would not have found outpatient visits suspicious or indicative of anything, but geopolitically, Beijing probably correctly expected that it was a hard nuance to make on the world stage. It was just one of those things that superficially looked too damning. Maybe that’s why the topic became so sensitive.
The WHO mission report is on record stating that no suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 were seen by PCR, and antibody testing of all WIV staff was negative. That they had been tested thoroughly and nobody was found exposed is not unusual or suspicious either. One has to consider that China’s virus surveillance and contact tracing during the outbreak were very strict, irrespective of institute affiliation. For example, it had been found that all staff from both the provincial Hubei CDC and the animal CDC tested negative in that period. Only one of the Wuhan CDC’s staff members was confirmed SARS-CoV-2 seropositive after infection due to family cluster transmission. All other staff had tested negative as well. The point of the dramatic lockdown and the Zero-COVID strategy after had been to spare most citizens an infection.
A day after the heated exchanges at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the WHO mission visited the Jian Xin Yuan Community Centre, a place for senior and elderly citizens that saw 19 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 on January 24, 2020. They were to hear testimony from survivors. It was moving, as well as highlighting the traumatic impact of the pandemic on the elderly. After that, they had some more days of expert interviews conducted at their hotel from the Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan Blood Center, and Wuhan Central Hospital. There were multiple days of discussions among themselves and with their Chinese counterparts for a joint statement and preparation of a summary report. The WHO members left China feeling that they had made some good progress and were hopeful to continue the work in the upcoming months and maybe even years.
By most standard measures, the WHO mission was pretty successful. First, it collected a large body of verified evidence despite political interference from an authoritarian country. The evidence allowed researchers to make succinct recommendations for further work and good estimates about the likely origin of the virus. Second, it was a diplomatic win, bringing together an international team of Chinese scientists as well as providing a basis for further data sharing and collaboration. Third, it provided valuable lessons on how to set up future outbreak investigations. “An outbreak not studied is an outbreak wasted,” Marion Koopmans would say. “We always went in with the idea that this is Step One.” Their goal for this mission was to put all the available information together, which was already a large chunk of work. “I never expected for a second we [would] come out with full answers, only to focus our knowledge and give recommendations.”
Yet from the start, the WHO mission had been viewed with skepticism by the US, believing that it was nothing more than a guided tour where the Chinese only showed the international members what they were allowed to see. A farce doomed to fail before it was even underway. While the WHO members and other scientists were getting ready for a year-long and arduous scientific investigation, the world was dissatisfied with not getting immediate answers. Hearing that the WHO mission had not definitively identified the origin of COVID, interest in the topic began to spike anew.
Everybody, including citizens, journalists, politicians, and even some scientists, craved a more compelling explanation of where this virus came from. They started looking for clues elsewhere. Many were unaware that their desire for a more emotionally satisfying answer would drive them into an information ecosystem that sought to blame not only some foreign virologists, but science itself, for the pandemic…
[the chapter continues in the book, explaining what led to the “vibe shift” of public sentiment in 2021. To protect myself from retaliation, this book excerpt in English has to stop here]
More information on the book can be found here: www.lab-leak-fever.com
DE - “Das Laborfieber”, released as paperback and ebook April 20th
EN - “Lab Leak Fever”, currently unavailable, trying to find a courageous publisher
If you have any questions, I will be doing a live stream on Twitch on Saturday, 4pm CET. Feel free to come to chat or write your questions in the reply and I will answer them in the stream.