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.
On March 4, 2023, while doing unrelated research, Dr. Florence Débarre randomly came across a new set of FASTQ files (a text file of nucleotide base sequences) on the GISAID database. Curious, she started investigating. Less than two weeks later, another viral information cascade would ignite the lab leak media universe ablaze again. This time, instead of the usual manufactured pseudo-events and trope-laden stories, a highly relevant scientific discovery supercharged its velocity and exploded in virality. A panic set in within the lab leak community; they were losing control over their viral narrative.
Like Stuart Neil, Alex Crits-Christoph, Michael Worobey, and many others, Dr. Florence Débarre, a French theoretician in evolutionary biology, had started out being very open to lab-leak ideas, lauding the efforts and engaging regularly with DRASTIC, Alina Chan, Jesse Bloom, and other lab leak proponents for much of 2021 after the theory went mainstream. She wrote that it is “actually good scientific practice to explore different hypotheses” in response to criticism of Bloom et al.’s Science letter, the one that caused so much grief between Mike Worobey and Kristian Andersen.
Florence, an extremely careful and meticulous researcher, had the habit of following up on certain lab leak ideas with investigative rigor. For example, she clarified with a web activity monitoring website that Shi Zhengli’s database of viral sequences “was not suspiciously taken down in September” to hide any sequences. It turns out the database first came online in April of the same year and never worked very well, dropping offline sporadically for months. It remained somewhat accessible until Feb. 2020, when hacking attempts finally stopped WIV researchers from putting it back online for fear of manipulation. Just as Shi Zhengli explained and Jane Qiu reported.
Over the years, Florence has single-handedly cleared up about two dozen such falsehoods that the lab leak conspiracy myth cottage industry had made into the lore if my cursory counting is correct. She calls these fact-checks “niche threads” on Twitter, but they dismantled, debunked, and destroyed many lab leak talking points, like death by a thousand cuts.
“The lab leak hypothesis survives in part because of poor fact-checking in the media,” she tweeted to explain why she followed up on all these circumstantial niche talking points. However, Florence did not have it out just for lab leakers; the zoonati would face the same type of scrutiny. Peter Daszak, for example, told me that Florence wrote to him countless times to fact-check statements he made in the past, asking whether he had supportive evidence and similar. He wasn’t alone; when Florence wants to get to the bottom of something, she becomes very tenacious and will not stop until she separates fact from fiction.
For that, she has earned the respect of fellow debunkers and scientists and, unsurprisingly, has become another arch-villain to the lab leak community. This is because lab leak ideas and talking points tended to fall apart under her scrutiny, while points raised in favor of zoonotic spillover tended to hold up. Reality, on average, is easier to substantiate than made-up fiction. For her independent efforts, the female researcher has been not only severely harassed, smeared, and discredited like the rest of the zoonati she is now lumped in with but also encountered despicable misogynistic insults, stalking, and threats of violence. A high price for somebody who is an extremely private person by nature and avoids the spotlight.
When Florence realized in early March 2023 that the new GSAID files she found were metagenomic data from environmental samples of the Huanan seafood market, which Chinese authors from Dr. George Gao’s CDC team had uploaded, she reached out to the Huanan market paper authors around Mike Worobey and Kristian Andersen. They, in turn, immediately started frantically downloading the data, which was about 500GB.
“I was pretty convinced that we will probably never see these data,” Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph stated, describing his take on these hectic days and the drama that would follow. “But I have been thinking for over a year what we could do with it if they were ever published,” he laughed about how quickly he reacted. He was the fastest to look at the data. On the same day Florence had reached out, Alex downloaded the metagenomics sequencing data and pretty much worked through the night, looking first at the samples taken from the one corner of the western market where the wildlife stalls had been identified. “I found a full mitochondrial genome of a raccoon dog.” He remembered his excitement over the discovery. “And later that night, I remember bamboo rat and civet popped out as well.” Just as Mike Worobey and his market coauthors had predicted, wild mammals had been at the market, leaving their genetic footprint behind. So, what animals were possibly at the market in late 2019? “The first approach was the mapping to a few possible hosts, quick to see what is in there,” Alex recounted. They wanted to satisfy their curiosity.
The next day, Prof. Eddie Holmes contacted a Chinese scientist, one of the few who tried to keep information channels open. To protect the scientist’s identity, let’s call the person Chen. Chen, whom Eddie described as someone “I trust completely” had previously told him that these metagenomics data had been messy, and they sequenced it multiple times. While not being part of the Chinese CDC, Chen had some insights into the sequencing data created for George Gao’s team. Eddie, opening his emails for me, explained how his first intuition was to talk to Chen and tell him that they saw the data uploaded on GISAID. Chen responded very quickly:
Dear Eddie,
Yes, George [Gao] has asked his colleagues to upload these data. In fact, some of these samples have been sequenced twice or even multiple times. [They] have uploaded all these data, including both SARS-CoV-2 positive and negative samples from the market. You can ask a group member to analyze them independently. I am happy to help if you have any questions.
Best wishes,
[Chen]
That reply had been encouraging to Eddie; Chinese scientists were finally able to share some crucial market data from the preprint they published in 2022. A bit later, Eddie excitedly shared in another email to Chen that they had already found raccoon dog DNA in the environmental samples:
As I’m sure you know, [the] most striking observation - which is of huge importance - is the high abundance of raccoon dog DNA/RNA. [...] So, we can now place susceptible animals exactly at the scene at the right time.
He received no response from Chen after that. None of them did. Alex Crits-Christoph, Mike Worobey, and Kristian Andersen would all write to George Gao and his coauthors about the data, wanting to talk to them and open a collaboration. But radio silence.
Unease set in with the international scientists. Suddenly, “and this was on like day three,” Alex described breathlessly, “the data disappeared from GISAID.” The Chinese authors, or somebody on their behalf, must have asked GISAID to pull it. “That really was pretty spooky, I think. We don’t know exactly what the heck was going through everybody’s mind.”
Everybody tried again desperately to contact George Gao, William Liu, and others who had collected the data. They offered to work together on the analysis. However, the Chinese researchers were no longer willing—or able—to reply. Eddie, Kristian, and Mike thought something had to be done to get the data back online. They contacted WHO, which promptly engaged in a quiet meeting with the Chinese CDC about their meta-transcriptomics data.
On 12 March 2023, some of us met with WHO and some members of SAGO (the WHO-convened Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens) to discuss our observations. On 14 March 2023, the WHO convened a meeting with SAGO where some of us and representatives from CCDC presented our respective results. [...] This meeting constituted one of several efforts to establish a collaborative relationship with our colleagues at CCDC to share data and findings as rapidly as possible. We acknowledge that these circumstances are unusual.
A summary by the authors would be made later. Meanwhile, led by Dr. Florence Débarre, all coauthors were busy analyzing the data and compiling a report for WHO. In another blow, they were all locked out of the GISAID database, which accused them of having breached the terms of use. A scary development.
It was right around this time when journalists learned about the existence of these data and the upcoming report. Alex Crits-Christoph assumed that a member of SAGO leaked the information to journalists, but details remain murky. The press, in turn, started circling the scientists, smelling a scoop. Some asked for comments directly. The cat was out of the bag; many other press requests followed, and some of the scientists felt they had to give some statements.
When the science writer Katherine Wu from The Atlantic reached out to Alex soon after, he tried to keep his statements general but explained candidly the rough outline of what happened. What they downloaded, what they analyzed, and that a raccoon dog was one of the species they found. He told Katherine Wu that she would be able to see more details in the report they are preparing, which was expected to come out soon.
Katherine replied that she was going to publish her story before the report came out. “Oh my God,” Alex recalled. “The rest of the conversation was me telling her that this is a horrible idea.” But according to Alex, the reporter did not want to wait; she “was convinced it was all about the scoop.” In the attention economy, she was under pressure to be first, after all. Jon Cohen, a seasoned journalist from Science who had covered the origin controversy extensively, was informed about their findings too, but “he had the correct understanding that he should only publish after the report came out,” Alex admitted.
On March 16th, just four days before their scientific report came out, Katherine Wu published her scoop in The Atlantic titled “The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” which Alex and others in the team thought was very unfortunate. Such analyses are complex, and more details are needed. Alex had mostly misgivings about the sensationalist headline. He felt the content of the article was factually correct, although some context and caveats should have been applied. “She did learn about the raccoon dogs; that was the only species she heard about,” he explained. “That’s why the article has an overly focus on raccoon dogs… It is not necessarily wrong but incomplete; we have other plausible hosts as well.” Also, the body of evidence surrounding the market was strong before, so the headline framing was misleading, creating the impression that this finding changes everything rather than just adding to the existing body of evidence. Irrespective of these reservations, few expected the waves Katherine Wu’s article would create.
The secrecy and drama surrounding the discovery and takedown of the data, the urgent arrangement of a WHO press meeting, the murmurations about raccoon dogs, and the framing of the scoop from The Atlantic journalist all contributed to the virality of the story. People reacted. Within hours, the journal Science would publish its own article about the report, corroborating the scoop. The dominoes in the media started falling. The New York Times would pick up the Atlantic article on the same day to run its own story about “New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Huanan Market.” Things escalated quickly. The following morning, WHO’s Director General Tedros called an urgent meeting and used it as an opportunity to stand up to China and demand “every piece of data relating to studying the origins of COVID-19 needs to be shared with the international community immediately.” Others joined the chorus.
It seemed that, for once, media attention and news cycle dynamics were working in favor of the scientifically supported zoonotic origin theory, if only to yet again allow amplifiers and leaders to signal their vehement opposition to supposedly Chinese duplicity and Beijing’s cover-up about these animals and data from the market. Renée DiResta argues in her book that virality on social media demands three key ingredients: novelty, familiarity, and repetition. A combination of a novel scientific finding, a familiar trope about Chinese secrecy and intransigence, and a lot of repetition in the press and on the world stage certainly matched that description.
In response, lab leak believers in media, politics, elite circles, and online mobs were pushed into a reactionary role for a few weeks like they never had before. The fear of losing control over the origin narrative and, along with it, their gradually formed network, community, and even parts of their identities and worldviews seduced many of them to throw all caution overboard and go on the offense, outing themselves as science deniers.
“It was a fascinating time because in the two weeks after that [article] and the report, we saw so many things thrown against the wall,” Alex explained about the hectic period. Personal attacks, professional attacks, political attacks, and everything in between were mobilized to hit back at them.
On the raccoon dog findings, reactions varied widely. Matt Ridley claimed that all of this is old news and much ado about nothing. Everyone knew the raccoon dogs were there; the question was whether they were infected. Scarlett, the bioweapon whistleblower, claimed the CCP planted the raccoon dogs as scapegoats, while Yuri Deigin and Dr. Washburne questioned the veracity of the sequencing data and analysis, as well as whether raccoon dogs were even at the market. Either these were Schrödinger’s raccoon dogs, or proponents just picked and chose their version of reality, I guess.
“There was this idea that the human data had been selectively depleted” in those animal samples somehow, making the animal reads feature more prominently, Alex remembered. Pretty ignorant hogwash. Metagenomics sequencing data are incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to fake without it being obvious. Alex had been over this spiel with lab leak proponents multiple times, who over the years alleged RaTG13 was fake, the pangolin virus sequences were fake, and bat viruses like RpYN06 were all just fake and part of the cover-up, even though some of these genomes were discovered before the pandemic.
Next, after years of lab leak proponents calling for independent investigations, of trying to get data out of China, of Sinophobic attacks against the credibility of Chinese researchers, “we had [the same] people telling us we are scooping poor George Gao, doing imperialist science,” Alex chuckled. As if Alex and his collaborators severely wronged some underprivileged Chinese authors by analyzing data they themselves put online on the GISAID database, a platform for sharing genomic data.
“Like come on, it’s the elite public health institution of a major superpower, not some underfunded lab,” Alex rolled his eyes. Indeed, the Chinese authors had been sitting on these data for over three years and had enough time to analyze them, as would soon become apparent. The report to the WHO was not even a paper, so the Chinese authors could still publish their own analysis, which they did shortly after in the journal Nature. In the corresponding paper by Liu et al., the Chinese authors begrudgingly acknowledged the existence of raccoon dogs while moving the goalposts about how others would need to somehow prove the animals were infected first to make any claims about where the virus came from:
Our study confirmed the existence of raccoon dogs, and other potential SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animals, at the market before its closure. However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected. Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out human-to-animal transmission, as the sampling was carried out after the human infection within the market. Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans, or cold-chain products, cannot yet be ruled out.
Notice the evasive tone and pivot to the far-fetched cold-chain hypothesis again that was already used for coloring the results of the WHO mission.
But the harshest attacks were coming, as always, from the usual lab leak commentators. There were these ideas that we “orchestrated The Atlantic to come out before the data” for various malicious purposes, Alex remembered, like preempting any criticism and independent assessment by the lab leak commentators, who had to wait four days for the report of their analysis to come. “I do not know what to make of the new strategy by Proximal Origin authors & friends to start their media campaign even before the preprint (data & methods) are available,” Alina Chan would write in her classic manipulative framing.
Some lab leak proponents more explicitly construed the scoop by a journalist as a fabricated PR stunt orchestrated by the zoonati. “The new natural origin propaganda by The Atlantic is laughable; their source is literally a scientist who helped cover up a lab leak in the first place.” The conservative YouTube show host Saagar Enjeti, who in my opinion relentlessly pushed pro-lab leak propaganda for years, would immediately try to discredit the findings.
Others did not even try to talk science, stating that the allegedly “conflict-ridden” proximal origin authors and friends made stuff up. “Pseudoscientific nonsense. From stooges who have been peddling pseudoscientific nonsense for three years,” Rutgers Professor and radicalized foul-mouthed Richard Ebright would cough up. Political commentator and pundit Nate Silver and NYT columnist Zeynep Tufecki, reminiscent of Katherine Eban’s usual beat, were quick to remind the chattering classes that everything from these “conflicted” authors needed to be taken with a large grain of salt and heightened scrutiny.
Then there was the detail that Mike, Kristian, Eddie, and their coauthors presented their findings to WHO first behind closed doors, which rubbed many people the wrong way. Within the fever pitch of activist mobs and conspiracy theorists, it was touted as an illegitimate act of international foul play. A conspiracy of the highest order.
“There were hundreds of ideas thrown out,” Alex remembered. It was akin to an avalanche of nonsensical and mutually contradictory arguments that were impossible to respond to, aligned only with the purpose of undermining the scientists and their new findings. “Just total panicking and pandemonium. People ostentatiously on the sidelines came out against us,” he recalled about the attacks from surprising sources. All the false equivalency pushers and commentators with large social media platforms, who had built a niche around the convenient idea that “we will never know, so we can blame who our audience wants,” saw their built-up popularity, credibility, or profits threatened. They were all unwilling or unable to accept the new critical data, which once again strongly pointed toward a zoonotic origin of the virus. Everybody was seeking to create or buy into a counternarrative that would stick.
Luckily for them, as we know by now, the infosphere tends to always deliver.
Within weeks, it was Jesse Bloom who finally became the kingmaker of public discourse and provided a resolution to the battle of conflicting counternarratives. “These data do not conclusively prove that animals were infected,” he would explain. He made his own analysis, applying different filters for processing the sequencing reads and finding a correlation of increased SARS-CoV-2 positivity with fish, not mammals. He concluded that, because of the paucity of reads, nothing should really be said about the samples collected in January anyway. A New York Times opinion columnist immediately picked up Jesse’s preprint and used it to scold people to calm down about raccoon dogs in an op-ed that labeled the new findings from Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph and his coauthors nothing short of “bad science that got hyped” in the headline. A scandalous accusation in itself, in my opinion.
In the op-ed, Jesse Bloom was given ample space by the writer to air his personal criticisms about how the sequencing data are not perfect, which is true but hardly unusual. He used a different threshold to filter the data, creating a false anti-correlation between the virus and animal reads. Mere co-detection of viral RNA and animal DNA alone does not prove that the animals were infected, Jesse’s argument would go. Also, there were just so few viral reads in those samples that it would amount to scientific malpractice to make any statements. He did not receive any pushback from the editors, nor were the market authors offered space to refute for balance. Guess journalistic neutrality works differently when the NYT op-ed section wants to push a narrative. Even more unethically, Jesse framing created a strawman about the discovery that others could use to knock down the work publicly. Who knows if the viral sequences in the samples even came from animals? Just like the Chinese authors Liu et al. asked, what if a sick human infected the animals first? What if infected humans just contaminated the environmental swabs? This type of co-detection data was not enough to conclusively prove directionality—that the animals were the ones who brought in and were shedding the virus. This last criticism is narrowly correct but misleading. A strawman to the more nuanced argument Alex and his coauthors were actually advancing.
Their analysis unequivocally proved the existence of these wild animals at the market, just as Worobey’s paper had predicted in 2022. The thrust of their argument was that the animals were there, despite years of denial, and therefore, all the necessary ingredients for a zoonotic spillover were in that market at the time when the outbreak started. All the new evidence uncovered was consistent with what would be expected if the animals were infected. For the totality of available evidence, this missing piece was a homerun finding. There was no more wiggle room around it. SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animal DNA intermingled and was co-detected with viral RNA in environmental swabs taken from stalls where we have past photographic evidence of them being kept there. In other words, every scientific effort to disprove a zoonotic spillover at the Huanan market failed; the market spillover theory remains standing as the most likely hypothesis, if not the only parsimonious hypothesis, that explains how the pandemic started.
Yet, obfuscating that simple scientific reality is the bread and butter of motivated influencers. Jesse’s analysis claimed that the study’s limitations were somehow too severe to draw any conclusion at all about the new data. This prompted lab leak influencers to subtly move the goalposts. They created the false perception that Alex and his coauthors now needed to prove directionality—that they needed to prove the animals were infected first, or their whole work would be worthless. No one dared to acknowledge how neatly the discovery fit and was predicted by the body of evidence we already had for zoonotic spillover at the market.
The hungry media coverage and amplification of Jesse’s criticism and framing also created a lot of smoke around the discovery. By taking these inherent and largely inconsequential limitations to the larger picture and blowing them up, amplifiers and lab leak proponents created a sense of uncertainty of the findings that was unwarranted given the overall strength of the evidence.
Then, they turned the discovery around on the market authors, labeling them as bad scientists for daring to derive obvious conclusions. As a result, mockery of the market authors and their findings ensued in print media and the heterodox podcast sphere, on social media, and in influential circles.
Leaning heavily on the “bad science that got hyped” op-ed by the NYT, Jesse’s framing and criticism of the findings allowed believers to hold on to their beliefs, their community, and their identity. All “without looking like idiots for doing so.” I remembered Matt Browne’s comment on why we tend to fall for these pseudoscientific rationalizations. That is the role of secular gurus and influencers, after all. Preserving identity and community are powerful motivators.
“When Jesse´s analysis came out, people just pivoted,” Alex Crits-Christoph corroborated what they experienced. All of the other motivated arguments thrown at them that did not gain wide traction just faded away; now everybody could point to Jesse’s analysis and say, “This proves that they are wrong.” The inconvenient discovery of scientists was contained yet again before it could persuade the wider public.
In fact, once it was neutralized publicly, the study could be repurposed to work in favor of the viral lab leak narrative many more actually want to buy into. Soon, conspiratorial allegations against Kristian Andersen, Mike Worobey, and others from the year prior were recycled and reinforced. Their new findings were spun as yet another piece of evidence that these virologists are guilty and making it all up to cover their asses—for Fauci, big virology, and their own money streams. “It’s just the same people, with the same conclusions, over and over and over again… They just can’t afford to let it go,” Heather Haying and Bret Weinstein would pontificate on their popular heterodox podcast before going into deep conspiratorial water about the world-shattering implications of allowing their allegedly risky virology research to continue and how they are paid off by Fauci anyway. Familiarity, novelty, repetition. These are not only the ingredients for online virality but also what makes narratives stick with the public.
Did any of their accusers ever pause to consider that neither Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph nor Dr. Florence Débarre, the first and last authors of these findings, are even virologists? They started working with Kristian and Mike not because of incentives or coercion but because good scientists follow the evidence wherever it leads. That is what brings them together around a body of evidence, no matter where they started. This is the beauty and power of science and a weight-of-evidence-based worldview.
However, what I observe again and again online is another unspoken coercive phenomenon, sometimes known as audience capture. To remain a successful influencer, it seems you are required to follow the viral narratives wherever they lead. Depending on how the co-created story evolves, it can lead to some pretty undesirable places, both professionally and morally.
“If you remember, Jesse [Bloom] wrote an entire paper on how lineage A was not at the market. And when it was found, he just dismissed it.” Alex recalled clearly how little evidence was able to shift opinions, even of credentialed scientists caught up in the myth. Identity and belief are personal, not rational. Jesse Bloom never apologized to Chinese authors for his flawed “deleted sequences” paper either. The ones he had accused of a cover-up despite them having done nothing wrong. Now, his convenient perspective was featured in The New York Times once more, trashing the work and ethics of Western colleagues after baselessly accusing Chinese scientists years prior.
“All these characters, they went through an evolution, where at first they were like, ‘I am just asking questions,’ [or] ‘I think it is even; it’s 50:50,’” Alex recounted all the excuses over the years. “And then, of course, the data has come overwhelmingly to support zoonosis,” and they “all have gone completely the other way.”
“Alina Chan used to say that she was agnostic, that she was just brave enough to bring up the idea,” he remembered. Today, she not only claims that it is now “common knowledge” that “top experts around the world acted to shut down” an investigation into the lab leak theory to allegedly “protect their own interests” but constantly insinuates that their reckless behavior created the pandemic and killed millions of people. Unlike Rutgers Professor Richard Ebright and others, who directly call virologists mass murderers, the media-hungry contrarian is smart enough to keep her accusations and brand sufficiently ambiguous to not run into defamation lawsuits and remain palatable for the opinion pages of The New York Times. All the biggest influencers are talented double speakers like that, heavily signaling their “red meat beliefs” to audiences while keeping enough strategic ambiguity to not be pinned down. Evidence to the contrary can be rationalized away over time, and goalposts will be moved to keep the viral lab leak narrative that made them influential alive.
In contrast, changing one’s mind with the evidence has become incredibly difficult for influencers who have publicly staked out a position and gained an audience for it. This is because “influence, activism, and profit are increasingly intertwined,” Renée DiResta explains. To retain their audience, profits, social status, career prospects, popularity, or just community and friendships, influencers remain dependent on the viral narratives that let them rise above the crowd. That is a hell of a motivation to move heaven and earth to find ways to discard inconvenient research, discredit pesky scientists doing the hard work, and dismiss any challenge to the narrative they depend on one way or the other. Science and evidence be damned.
Unfortunately, the motivated rationalizations and technical vocabulary of credential contrarians may be the last nail in the coffin of shared reality. When people are already sorted into polarized groups by viral information cascades, every time new scientific research comes out, a barrage of counter-narratives is bound to be created by contrarian scientists as a function of the underlying topology of their social communities. Because these contrarians are also part of a dedicated amplification network, their ideas can move rapidly from the periphery to the center of society, i.e., from a thread on Twitter to the opinion pages of NYT. Counter-narratives that arise through co-participation in the bespoke community, in turn, entrench the worldview of participants further, sharpen their sense of identity and belonging, and make bridge-building and consensus-finding around shared facts even harder.
“It is not about the weakness of evidence that we have, which is very strong,” Alex Crits-Christoph said. It is just that lab leak proponents move the goalposts until the counter-narratives become unfalsifiable by normal scientific inquiry. He was certain that if they could find infected animals on a wildlife farm outside of Wuhan, lab leak proponents would just move the goalposts again, arguing that humans infected the market animals first, who then brought it back to the wildlife farm. No matter what happens, they will find a motivated rationalization to explain away any new scientific finding.
“But it is funny. When we get this paper published, we will see some of that again,” Alex was certain. Their initial report to the WHO from 2023 has since morphed into more extensive and careful scientific publications, backed up with more rigorous methods, more coauthors, a long peer review, and some very subtle but cutting conclusions. At the time of our interview, I had just learned that it was accepted for publication.
Did Jesse Bloom’s criticism about the data hold water? Was there really nothing to be learned from these new market environmental samples? Or did Alex and his coauthors discover something in those vast meta-transcriptomics data that could be relevant to the origins? The young researcher shared his screen with me, pulling up the latest version of the paper, and we went through the data, figures, and conclusions together.
He showed me some phylogenetic trees and said, “We see about a 99% likelihood that the ancestor of the pandemic was the ancestor of the market sequences.” This again contradicts the idea that humans were the ones who introduced the virus to the market rather than animals. Some counter-narratives have proposed that the virus spread silently in Wuhan before it emerged in the market, but their data told a different story. Jonathan Pekar’s modeling showed that on average, only around 3 people had been infected between the first introductions not observed and the first detected cases at the market. Not a lot of wiggle room for a lab leak, multiple sick WIV workers, and an asymptomatic community spread, bringing it to the market but nowhere else in the city.
“Any hypothesis of COVID-19’s emergence has to explain how the virus arrived at one of only 4 documented live wildlife markets in a city of Wuhan’s size, at a time when so few humans were infected,” their paper states. Animals carrying the virus explain both the lack of human cases prior in the city and the location of the epicenter around the Huanan market, the largest of its kind. On top of that, the idea that humans brought the virus is further challenged by the high likelihood of transmission chains that depend on single individuals going extinct. It supported the theory that a sustained animal-human interface in the market facilitated multiple spillovers, which are more likely to cause a sustained outbreak and the establishment of two distinct lineages in the human population.
As The Atlantic reported, they also found that “among the potential intermediate hosts present in the Huanan market, raccoon dogs are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, to shed high titers of the virus, and to be able to transmit.” Raccoon dog DNA was also the most abundantly detected animal species in market wildlife stalls sampled on January 12th and in the wildlife stall with the most SARS-CoV-2 positive samples. However, other potential animal hosts cannot be discarded; in fact, they are not even that unlikely. Amur hedgehogs and Malayan porcupines were quite prevalent as well; even a few reads of masked palm civets were discovered in one environmental sample, and those animals had been involved in the 2003 SARS outbreak.
“The bamboo rat is another candidate, top 3, maybe even top 2,” Alex said. This has to do with a fascinating finding in the genetic traces it left behind. It turns out the market bamboo rats were infected with a curious-looking murine coronavirus. “It was very, very closely related to a virus found and reported in bamboo rats in South China in 2018 and 2019,” Alex got excited. The market bamboo rats were infected with a direct descendant of those rat viruses discovered in Guangxi Province.
“What this means is that as these animals are being transported up from South China, from Yunnan, from Guanxi, they are bringing viruses,” he explained. Eddie Holmes, who was working on a different paper with Chinese authors on surveilling the wildlife trade, had shown me how they found that, while wild animals rarely carry viruses, captured wildlife is “chock-full” of them. He reasoned that the moment they enter the wildlife trade, they come in contact with many other species in poor sanitary conditions, and their viral burden increases, from a few sporadic infections after capture to multiple infections with multiple cross-species jumping viruses at the end of their trading route before being sold at those wildlife markets. The bamboo rat viruses Alex found certainly argue for such a scenario.
Then he got amused, a sneaky smile running over his face because he already knew that I was going to enjoy the next part. “So, they bring up a beta-coronavirus,” he chuckled, “and one that has a furin cleavage site.” It took me a step back; I had missed that detail when I first read the preprint. He continued:
And the other funny thing is, it is a beautiful one; RRKRR, like a canonical one; like the type that if it had appeared in SARS-CoV-2, maybe then you would be like, ‘Oh, is it engineered? Because that looks like the type we would engineer.’
We laughed at the absurdity of it all. This breathless media fuss about this supposedly unique genetic element that required human engineers seems to pop up quite a lot in wildlife all by itself. We underestimate nature at our own peril.
Prof. Stuart Neil agreed. He had just published a commentary in the journal Cell about the discovery of yet another freshly acquired furin cleavage site in a MERS-related bat virus harbored by smuggled pangolins. Bat cousin viruses in that specific MERS-like subgenus have also not been found with furin cleavage sites; yet it seems the moment the host switches out of the bat, no matter if to bamboo rats, pangolins, Middle Eastern camels, or humans, these polybasic cleavage sites seem to be suddenly favored by selection pressures. They can enable the switch from a bat gastrointestinal virus to a respiratory pathogen in other mammals. “Like for a lot of people, my gut feeling is that the FCS has been acquired upon transmission out of the bat,” Stuart Neil offered as the best estimate. “I would still hazard a guess that the next stage from the bat is the pangolin.”
Pangolins are the most trafficked wild animals in the world. Chinese authorities made a recent bust of a criminal gang smuggling 23 tons of pangolins over the border to give an example of the scale of these operations. Pangolins, because of their prevalence and ubiquity in smuggling chains, seem to act somewhat as sponges for these bat viruses or maybe sentinels for whatever is circulating along the wildlife trading routes and smuggling operations. Pangolins come in contact with all kinds of other traded wildlife, so they capture circulating viruses and possibly shed them quite frequently.
I remembered that Supaporn Wacharapluesadee from Thailand had found a sample from one pangolin smuggled in 2003 that retrospectively tested positive for SARS-1 in 2020, which was previously only linked to civets and raccoon dog farms. In 2020, Supaporn also found another pangolin sample positive for SARS-CoV-2, again from a smuggled animal captured by Thai authorities. A year before the outbreak in Wuhan, multiple pangolins were found carrying distant SARS-CoV-2 relatives with almost identical RBDs to the human virus, which Eddie’s former student Tommy Lam rediscovered early in the pandemic. Since more scientists started paying attention, more smuggled pangolins have been found with Hibeco viruses and MERS-like viruses, gaining an FCS as well. Uncanny. It appears that sick, scared, and stressed wild animals stacked together in cages on top of each other provide a fertile breeding ground for viruses to explore new intermediary hosts and routes of transmission. “Bat coronaviruses are fecal-oral transmitted,” Eddie Holmes argued as well. That’s where bat researchers tend to find them, but not in other tissues in bats.
I think many haven't put all the puzzle pieces together. The molecular evidence suggested that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 was a rather recent acquisition, boosting respiratory transmission at the cost of spike protein stability. In the rough environment of bat guts, such polybasic cleavage sites are disfavored, which is why most bat viruses cannot maintain them. Everything changes when such a bat virus spills over into an intermediate animal, where suddenly, the more labile spike protein fares better in respiratory tissue and starts to become dominant. “I suspect the furin cleavage site is not a natural bat adaptation. I strongly think it came in an intermediate host, and that allowed it to change its tropism to be respiratory rather than fecal or oral,” Eddie Holmes explained.
This is not only true for the FCS but for all respiratory adaptations, even the ones that did not make the headlines. Viruses are complex biological machines; even small changes can have a large impact. An identical argument could also be made for the T372A mutation that alters the 3D confirmation of the trimeric S glycoprotein to a more open and respiratory infectious form and the flexibility mutation N519H we mentioned briefly earlier.
From hundreds of known bat sarbecoviruses, not one has yet been found with these essential mutations for respiratory transmission. Yet SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory pathogen. Human engineers in a lab did not know about these adaptations, nor could they come up with them in any reasonable experimental setup. So, where did these mutations suddenly come from? There is only one plausible explanation: Circulation through intermediate animals brought them forth and maintained them, possibly helped by the fact that the traded animals were stressed and wounded, and their immune systems were weakened.
The implications are serious. First, I trust we can finally dispel the myth that bat-sampling researchers somehow brought SARS-CoV-2 to Wuhan. This virus did not exist in bats; only its bat precursor did. A priori, it is very unlikely that a random bat virus can directly infect bat researchers, and even extremely unlikely that bat researchers will ever encounter a pandemic pathogen from the pithy sampling efforts bat researchers ever get to conduct. But now we need to add to this the evolutionary requirement of a host-context switch out of the bat gut and gradual respiratory adaptation over months in an intermediate animal host. This final ingredient to acquire and maintain respiratory elements like the furin cleavage site and necessary respiratory mutations such as A372T/N519H is what likely allowed a former bat virus to turn into SARS-CoV-2.
“The furin cleavage site gave me the strongest hint that the progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 is not in bats,” Linfa Wang explained to me some time ago. “It’s in pangolins, raccoon dogs, civets, badgers, or whatever; maybe another small mammal, we don’t know.” Because of politics, he was hesitant to speak up too much, but he was very certain about this. “With the US intelligence agencies, they all focus on the Wuhan Institute of Virology because they have the most bat samples… I said, yes, but science says that this progenitor comes from a non-bat small mammal.” In other words, looking into bat samples in Zhengli’s lab, as the Chinese authorities did, and Westerners demand to this day to do independently, was always utterly improbable to yield any incriminating evidence in the first place. A witch hunt for magic that could not have happened there in the first place. “Even as a batman, I say bats are important, but they are not the only mammals.”, Linfa said.
For us, it is important to understand that SARS-CoV-2 could not have become the human pathogen it is today without circulating in intermediate animals for some time. They are the conduit for its virality. The wildlife industry provides the necessary environmental context to develop some of these critical respiratory adaptations we observe in human pathogens, including polybasic cleavage sites, conformational changes, and stabilizing and compensatory mutations that all must work together to gain prominence in those intermediate hosts and ultimately pose a danger to us and other mammals.
There has been a lot of hysteria and myth-making in our public discourse surrounding gain-of-function research and especially the furin-cleavage site over the last four years, but very few fact-based discussions. Science has advanced our understanding dramatically since 2020; we are out of the dark cave of uncertainty. I believe understanding the full context of this infamous genetic element, which has been falsely called the “smoking gun for engineering,” offers us clarity and illumination that viral narratives soaked in powerful emotions but hazy on facts cannot provide: The realization that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 contributes much more to bat researchers’ exoneration than to their incrimination.
It would certainly be a fitting and long-overdue twist of fate for bat researchers if society finally woke up to that reality, too.
“It just goes to show you, this is the place to look for furin cleavage sites,” Alex brought our conversation back, referring to the animal trade. All the mysteries and remaining uncertainties about the origin and trajectory of SARS-CoV-2 are found in the wildlife industry, not in research labs. Integrating this knowledge into ongoing investigations puts the emphasis on the wild animals at the Huanan market, specifically those known to be susceptible and able to transmit the virus. And that brings us back to the now famous raccoon dogs.
“Where are these [market] raccoon dogs coming from? Because a lot of them are farmed in Northern China for their fur.” Alex explained how millions of raccoon dogs are kept on fur farms in northern provinces, so that seemed a bit odd at first. “I think that would have made them less likely as a conduit [for viruses] from South China.” However, wild raccoon dogs inhabit an area from the Southeast Asian Karst region all the way up to Russia and include various distinct subspecies. Could they figure out what subspecies were in the market? The genetic material that raccoon dogs left behind in the environmental samples was quite extensive, so Alex and his coauthors managed to de-novo assemble full mitochondrial genomes from the discovered sequences. Mitochondrial genomes are often valuable as markers for intraspecific species identification. Indeed, the raccoon dogs at the market belonged to a less-known subspecies that was quite distinct from the northern raccoon dogs used for their fur. Another hint that points towards the wildlife trade, possibly from the heart of the Karst region, but this is speculative.
“Every time you could bet against raccoon dogs, and you would lose a lot of bets,” Alex chuckled. For him, these animals still hold the top spot for introducing the virus to the market. Imagine if you tried to disprove raccoon dogs as the culprits. You would find they are susceptible to the virus. You find they shed the virus efficiently to infect others. You find reports and photographs of them being at the market. “It could have been that they were super rare or not there at all,” Alex offered, specifically at that time in late 2019. Yet their DNA footprints were the most abundant. The number one animal from all other wild species detected happens to be the one most susceptible to shedding SARS-CoV-2. You find their DNA deposited in the environment together with viral RNA. You take their genetic material and discover these are not common raccoon dogs used for fur farming but possibly a wild subspecies. And, of course, raccoon dogs and civets were the animals responsible for SARS-1, a virus whose reservoir was traced back over 1,000 km from Guangdong to Yunnan. So, there is historical precedent that this host and route of viral emergence are possible and plausible.
Can we know even more? Outbreaks rarely divulge all their mysteries, but the ingenuity of scientific research should never be counted out.
Dr. Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist now with the University of Tokyo, and Jonathan Pekar, who we heard briefly about for his involvement in the market origin papers, were two young researchers with the most exciting and impactful PhD trajectories I certainly have ever heard of. They were also incredibly generous with their time to walk non-domain experts like me through some grueling and complicated technical details of their work. In 2023, they were sitting on a little breakthrough of their own.
While Jonathan worked on epidemic simulations that would end up supporting the multiple spillover hypothesis, Spyros worked on trying to understand the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 through the lens of viral recombination. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a mosaic genome, they realized that its history in bats is fragmented; there was no single progenitor virus but many incestuous parent and grandparent viruses that were spread all over Southeast Asia and China. By using all available bat sarbecoviruses that had been painstakingly sampled by bat researchers in China and Southeast Asia, the two junior researchers recreated a history for the recombinant genetic elements that would eventually end up in SARS-CoV-2. Using non-recombinant regions that remain largely unchanged in the hectic evolutionary arms race between family members, they found that they could identify recombination breakpoints—places where genetic similarity from one parental strain stops and similarity to a different parental strain starts. This allowed them to reconstruct not one evolutionary history but 27 different ones for each non-recombinant segment, teasing out an inferred common ancestor.
“It’s puzzle pieces that descend from that ancestor,” Jonathan explained. By studying them, they made a surprising discovery. “The virus pieces that were most similar circulated in bats very recently,” Jonathan shared their findings. SARS-CoV-2’s bat ancestor did not circulate in the wild for decades; rather, it came together “just a few years” before it emerged in Wuhan.
They were not done. On top of that, they combined geographic information from sampling locations of close ancestors with the phylogeny scaled with units of time. “Since we have sampling locations for the tips of the family tree,” Spyros explained, they can project the tree on a map. “Essentially, you zoom in on the parts of the map that correspond to the parts of the tree closest to SARS-CoV-2.” By doing so, they could narrow down a dispersion zone for the final recombination events that created the inferred bat ancestor. In other words, the most likely birthplace of the bat viruses that would later become SARS-CoV-2.
Based on their model, the South Chinese and Southeast Asian Karst region, a large area running from Yunnan Province, Laos, Northern Vietnam, and Myanmar down to northern Thailand, harbored those parental virus strains, with the diffuse geographic bullseye sitting over the wide border region between Yunnan, Laos, northern Vietnam, and Myanmar. The bat virus’s origin is likely multinational. Alice Hughes, somebody who collected some of the samples that informed their analysis and who was a coauthor of their paper, commented to me, “It just shows this pointlessness of trying to blame countries. Bats do not care about our borders.” Neither does the international wildlife trade.
Spyros, Jonathan, and their coauthors concluded that “direct ancestors of the SARS-CoVs likely could not have reached sites of emergence via the bat reservoir alone.” Meaning that somehow our human activities must have facilitated how the bat virus made its way into intermediate animals, acquiring respiratory adaptations before eventually being carried as SARS-CoV-2’s direct ancestor to Wuhan. It was another important piece of evidence that implicates the wildlife trading routes that run from Southeast Asia through Yunnan to the more prosperous Chinese wildlife markets in the north. “The border region is very porous,” Alice Hughes, who worked there for over a decade, explained. Sometimes, she and her team would wander over the borders in the wild by accident; sometimes, her students would sit on buses returning to Yunnan that carried wildlife from Southeast Asia in the storage compartment under the bus, only to vanish at the border. The often-illegal wildlife smuggling is especially hard to study for scientists.
Unfortunately, as of today, very little is also known about raccoon dog farms in Yunnan, and even less is known about conducts anywhere else in Southeast Asia. What and where are the trading routes that move them, together with pangolins, munjacks, bamboo rats, amur hedgehogs, civets, and other wildlife up north? There is much we still need to learn about how captured, smuggled or cultivated wildlife moves and ends up in Chinese and other markets.
“Of course, we know they exist,” Alex said, acknowledging the existence of smuggling routes as well as wildlife farms holding domesticated wildlife and wild-caught varieties. That has been clear since SARS-CoV-1. But how to gain insights into them? “We make these mitochondrial genotypes available because many people did not realize they could do this,” Alex explained their rationale. Once you have the genotypes of those animals at the market, you can go out and test where the host species might have come from. “In the case, of course, if there are different subspecies farmed in different areas,” he cautioned, this could narrow down the trajectory the virus took even further. Alex still had the hope that if tensions eased and people were allowed to sample farm animals in China or even wider Southeast Asia, a more granular picture of the origin would emerge. “If you have a national survey of raccoon dogs, you could pinpoint exactly where they came from,” Eddie Holmes agreed. “But it’s so sensitive, you know, that people in those countries do not want to admit they’ve got this wildlife trade problem.”
Honestly, who can fault their reluctance? Southeast Asian governments, just like Beijing, fear that more scientific discoveries will lead to them being blamed by a world that has not made peace with its natural pandemic risks.
The investigative reporter Michael Standaert, who was in Wuhan at the time the pandemic started, at least tried to find full numbers on the wildlife farms in China but was never very successful. He did, however, collect reports from the crackdown on the wildlife industry and the culling that happened starting in February 2020, where thousands of farms that had domesticated wildlife on them were shut down by the authorities. In Yunnan, 2,351 farms were impacted, in line with other provinces. Again, the wildlife industry in China is enormous, employing over 14 million people, and is estimated to be worth more than $70 billion USD. Smuggling and trafficking operations of wildlife from Southeast Asia have also been put at a price tag of around $10 billion, albeit these estimates have big uncertainties.
No matter if the illegal trafficking of rare animals over the border into China, hunting and trapping them in the wild for later sale or sustenance, or supplementing breeding in wildlife farms, this porous industry has many facets. Some activities are illegal but lack enforcement; some are traditional and culturally valued; while other activities, such as wildlife farms, were explicitly promoted by politicians before the pandemic. “Local officials trumpeted the wildlife trade as a way to close the rural-urban divide and to meet ambitious national targets to alleviate poverty,” NPR journalist Emily Fang reported about the role this industry plays in China. Given this reality, is it any surprise that follow-up on this industry has been politically sensitive from day one?
Michael Standaert, who specializes in property, contract, and business records, explained to me that on top of everything else, there is often a “black and red alliance” when it comes to wildlife trade. “Black,” meaning illegal activity like a black market, often owned and controlled by criminal syndicates like the Triads, and “red,” for local members of the communist party, who are corrupt officials looking the other way in exchange for a cut of the revenue. I recalled the Huanan market owner, who had allegedly lied twenty times to Peter Daszak and the WHO mission about no mammals being sold at his market. I learned that he apparently had direct connections to some powerful party officials, including a cousin of Xi Jinping, according to Standaert. Independent confirmation was hard to come by, so we are in the realm of speculation. Could that local black/red reality have obstructed Chinese health authorities and Chinese scientists from getting to the bottom of the outbreak despite their earnest efforts? Maybe even prevent tracing of wildlife traders, farms, and supply routes? “Why did they step away from following up on that?” Marion Koopmans’s question rang in my ear.
I honestly do not know the answer. However, I think these are contextualizing sideshows to the Chinese outbreak response in Wuhan that have not faced any investigations or scrutiny by the Western press and, more surprisingly, US intelligence services. Nor was there any compassion for Chinese scientists by the many grandstanding armchair investigators in the West, all too quick to question their integrity or character rather than their obstacles. Perhaps it’s not surprising the WHO mission faced 19 hours of fervent pushback in heated discussions about the Huanan market with a room full of delegates sitting in the back of Chinese scientists who were not allowed to concede that illegal wildlife had been sold there.
None of these are particularly pleasant speculations to talk about as a scientist. They are hard to substantiate in a repressive nation locked into a geopolitical skirmish with the US. These speculations are possibly still quite irrelevant to the larger origin question, which puts the totality of the global wildlife industry, not just an unlucky local market or country, under pressure. We have to be very clear on that.
Pandemic prevention is about the big picture—what we can learn about systematic problems and challenges—not pointing the finger at the unlucky victim of larger circumstances. For me, it is also important to understand that China is not a monolithic entity, where Beijing gives the marching orders and everybody obeys. Reality is, as always, much more nuanced and complex. Chinese scientists, journalists, and citizens have repeatedly shown their allegiance to the truth despite the consequences, whereas the “free press” and influencers in democracies often lie for self-serving gains without facing any consequences. On top of that, the global wildlife industry is enormous, similar practices are widespread anywhere, and no government in the world, not even Beijing, has the power to prevent all risky or illegal activities, nor can it stop humans from being humans with all the messiness that entails.
Yet, considering this messy reality, I believe we can understand the past and each other a bit better. Chinese authorities preferred to send out swaths of bat researchers, including Alice Hughes, to find evidence of a “blameless disaster” by discovering a bat “culprit” in the wild rather than being forced to open this particular can of worms surrounding their relationship to wildlife. Would other countries have acted differently? I do not know.
However, once the geopolitical blame games started at a time of domestic unrest and regime frustration, Beijing realized they would never get a fair hearing. Many politicians in the wider world, led by the US under Donald Trump, used the pandemic as a weapon against China and a tool to obfuscate from their own failings. Consequently, these actions, among other factors, led to reactionary policies of suppression and censorship occurring in China. Stopping any inconvenient research, controlling information flows, and pandering to domestic audiences with anti-US propaganda became more essential. This is still true today.
But some earnest efforts have also been made by Beijing. The authorities did initially crack down on the wildlife industry, shutting down thousands of farms, culling millions of animals, and successfully suppressing the virus within China for a long time before the increased virality of the omicron variant made it impossible. Their pandemic response offers no real excuses for the failings of our own governments.
Unfortunately, our human nature cannot be excluded from culpability either. Most early restrictions and bans for the wildlife industry implemented in 2020 have since flickered out or reversed. The wildlife industry is back in full swing. The same thing happened after the crackdown on civet farms after SARS-CoV-1 in 2003: they were shut down temporarily, bans were issued, then lifted. By 2019, the numbers of domesticated wildlife on these farms had risen to what they were before. “Not much had changed in those nearly 20 years, other than the magnitude,” Michael Standaert wrote on Twitter, commenting on an account by Hubei’s forestry officials, stating there were 631 total wildlife farms and 1.12 million animals on them by 2019.
This should not surprise us; 20 years after the Nipah outbreak in Malaysia, the pig industry is back in full swing as well. So are the factory farms in Mexico after the 2009 swine flu and about two dozen other risky animal-human interfaces, from the United States to China, from Brazil to Liberia, from Saudi Arabia to India, from Malaysia to Vietnam. We lose focus, we forget, and we trod on with little changes. The false lab leak narrative is simply facilitating this process again, against our better knowledge and interest.
But it’s 2024 now, and real answers to the question of where SARS-CoV-2 came from have been emerging. So, let me outline a different explanation for the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic:
A comprehensive body of scientific evidence and field work has shown us that the immediate bat ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 came from one of the countless natural “gain-of-function labs” spanning the vast biodiverse Karst region from Yunnan in Southern China towards Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and maybe even Malaysia in Southeast Asia. The lingering and promiscuous endemic viral elements in that biodiverse geographic region constantly mix and bring forth new chimeric combinations within their socially intricate and transnational rhinophid reservoir hosts, while our exploitative human activities and reckless encroachment on bat territories stir the genetic cauldron ever faster.
Once a particularly combustible set of genetic elements had produced a potential pandemic pathogen with broad host tropism, the legal and illegal network of thousands of mammalian wildlife farms and markets likely became the maturing vessels. Only there, in this cruel environment of close-contact, stressed and sick animals could the former bat virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2 have acquired respiratory adaptations over months to reach its final explosive form.
From the large wildlife industry supply chains, sick and infectious animals were dragged in front of hundreds of immune-naive future human hosts visiting the largest wet market of one particular Chinese megacity well connected with the entire world. This risky human-animal interface would end up seeding enough zoonotic spillover events for the virus to sustain an outbreak in people and eventually take humanity by storm, while political failures in most countries sabotaged effective containment at high economic, social, and personal costs to all of us.
That pandemic origin story, no matter how confusing, unintuitive, or otherwise emotionally unsatisfying, is the most likely and accurate approximation of reality given the weight of evidence we have and are likely to ever get; best I can tell after years of trying to understand this topic.
Instead of dealing with that inconvenient reality and implementing pragmatic counter measures, the viral lab leak narrative has done its fair share of harm in distracting us from the task at hand by offering scapegoats and entertainment rather than insights and solutions. Today, I also fear that too many lack the courage to follow the facts where they lead us because we fear solutions that put the onus on us to change. We intuitively shy away from acknowledging reality for the multidimensional and systemic struggle it is, trading real-world complexity for simple answers that put the blame on an outgroup. On top of that, we often lack compassion for the lived reality of others; therefore, we fail to make science-based change stick with communities.
Yet despite the challenges, I believe progress can be made without alienating people or polarizing the discussion, even on deadly serious topics. Science does not prescribe that 14 million humans in China involved in the wildlife industry have to suddenly give up their livelihood, and many more consumers have to change their culture or identity to prevent a future SARS-CoV-3. Instead, as Alice Hughes likes to argue, science allows us to find a pragmatic way forward. Karst forests and biodiversity can be protected by empowering local communities. Farmers can be educated about biosafety risks and best practices. Researchers can build surveillance at those risky human-animal interfaces and train boots on the ground for fast containment responses where new viruses are likely to emerge. Consumers can be offered safer choices for where, what, and how to shop for farmed wildlife. Regulators can be equipped with better tools to monitor, diagnose, and trace disease symptoms. Smuggling can be reduced by changing incentives and economic prospects, as well as enforcement actions. Authorities can establish fast-acting playbooks to anticipate, prevent, and counter outbreaks. All without overt blame, totalitarian control, or unrealistic expectations towards our human nature or communities.
In my opinion, if we, as a global society, can come to our senses, this is how a courageous and compassionate evidence-based response to the first global pandemic of the 21st century could have looked and might still turn out. We have no real choice; the biological danger is not gone but increasing. Many scientists I got to know now think another deadly zoonotic-origin epidemic—even a new pandemic—within the decade is more likely than not. The false lab leak narrative has sabotaged them—and us—from acting on that inconvenient reality. I certainly do not want to repeat the mistakes of COVID-19 nor write about the inevitably contested origins of H5N1 bird flu, Nipah-2029, SARS-CoV-3, or disease X a few years down the road.
Moreover, science and scientific institutions need to get ready for the information age. Pandemics are also always social phenomena. With the appearance of COVID-19 and the myths surrounding it, I believe we have fallen victim to a previously unobserved synergistic phenomenon: a hybrid attack of related viral occurrences. A biological pathogen has captured our attention and pushed us in front of our screens, thereby prompting social isolation, increased digitization, and online community formation. This hastened the disintegration of our shared infosphere by restructuring our social networks into polarized fiefdoms. That social fragmentation along the most successful information amplification networks has paved the way for harmful viral narratives to infect us at unprecedented scale and velocity. In return, the viral myths surrounding the origins of a biological virus helped to confuse, paralyze, divide, and conquer us to the point where we sabotage international and scientific collaborations, even blame scientists and distrust their advice. A lethal combination. A true global twindemic, perhaps the first of its kind, with long-lasting and incalculable damage. How can we hope to not repeat the same mistakes?
Given our broken information ecosystems, it is obvious to me that every future outbreak will be a war on two fronts. We already observe the same bad actors and myth makers prepare content for a potential H5N1 pandemic. If it comes to pass, they will profit while we will drown in confusion and chaos.
Unfortunately, as of today, while we have made a lot of progress on the scientific front when it comes to dealing with a novel biological threat, we seem stuck and less prepared to deal with virality in our online ecosystems that impacts our trust, our politics, and our ability to cooperate. We remain too captured by false myths and viral narratives that have become self-sustaining. Incapacitated by an overabundance of noise and confusion, we seem unable to bridge our divides and act on evidence, while some influential people among us are actively making things worse. The online restructuring of our societies into fragmented communities and polarized factions has not only paralyzed us but also made us sicker and more vulnerable to ever-new viral waves to conquer our bodies and minds.
This diagnosis is dire. We clearly have to reckon with the most self-serving among us who have spotted their opportunity in our current vulnerabilities and work tirelessly to exploit them further. After all, those who can create, shape, and maintain viral narratives in their favor have much to gain.
Yet I believe that most of us are neither gullible nor easily persuaded by self-serving commentators, contrarians, politicians, or grifters. These opportunists only gained influence over us by piggybacking on viral narratives whose power and social coercion we just did not understand before they hit us. We all participate in and co-create these viral narratives because we are a story-telling species and seek meaning. On top of that, our decisions to participate online are not fully our own but shaped by our emotional needs, cognitive biases, and the decisions of the people and social networks we trust and see as our own.
Our human flaws and idiosyncrasies have not fundamentally changed in the last ten thousand years; yet throughout history, some societies manage to still prosper, while others fall into chaos and decay. We have to understand that humans are not the only ingredient in our current conundrums; we need to be aware of the larger systems we have become part of and scrutinize them much more ruthlessly if they do not serve society.
Currently, platform companies have created merciless winner-take-all incentives for our pugilistic strive for attention, fostering a profitable information war of all against all with constantly shifting factional alliances. Within that system, we collectively have repurposed the internet from a marketplace of ideas into a marketplace for motivated rationalizations, with influencers creating justifications that legitimize the confident beliefs and worldviews of the powerful and the biases of algorithmically amplified crowds alike.
Unfortunately, it seems that the trinity of algorithms, crowds, and influencers has gotten too efficient for our own good, producing pseudo-events, fake news cycles, and counter-narratives at a breakneck speed to uphold their own polarizing virality. Hugo Mercier argues in his book Not Born Yesterday that:
Polarization does not stem from people being ready to accept bad justifications for views they already hold, but from being exposed to too many good (enough) justifications for these views, leading them to develop stronger or more confident views.
This, I believe, is the true reason why the information sphere always tends to deliver content to substantiate any narrative that gains traction. In turn, creating and controlling the distribution of these rationalizations that feed into larger viral narratives bestows a dark power over society.
The influencers and platforms of today, just like the regime propagandists of old, play a critical role as gatekeepers and super spreaders for these motivated rationalizations and mutually contradictory myths that feed into viral narratives. They are the champions of bespoke communities, the conduits of our feelings, the wordsmiths and velocity hackers that sharpen our co-created stories into epic viral narratives. And they are the shield bearers defending us with counter-narratives when we feel like upholding belief against all evidence. Under this gladiatorial spectacle of bespoke worldviews, what was once “the public” has further fractured every day, “coming together only to assail each other in factional warfare,” as Renée DiResta put it.
The only commonality, consensus-forming, and bridge-building that our current information ecosystems allow is not on issues but on shared enemies. Constantly creating new heroes and villains that activate us to take up arms, to participate, to defend the viral narratives we have come to believe in. “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer noted in his book The True Believer. The information age has seemingly turned us all into zealots on topics we participate in, to which we feel emotionally attached.
Science, rationality, and an evidence-based worldview have thereby become an obstacle to the co-created narratives that drive and define us. A pesky nuisance that sabotages the myth-making of the powerful or the will of the crowds. Is it any surprise that too many gladiatorial champions of our online arenas decided once and for all to make science their ultimate enemy during a pandemic that required us all to pay attention to scientists?
“Invisible rulers... are most effective when they discredit not only a specific idea but also the authority that promulgates it”
Renée DiResta wrote in her book about how hidden rulers shape public discourse. We all exert some influence by participating in crowds defending our bespoke worldview. Best I can tell, the rise of viral narratives has made the current crisis of trust in science and war on scientists both lucrative and inevitable.
The pandemic provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity for seasoned anti-science gladiators, such as anti-vaxxers and right-wing politicians, to tear down the hard-earned trust science has built with enlightened society over decades, if not centuries. Because scientific institutions were ill-equipped and unable or unwilling to participate, the gladiator’s modern crusade against them has been remarkably successful. Science and scientists have come under heavy siege, far outside the pandemic’s origin controversy.
This broadening war on science and shared reality shapes up to be one of the most consequential conflicts of our time. Unfortunately, for now, the lost battles, casualties, and consequences have been almost entirely one-sided for the upholders of an evidence-based worldview. This worries me immensely, not only for scientists but for society and our future. Without science as the arbiter of shared reality, the very incentives, vulnerabilities, and dynamics of our information ecosystems make polarization on any topic preprogrammed.
Without science, I fear that all our current conflicts will turn perpetual, and finding any cooperative solutions to shared problems turn to ash. Combating climate change, building up pandemic prevention, or getting citizens to protect themselves and others with a vaccine have already become seemingly unsolvable societal challenges despite having pragmatic scientific solutions at hand. Tragedy will inevitably follow.
Even worse, as hard as this is for me to write, is that our current vulnerable state of affairs has induced a dangerous type of “epistemic paralysis” in society, where citizens cannot separate facts from fiction anymore, no matter how hard and sincerely they try. We have unwittingly created the conditions where many citizens are left attaching themselves to the postmodern idea that nothing is ever really true and everything is always possible.
With science out of the way, this epistemic paralysis in turn has laid the groundwork for a very particular set of actors and authoritarian politics that we hoped to have banished to the past.
Their current rise is threatening to even more fundamentally change our democratic world than mere ignorance or inaction on scientific advice ever could.
Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.
Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.
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