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.
“They got a police escort to get us shoe shopping, and I basically wore a wedding dress… There are even photos in Pakistani newspapers… and I just thought, if I can give a talk wearing this, I can give a talk in anything.” Alice Hughes laughed wholeheartedly while I shook my head in giddy disbelief. It was a good day, which we both needed. She vividly recalled how she was culturally ambushed by her hosts on a day she was supposed to teach a course about spatial ecology in Pakistan in 2012. They needed her to put on a blue sari robe and traditional women’s shoes, which they could not find for her size anywhere in the city, despite chaperoning her through six shoe shops with a full police escort. This only came up because I had asked the renowned bat huntress about the most uncomfortable situation she had ever been in. She offered me this anecdote as an answer, which was telling in more ways than one.
Dressed in worn-out hiking shoes, a light jean shirt, and carrying a massive backpack, the 38-year-old professor sitting in front of me looked slightly out of place for a posh cafe in Zurich. She was a member of the university faculty in Hong Kong, and she has done her best to break any stereotypes one might have about ivory tower academics and women in academia. Her name appears in over 190 publications at the time of writing, and her resume is much closer to that of an accomplished male peer at the end of his career than someone her age. She is an adventurer, a world traveler, and a force to be reckoned with. At 17, she was the only one in her group to not get sick in the Peruvian rainforest. Drug traffickers had held her at gunpoint in Paraguay on the Brazilian border when she was 21. She had ventured too far while exploring; her colleagues had already filed an international missing person’s report. All alone, without knowing a word of Portuguese, she somehow talked her way out of it. At 23, her PhD was not spent behind a desk but was colored by visiting some of the remotest places in Southeast Asia. Climbing through picturesque mountain ridges plastered by checkered corn fields in Vietnam, traversing untouched lakes in Malaysia by rowboat, venturing deep into tiny caves in Thailand, or wading through rainforest creeks in southern China, her every day seemed like a nature documentary if it weren’t for dramatic motorcycle accidents, horrible falls in caves, and broken bones on remote islands while fending off angry snakes in her bed.
However, exploring hundreds of meters deep into low-oxygen caves, where some others never return, is her favorite way to spend her time. “Oh, remember the Thai cave where teenage football players got trapped by a flood that saw even a trained Navy Seal rescue diver die? Yeah, I was there too, kilometers deep.” She laughed again at my panicked expression. I would not be comfortable venturing into those narrow pits of darkness. Yet when I asked her about ever feeling some dread or panic on her trips, only the “Blue Sari Incident” came to her mind. Alice might not have worn a dress for the many years since (I quote: “I’m more comfortable in FieldKit even if it’s been soaked in cave water”), but she has explored hundreds of caves, captured thousands of bats, studied their ecosystems in more than a dozen countries, and continues to teach courses for students all over the world.
She lived for discovering new species of bats, fungi, lizards, or cave spiders, snakes, and scorpions; protocoling glow worms hanging from the walls and undescribed flying squirrels from the jungle; sometimes petting the occasional red panda; or investigating trafficked animals like pangolins, moonrats, muntjacs, raccoon dogs, and civets. Even mapping karst geography, local ecology and recording climate parameters were part of her routine. There was simply nothing about the natural world that didn’t fascinate her, and that made her incredibly knowledgeable. It is impossible to come away from a conversation with her without knowing some new and fascinating animal trivia that one must vow to read up on more. She delighted at the thought of being in places few humans have ever set foot in before. At times, her career seems much closer to an Indiana Jones-style adventure revamp than what one might picture as the dry academic research of an ecologist. “You know, my father wanted me to get married and be a homemaker since I was three,” Alice recalled, followed by some joshing around. “You might see me squeeze through a lot of narrow spots, but fitting in the narrow box of convention is the one tight spot I cannot accommodate.” It was a hilarious and carefree afternoon, a welcome distraction from her grim last few years.
After we sat down near the Zurich lakeside with ducks and swans gathering at our feet in hopes of a snack, I got her on a more serious note. Since she was eight, she wanted to be a conservationist. Listening to David Attenborough, Gerald Durrell, and other nature documentaries growing up in Great Britain, she remembered crying as a child about deforestation and habitat loss, about the unsustainable way we treated our planet. She lifted her hair behind her neck to pull up a modest necklace—a medallion with an extinct dodo on it, a sign of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust—that she received as a child. She has been wearing it ever since, a reminder and talisman of her childhood pledge to save as much of the world as she could. We are all idealistic and naive when we are young, but as we grow older, most of us seem to forget or give up. Alice appeared to have found another way via science. “People see idealism as something to grow out of, rather than finding a pragmatic way forward where you can instrumentalize elements of it.” For her, saving the planet starts with truly observing it in all its detail, diversity, and vastness: the beautiful and the curious, the dangerous and the unconventional, the boring, the nerdy, and the slimy. She was in the business of understanding and saving ecosystems, not just token species that capture our attention. That’s what gets her up in the morning. That’s why she ventures into the wild, equipped with a geolocation device, a laptop, and whatever specialized gear she might need for the expedition or sampling, from basics like lights and ropes to diving gear, harp nets, field lab equipment, and what one of my friends would call a “bat Shazam”—a custom-made recording device that captures the echolocation sounds and frequencies from bats. Every bat species makes its own unique sounds. Usually, she has to listen with her bat shazam to what species are around before she can get research funding and a permit from the authorities to sample them.
Before the pandemic, she had finally found a place that would not get boring, even a second home, in Xishuangbanna—a large botanical garden and national park in the tropical Yunnan region of southern China. A biodiverse paradise nestled between green mountains with now-turquoise rivers cut out of the karst over the ages. A place of life and Chinese folk legends, and a hotbed for scientific collaborations. She was leading a team of 18 scientists, half of whom were bat researchers. She was a stable pillar of the small research community; her students loved her and came to her for advice. As one of the few female professors, she would also be a trailblazer and confidant for talented women in a male-dominated environment. Her publications often drew the jealousy of male peers, but her success and work ethic made her untouchable; many students from all over the world wanted to learn from her. And yet, one day, she had to leave it all behind.
By the end of 2021, she left as quietly as she could, crossing the border by foot to Hong Kong because it was less controlled than the airports. She would not have made it out otherwise. She left with just a single piece of luggage and a backpack full of 34 hard drives loaded with her research data. She held her breath when she passed the last checkpoint—in China, moving has been severely limited—and finally crossed the border to a still-free Hong Kong. Her exit was planned in secret, with a new job already lined up, her official resignation timed to hand in right after the defense of her last PhD students, and leaving her open grants and tons of money behind at the institute so as to not ruffle any feathers and to ensure the jobs of the team she left behind. “It was hard. I had a successful group. I was really proud of my students. It just wasn’t safe anymore,” she told me soberly, but I could tell how much this place and its people had meant to her. Students were shell-shocked; one cried for six hours, and others tried to physically hold on to her, preventing her from leaving. But she had to go.
Alice had been under surveillance by the Security Bureau for months. She did not know exactly how long, but it was likely before she and her group were baselessly arrested on a regular field trip to a cave on her institute’s grounds earlier that year, despite having the necessary permits to sample there. It was not the first encounter with the police, either. Starting around the middle of 2020, when her team was first taken to the local police station for questioning, it had become increasingly impossible to do her work. Authorities did not want her sampling bats there. Soon after, a regulation was passed that prohibited foreigners from conducting any field work or bat surveillance. But even before that, authorities would make up rules as to why her permits were suddenly invalid. “You never knew where it came from. Did they make it up? Or was it their bosses? Or the bosses of their bosses?” Towards the end of 2020, reporting by the Associated Press about her research sparked another escalation. It led the local authorities to wall up and barricade access to caves they had regularly surveyed for years. Categorical bans on talking to the foreign press were issued to the institute. WeChat messages would be deleted from her phone. In July 2021, a foreign national rule was implemented, prohibiting foreigners from visiting Yunnan. This rule included Alice’s partner at the time, who was based at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.
Her own movement was also severely limited. “Foreign nationals who did live in Mengla needed a letter from HR with police permission every time we left,” she said, explaining to me how this contributed to her relationship coming to an untimely end. In China, traveling as a foreigner meant two weeks of forced quarantine in designated hotels. The last time Alice did this, in March 2020, it was in a downtrodden hotel with a wall entirely full of black mold and a rotten food supply, which led to others in quarantine being hospitalized. She refused to eat during this period and went into a type of shock. To finally be released after 14 days, she had to sign an agreement promising not to speak of any problems during quarantine. She didn’t want to go through something like that ever again. Censorship and threats were omnipresent. “Even talking just about COVID-adjacent work… I did get the State Security Bureau basically calling me up and questioning me extensively as a consequence.” The repression went so far that they weren’t even allowed to talk to the press about the literal elephants that walked through their institute’s garden because some authorities worried that even this might look “bad” for them. To me, it appeared that the authorities had only one message: any attention to this region was too much attention.
Why was Beijing so afraid of foreign researchers in Yunnan? And what exactly had Alice gotten herself into?
This all started because Alice had the unique talent and experience, or should I say misfortune, to be the right person, at the right place, and at the right time to figure out scientific clues to the origins of COVID-19. In early 2019, months before the pandemic started, she had collected some fateful samples from bats at a cave in Mengla County, which was basically her institute’s backyard, within the Xishuangbanna botanical garden in Yunnan Province. The samples were sent to a Chinese collaborator in Shandong, Northern China, for sequencing and analysis.
On January 21, 2020, while on a trip to Buenos Aires, her phone started buzzing excitedly during the wait in the immigration line. WeChat messages kept popping up uncontrollably. The frenzy had started with her collaborator, Shi Weifeng, from the University of Shandong, who performed genomic sequencing and analysis for their project. “ALICE!!!... We sequenced your samples… found a very close relative of 2019-nCoV… We plan to run more analyses, but we want to write a paper quickly and submit it to Nature.” Alice recalled the gist of the wall of text that flew her way. The renowned scientific journal Nature represents the pinnacle for many life scientists, particularly Chinese researchers, who not only find publication in Nature prestigious, but it can also reap handsome rewards. Being first was important to getting into that journal. Weifeng had named the new bat betacoronavirus RmYN02 because the samples came from a horseshoe bat—Rhinolophus malayanus—in Yunnan. They wanted to write it up and publish it within 10 days. RmYN02 was strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in bats, similar to SARS-1. A big deal discovery.
However, a mere two days after that hopeful conversation, they got scooped. Someone published a similar finding before them—none other than Shi Zhengli, who released her RaTG13 analysis, claiming the exact same thing: SARS-CoV-2 originally came from bats. Those few days made all the difference. While Weifeng and Alice’s findings remained mostly obscure to the public, Zhengli’s paper—published in Nature—would open Pandora’s box of attention and unhinged abuse for her. I wonder how it would have turned out if Weifeng and Alice’s team had been first. In all that furor that followed about WIV having the closest viral ancestor with 96.2% similarity, nobody but a few researchers cared that RmYN02 was actually much closer to SARS-CoV-2 for about two-thirds of the whole genome, with a similarity of 97.2% sequence identity. But because RmYN02 diverged a lot more than RaTG13 for that last third of the genome, including the spike and RBD, the overall similarity for the whole genome was just 93.3% compared to RaTG13’s 96.2%. Alice’s “partially the closest ancestor” did not sound as sexy or relevant in media coverage, but it was incredibly important from a scientific perspective. Just as the pangolin viruses had a key receptor binding domain much closer than what Kristian Andersen ever found within a lab, Alice’s new virus from Yunnan showed that yet another genetic puzzle piece—this time the largest of them all—was to be found outside, not inside, of a lab. RmYN02 discovery, if nothing else, would be the unequivocal proof that SARS-CoV-2 was not made or derived from RaTG13, contrary to what many conspiracy theorists suggested at the time. For a long time, I did not understand that argument until I learned about the importance of viral recombination for coronavirus evolution.
Early in 2020, RmYN02 was found to have another explosive genetic feature that would shed light on the origins of the pandemic. Coincidentally, this discovery would also dramatically change the minds of the “proximal origin” virologists in the West, who would later be falsely portrayed in conspiracy myths as having been “coerced” by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. For scientists, only compelling evidence is coercive, and the discovery of RmYN02 provided the necessary illumination into the murky oddities of the new virus’s genome.
SARS-CoV-2 seemed so very special because of the “suspicious” insertion of a furin cleavage site (FCS) in the very narrow S1/S2 region of the spike gene. The fact that it looked artificially inserted was a bit of a fluke. No other previously sampled relatives had these extra amino acids in that position, so any alignment and comparison to other SARS-related viruses made it stand out like a llama in a flock of sheep. Until RmYN02, that is. This particular bat virus also contained a rather reminiscent insertion in the exact same position. While RmYN02’s insertion did not form a full polybasic cleavage site, it nevertheless showed that in what was supposed to be a homogeneous flock of viral sheep, there were at least some alpacas, too. Found again in nature—no human intervention required. Since those early days, scientists have discovered all kinds of insertions in that genetic region, making it clear that SARS-CoV-2’s sequence oddity in that S1/S2 region was indeed not that special. We constantly underestimate the diversity nature can come up with. The discovery of RmYN02 was among first hard clue toward unraveling the mystery of the FCS, as well as a strong argument for natural evolution rather than human design being its originator.
News travels fast among experts. It might not be surprising at this point, but Shi Weifeng, Alice’s collaborator, had good contacts with Western scientists. He did a sabbatical in 2017—an academic semester abroad—with none other than Prof. Eddie Holmes. Since the start of the outbreak, the two had been involved in a different project about early patient genome sequences with Dr. George Gao from the Chinese CDC. On the eve of February 24, 2020, Weifeng reached out to Eddie Holmes to discuss this one bat virus they found in Yunnan and what it could tell about the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2. He sent Eddie a draft of their RmYN02 analysis. Eddie, already primed from his ongoing work and discussions about the “proximal origin” paper, immediately spotted the partial insertions at the S1/S2 boundary. Hours later, he messaged his coauthors the early draft of Weifang’s paper along with just one word: “Discuss.”
“Holy crap - that’s amazing,” Robert Garry could not help but blurt out first. Kristian Andersen, still dogged about keeping the possibility of a lab leak open, said that this was no polybasic cleavage site, but it certainly provided a mechanism for how the FCS came about. “I think this lends pretty strong support for an animal origin of the ‘confusing’ features of the virus [SARS-COV-2] … It shows that the virus likes to ‘mess around’ in this part of its genome, that is pretty important knowledge.” Andrew Rambaut weighed in about how one could get to a furin cleavage site using RmYN02 by just simulating a few deletions. Eddie explained that RmYN02 is the closest ancestor for certain parts of its genome, so clearly some recombination—the exchange of genetic elements between viruses—was going on with SARS-CoV-2. After a bit of back and forth, Kristian Andersen again said, “It does not rule out lab infection/release… However, there are now no more ‘mysteries’ to explain… We see the optimized RBD in pangolins and parts of the furin site in bats (which is pretty cool!!!).” Eddie Holmes concurred, saying, “I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin.”
Soon after, they would submit a revised version of their “proximal origin” paper to the journal Nature Medicine, being firmer in their conclusions. RmYN02 was, to the best the experts could tell, a major contribution to figuring out the much larger story behind how SARS-CoV-2 came about. Other contributions would later follow, from none other than Alice Hughes yet again. She had managed to collect four more close relatives in late 2019 and early 2020 before the mantle of silence was thrown over Yunnan, her work, and ultimately herself. Over the next eighteen months, doing science not only became impossible but a liability. Her illuminating results became a sin not easily forgiven by an authoritarian state that had decided by April 2020 that it was politically smarter to keep others and itself in the dark. How did we get here?
§
As the public health crisis unfolded in the West, the Trump administration’s political fortunes increasingly relied on putting their own pandemic failings on China. Scarlett, the so-called bioweapon whistleblower, wasn’t the only one to succeed in the very crowded field or even be the only one entangled with the Trump administration. It is impossible to outline all the plots, ploys, or players involved in shaping public perception. But after we learned how influencers and media manipulators operate, I think it is illustrative to focus on some events that directly sabotaged science and have rippled forward even into the present.
Take the White Coat Waste Project, a niche activist and political pressure group until 2020, founded in 2013 by former Republican strategist Anthony Bellotti. Anthony reportedly had spent years working on efforts to defund Planned Parenthood—a non-profit for reproductive health care—and Obamacare—the health care insurance system President Barack Obama set up. His real passion, however, was animal protection. At least that’s how he portrayed himself to Buzzfeed News, who later worked up most of his story. Anthony’s idea was to win Republicans over for animal welfare, traditionally more of a progressive issue in the US, by reframing the topic as a problem of undue big government funding. The White Coat Waste Project would serve as a “taxpayer watchdog uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers” and put pressure on government labs. Using FOIA requests to investigate governmental labs, the activist group would seek information they could abuse for their agenda. They often combined libertarian and anti-communist coding to appeal to Republican ideologues. For example, with sensationalist reports such as “USDA Kitten cannibalism” superimposed over a Chinese flag and the NIH headquarters, Anthony Belotti had a knack for combining suggestive headlines and shocking imagery with cherry-picked numbers. His policy recommendations, however, were always the same: defund all animal research.
On the one hand, the idea that some US government funding was sent to WIV was not exactly new. Every scientific study coming out of this collaboration publicly acknowledged the fact that WIV received US government funds. No FOIA requests were needed for that. Even pretty ignorant conspiracy theorists had figured out this connection between NIAID, EcoHealth Alliance, and WIV within days in late January, including the correct grant identifiers. Scientific collaborations tend to span the globe, connecting researchers in every major city and most minor cities with each other internationally, especially if they work in the same field. The fact that some grant funding was shared was not exactly newsworthy, at least in the hands of amateurs. Anthony Bellotti, on the other hand, can be fairly described as an experienced activist with deep connections to the highest offices, and he was sitting on precise financial figures for some grants from numerous FOIA requests he had filed in the past. An opportunity presented itself to put White Coat Waste on the political map. Together with US Congressman Matt Gaetz, a long-time collaborator, he convinced reporters at the gossipy British tabloid the Daily Mail, already deeply steeped in conspiratorial narratives, as well as the Washington Examiner, a DC-based right-wing outlet, to cover his story of how US taxpayers funded “dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute,” an eye-catching allegation.
The same day the newspapers put out their story, his activist group used the media coverage they had instigated to petition US Senator Marco Rubio to put pressure on the NIH to stop “financing China.” Less than four days later, a partisan reporter lined up a question about the NIH’s grant for WIV at the Trump press conference. Peter Daszak remembered this moment vividly. He was in the kitchen with his family, the TV playing in the background. Suddenly, he told them to be quiet. Trump had just publicly announced, “We looked at this just an hour ago. We will end that grant very quickly.” A week later, National Institute of Health leaders officially terminated the grant, a move that was not well received by NIH staff, who expressed their disgust at the decision. Shutting down essential pandemic prevention research during a pandemic?
Peter Daszak was not the only one flabbergasted. Many other scientists were equally disturbed that research that had been exceptionally highly rated in peer review and that was directly related to the pandemic could be canceled with a stroke of a pen, at the whim of an erratic president. It rippled through the scientific community, prompting 77 Nobel laureates to come together in the next week and write a scathing letter to the NIH and the health secretary. Another rift between science and society opened by politics. Because the termination was basically illegal, the NIH had to begrudgingly reinstate the grant, but any money flows were suspended immediately until EcoHealth Alliance arranged an outside investigation into WIV. This was an absurd requirement for a non-profit; they simply did not have the power or mandate to demand anything from the Chinese government.
While EcoHealth Alliance would struggle to exist from this day forward, the White Coat Waste Project has since become a household name in Republican circles. Later, White Coat Waste would participate in what I would characterize as smear campaigns against Dr. Fauci and garner influential supporters with deep political ties on their advisory board; such as the ex-State Department advisor David Asher who would be instrumental in seeding other false lab leak stories through the Trump State Department. It seems to me that Anthony Bellotti had long aimed for popularity, persuasion, profit, and power. Sharing deeply decontextualized information with overt emotional framing is what made it happen for him. Such is the attention economy.
However, I believe there is an important thing to be learned from this episode, one that many who documented the rise of this activist group have missed. Before using the lab leak narrative to further their goals, White Coat Waste made several attempts to exploit the attention of the outbreak for personal gain, as political activist organizations tend to do. On March 24th and April 10th, 2020—before they landed the viral media hit about the Wuhan lab funding—White Coat Waste attempted similar-quality fabrications, claiming that US taxpayer money was funding the Chinese wet markets that caused the pandemic. Given the animal cruelty at those wet markets, this was much closer to their hearts. Yet somehow, those narratives just didn’t have the same media impact. Only a laboratory-focused blame story exploded onto the world stage and into the US president’s mind. There surely seems to be an asymmetry in our algorithmically empowered social networks when it comes to what type of content will go viral or not. For certain people—usually those in power—the information sphere somehow seems to always deliver the right story.
As the first COVID-19 wave ravaged US cities, the need for the Trump administration to blame China was dire, but his assertions lacked any credibility. Another opportunist, the Trump-friendly columnist Josh Rogin, writing for The Washington Post, leveraged an old memo from a diplomatic visit in 2018 to the Wuhan Institute. He wrote an inflammatory opinion article based on this diplomatic communication about the supposed lack of lab safety. The story was exceptionally well crafted, basically claiming that diplomatic cables warned the US government about serious issues with WIV BSL-4 lab safety and management weaknesses while performing dangerous research. He backed up the story with damning quotes and a lot of paraphrases. Because the cables Rogin referenced were confidential, it would take months to realize that reportedly, he had skillfully decontextualized the quotes therein, as well as the overall content, to tell a very different story than what was actually in those cables.
The diplomatic visit to WIV was in the context of “planning for a potential visit by Trump and actively looking for positive collaborative efforts that Trump could point to,” Peter Daszak explained to me. In short, they were in preparation for a PR stunt. Peter had seen this many times before with the prestigious PREDICT project, and the visit was to be arranged by USAID and NIH personnel embedded in the embassy. The US had already funded WIV with some grants, and scientific collaborations make for good diplomacy. Chinese researchers hoped that if they explained how they have a fully accredited lab that they cannot use at full capacity because of a “shortage of talent to safely operate,” it would spawn further collaborations with the US and maybe invite researchers to come work with them. It was basically a “come to our cutting-edge facility; we have plenty of space” advertisement. They might even acquire more funding from the US and international organizations to hire more talent for more experiments. The diplomatic cables clearly outlined this context, but Josh Rogin just focused on the “serious shortage” quote that would not allow the lab to operate safely (at full capacity), which seems like an outright omission and the manipulation of his readers. His so-called “biosafety issues” were, however, the substantiation many needed to raise the issue of a laboratory-origin virus again, including the Trump administration.
These supposed revelations were deeply impactful, even causing scientists like Kristian Andersen to second-guess themselves. After Rogin’s reporting, which came with the seal of credibility from The Washington Post, Kristian instigated another round of discussion with his coauthors about whether they had missed something in their proximal origin paper. “If they had bad biosafety, it’s just so friggin’ likely something leaked,” a slack message to colleagues expressed his intuition at the time. He had no reason to distrust the reporting. Why else would The Washington Post publish something with such confidence if they did not have the evidence to back it up? I guess most citizens, including scientists, did not appreciate that when the narrative need for the powerful is dire, the information sphere tends to deliver.
Of course, the powerful have many avenues at their disposal to manipulate the news cycle. As the Trump administration came under more criticism for their mishandling of the pandemic, they quietly enlisted the help of a New York City-based consulting group called O’Donnell & Associates. The “solutions-focused government relations firm” wore only a thin veneer of a consultancy. Best I can tell, they were political fixers, a kind of one-stop-shop for lobbying, procurement, public affairs, crisis management, strategic media relations, and political strategy. By April 17th, they had distributed their “Corona Big Book,” a document full of political talking points that should get GOP politicians in lockstep with the administration. The executive summary included just three short key messages to be constantly repeated: “China caused this pandemic by covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world’s supply of medical equipment. My opponent is soft on China, fails to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party, and can’t be trusted to take them on. I will stand up to China, bring our manufacturing jobs back home, and push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.” After that memo, the president, sitting congressmen, senators, administration officials, and a cottage industry of pundits and outlets, from Breitbart to Fox News and everything in between, would make these talking points their priority. The “Corona Big Book” also provided instructions on what politicians should do when faced with media criticism of the Trump administration’s pandemic failures:
“Note - Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China.”
Of course, the consultants knew that admitting mistakes and trying to defend Trump’s pandemic conduct and handling was a losing strategy in a critical election year. Going on the offensive was the only way out. That is human psychology, maybe even biology: nothing mobilizes the tribe better than attacking a shared enemy.
For a long time, scapegoating China has been a crowd-pleaser in the US, and a shared enemy brings more than just some strange bedfellows. Take, for example, the Epoch Media Group and its many affiliates. The Falun Gong-aligned organization is best described as an anti-communist influence operation, a deep-pocketed propaganda tool that had fallen out of relevance for a long time. When COVID hit, they seized on the opportunity to regain that relevance with wall-to-wall coverage about the “CCP virus,” which was happily amplified by the American right. Much of their shady success story has been worked up by excellent journalists working for The Atlantic and The Guardian. “They’ve been waiting for so long to find some large-scale evidence of the abject villainy of China,” explained a disillusioned former employee to the journalists. He was a source inside the New Tang Dynasty—the TV arm of the Falun Gong-founded propaganda outlet broadcasting in 70 countries. On April 7, 2020, New Tang Dynasty and The Epoch Times released a well-produced, but horribly false, documentary called “Tracking down the origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus”. It featured several credentialed but fringe figures, such as Judy Mikovits, a long-time discredited anti-vaccine activist and later “Plandemic” conspiracy theorist. Accordingly, the documentary took up many half-baked ideas from conspiratorial communities that have festered since the end of January 2020, from HIV sequences to Canadian spies to supposed vaccine patent myths.
This “origin” documentary made a particular point about recycling falsehoods about Shi Zhengli and her American collaborators, such as Ralph Baric, a renowned virologist working with coronaviruses. It also recycled some spurious claims about Chinese military connections and directly stated that Shi Zhengli’s lab was working on bioweapons. According to Angelo Carusone from the non-profit organization Media Matters, such opportunistic retreading of existing conspiracy narratives is characteristic of the Epoch Times and similar outlets. “They’re not drivers, they’re not weaving new conspiracy theories, they’re amplifying what’s already out there,” he said in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. “There’s an incredible demand for a version of the world centered on one big villain,” he told the reporter. The Epoch Times “provides that very simple narrative.” If its lucrative conspiratorial fabrications helped foster resentment against China while serving the Republican Party, all the better. The Epoch Times grew its “revenue by 685% in just two years” on the back of their COVID-19 conspiracy content, an NBC investigation would later report. Conspiracy myths are cash cows in the attention economy, after all.
Predictably, the well-produced Epoch Times “origins” documentary went viral, garnering millions of views on the video platform YouTube alone. Unfortunately, this mattered. For a long time, YouTube has served as a recruitment tool for conspiratorial communities because its curation algorithms and recommender systems learned that the best way to maximize engagement was to drive people down rabbit holes. What is mostly harmless when it comes to entertainment, music, or education is nevertheless a boon for manipulators. A well-produced video on a topic serves as a well-lit gateway into an ecosystem of smaller, more radical niche content that would never have been found otherwise.
Our susceptibility to conspiratorial beliefs exists on a spectrum. While most people would not be taken in, for a subset of individuals, a documentary like this might pique their interest enough to look deeper into the topic. All while algorithmic systems dutifully deliver up whatever is needed to satisfy our confirmation bias. Soon, susceptible citizens are nudged to follow up with more videos, more blogs, more Reddit posts, etc., until they eventually become trapped in false beliefs. Just like Scarlett had been a funnel into the Guo-verse, The Epoch Times “origin” documentary drove curious viewers into an alternative media ecosystem with the help of YouTube’s engagement algorithm, creating a willing audience segment for more related content.
On top of that, The Epoch Times documentary and similar works of conspiratorial fiction also served another important purpose. In its 54 minutes of collecting and amplifying currently circulating conspiracy myths, it created a shared set of alternative facts from which to create spin-offs. With its popular success, a willing community of online creators started producing content for this very specific, conspiratorial niche market. The “lab leak myth-entertainment complex” was born. And demand for influencers who delivered content for it was rising fast.
Like pandemics before it, COVID-19 was always expected to inspire the birth of fear-based narratives and conspiracy myths. But what event in human history has ever seen more attention than a worldwide health crisis paired with a geopolitical blame game between two superpowers about who caused it? Glued to our screens and in need of pandemic-relevant information, many citizens not only witnessed the show but felt somewhat invested, or were at least interested, in the outcome.
Soon, on every social media network, from YouTube and Reddit to WhatsApp and WeChat to Facebook and Twitter, virtually everywhere, independent man-made content creators saw an increase in their popularity, followers, and demand. With it, something quite interesting happened. Market competition. Some influencers got bored of the Trump-associated pundits and MAGA machinery dominating the lab leak narrative when they had much, much richer stories to tell that would resonate with different audiences. After all, wherever there is popular demand for a hot take, there is also power.
One of the most vocal and influential conspiratorial communities found in opposition to the “natural” origin of COVID-19 was a group of mostly anonymous Twitter amateurs, wannabe investigators, and internet sleuths who fell a bit too deep down the rabbit hole. Supposedly trying to uncover the truth about what really happened in Wuhan, they had spent months googling their way through the internet for answers. Right-wing blogs, scientific databases, Chinese papers, and researcher affiliations were scrutinized with the hope of trying to connect the dots to uncover a gigantic cover-up conspiracy. The fact that most of their theories were mutually contradictory was not as important as finding supposed plot holes in the “official narrative.” In a sleuthing practice sometimes called “anomaly hunting,” these motivated conspiracy theorists would look for unexplained coincidences, trivial errors, or—to be completely honest—anything that seemed unintuitive to their understanding as evidence of their deeply felt suspicions. The fact that BtCoV-4991—an earlier partial sequencing of the virus now known as RaTG13 after the full genome sequencing by Shi Zhengli’s group—was identical to the closest ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 had puzzled them for months. Did Zhengli hide the real ancestor of SARS-CoV-2? Was RaTG13 real or made up? Where did BtCoV-4991 even come from?
By April 2020, when the lab leak advocates from the US government and right-wing media to the anti-CCP Chinese diaspora and Indian nationalists were in dire need of new material, media manipulators went fishing for clues and new stories on Twitter. Soon, headlines such as “Is Bat coronavirus 4991 a smoking gun for China’s COVID-19 cover-up?” would find a willing audience and elevate random Twitter sleuths to their minute of fame. Around this time, social media-savvy journalists and influencers alike paid close attention to possible lab leak scoops to boost their profiles, too.
By May 2020, a group of like-minded conspiracy theorists had found another and combined forces under the acronym DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), a self-proclaimed sleuth collective with the self-prescribed mission to independently investigate the origins of COVID. When an Indian teacher, known by the handle “TheSeeker268,” uncovered (read: found on a publicly accessible Chinese website) a 2016 Chinese PhD thesis, all hell broke loose. It was from one of George Gao’s students, Huang Canping, who described BtCoV-4991 and said that it was collected from an abandoned copper mine shaft in Yunnan after miners came down with a deadly illness. Soon, DRASTIC knew what to google next: mainly contemporary reports from 2014 about the deaths of the miners and how Zhengli’s team went to the mine because the suspicion had been a coronavirus. What a coincidence—finding the closest ancestor (they knew about) related to this pandemic with mysterious deaths of the past! For many conspiracy theorists, this “undisclosed connection” was finally proof that the official narrative was wrong, and in their furor, they would start attacking Peter Daszak on Twitter. The zoologist, ever in the media since the public cancellation of his grant funding, had become the Western stand-in for Zhengli, who did not frequent any Western social media. Naively, Peter would try to argue on Twitter and correct the record as best he could, but arguing with true believers just makes them more obsessed with defending their beliefs and more likely to double down. For them, Peter was defending her, so it must mean that he was in on the cover-up, too. His life would take a similar trajectory to hers soon enough.
In the meantime, the “dead miners” idea would provide a treasure trove for further myth-making for vocal DRASTIC members. Most of them were spending countless hours a day creating arguments, screenshots, personal analyses, and similar content while throwing doubt on the “official narrative” or swarming the comments of virologists and picking fights with them publicly. Soon, some Twitter bystanders, a group enriched with bloggers, journalists, and other amplifiers in need of constant scoops, would follow them down the rabbit hole, opening the door to even more mainstream media interest. With their sensationalist stories about the secret COVID-19-Yunnan connection came unwelcome real-life consequences for scientists on the ground.
This brings us back to how Alice Hughes’s work in Yunnan and how her whole life was uprooted. As the pandemic’s impact worsened—and the constant media drumbeat and political environment made sure Beijing would never get a fair hearing on the origin issue—obfuscation and deflection were likely the only plays that Beijing felt it had. “At first, everyone was out there looking for an answer,” Alice explained. “And then it became apparent that no matter what answer we found, the world was not going to listen. The outcome they wanted was ‘Let’s blame China’.”
Discovering SARS-CoV-2-related viruses in Yunnan looked bad for Beijing. Taking cues from their geopolitical adversaries and ideological enemies, scientists and inconvenient science would subsequently be attacked on both sides of the Pacific. As mentioned before, scientists tend to have an allegiance to the truth, not the state, which makes them inherently suspect to politicians. A liability. What other undesired discoveries would they make? Initially welcomed, scientific efforts to shed light on the origin of COVID-19 were now seen as a potential threat to the larger party narrative. These tensions between inconvenient scientific reality and politically motivated fictions only deepened as time progressed. It wouldn’t take long for scientists to find themselves on the wrong team when conducting the type of research that was Alice Hughes’s specialty—research that could actually uncover the true origin of COVID-19 in China.
One has to understand that Beijing was not only threatened geopolitically by origin science but also domestically. During the lockdown in Wuhan, China’s ruling party came under increasing pressure to deal with the fallout of the virus. Catastrophic images of people sealed into buildings, the death of Li Wenliang, the doctor-whistleblower reprimanded for sharing a first lab report about the virus in late December, and the starvation of a disabled teenager because supplies could not be arranged or delivered—it all merged together to provoke an unprecedented national outpouring of grief and anger at authorities. A cacophony of misery is often a fuse for political change and an existential threat to the regime. For Beijing, it meant it had to do everything in its power to deflect blame and reassert control of public sentiment again, using tried-and-tested propaganda about foreign enemies and Chinese victimhood to unite its people. Taking any responsibility for the pandemic, even acknowledging it started in China, quickly became unthinkable politically.
Alice Hughes recalled that in the beginning, people were allowed to say the outbreak started in Wuhan and at the Huanan market. The authorities wanted bat researchers like her to go out and find the cause of the “natural catastrophe” that was the outbreak. “All efforts, all teams across China were incentivized to look more at wildlife, and no work on bio-surveillance of fur farms, etc. was done… because they wanted to find a ‘blameless reason’ initially,” Alice explained to me. From day one, looking too closely at the wildlife trade or smuggling industry was dangerous. But a few months after the pandemic started, under pressure from outside and inside China, finding a blameless reason for the outbreak became increasingly impossible. Panicked, the ruling elite needed to point away from its own failings at any cost. Yet having what appeared to be a repeat of SARS-1—possibly because of the often-illegal wildlife trade (trade in those markets even of exotic wildlife can be legal with the right permissions, which are however often lacking in reality) at wet markets that was allowed to persist under their noses—certainly looked bad for the authorities. Despite early acknowledgments by the Chinese CDC—which wrote on January 22, 2020, about how their investigation found that wildlife trade at the Huanan market existed and that this was “highly suspected” to be related to the current epidemic—any mentions about these activities at the market would soon be promptly removed from social media by censors and banned from the press. The state-controlled media apparatus rather opted to sow doubt, deflect blame, and support any absurd origin theory that deflected from the illegal wildlife trade at the market, a scattershot strategy that science journalist Jon Cohen would aptly call “anywhere but here.” Chinese authorities also cooled down dramatically on supporting any related bat research that could lead to inconvenient findings.
“During the pandemic, people became extremely risk-averse,” Alice Hughes explained. With the pressure to not contradict the official narrative, self-censorship and shutting down activities that could unearth inconvenient data took over in Chinese society. A lot was at stake when not trotting the party line, especially for local politicians.
“Now, if you are that government official, you do not want to be blamed; you do not want to go to jail, so the easiest way to protect yourself is to put blocks in place.”
Alice said. Blocks to research, blocks to scientists’ movement, blocks to information flow with respect to anything and anyone that might make them look bad. According to Alice, the only way out for local authorities, as well as Beijing, was trying “to not let this inconvenient information be generated in the first place.”
This is when things escalated for Alice. By the summer of 2020, her team had already identified four additional closely related cousins of SARS-CoV-2 in wild bats. The first time her team was brought into the police station for questioning about their sampling in Yunnan was when the RaTG13-dead miners’ story first surged in Western media. A few months after the story appeared in the media, Western and Chinese journalists tried to gain access to the copper mine in Yunnan, much to the ire of local authorities. A team of international correspondents would be blocked by a quickly arranged roadblock using cars on the street. The Western press lavished on that incident, with John Sudworth from the BBC being first with his story titled “Bats, roadblocks and the origin of coronavirus,” pushing the idea of a cover-up in Yunnan to the world stage. To them, obfuscation was proof that the Chinese were hiding something in that region.
Being blocked from the mine did not stop their search for a sensationalist story in the region, raising the temperature with authorities even further. Unfortunately, this culminated in some Western journalists opting to break into Alice’s institute and interrogate her bat researchers while she was not around. Their recklessness brought Alice into a very dangerous position, whom authorities now suspected her as a foreigner of coordinating, or even inviting, these investigations by foreign journalists. “There are a lot of dishonest journalists out there who just want to tell their story.” She lamented how the press often treated her, using cherry-picked half-quotes that sound damning without the necessary context and caveats. Even worse for Alice, these journalists acted without regard for the consequences their behavior had on scientists in China. Alice has been under surveillance by the State Security Bureau ever since. It became impossible for her to speak up while in China. The journalists swarming to Yunnan, with various innuendo-laden and ignorant stories about alleged cover-ups, prompted Beijing and local authorities to restrict and silence any and all information coming from its southern province.
“The same thing has happened in Russia and China for decades. This is how these countries operate. And that means even if there is nothing to cover up, because of that risk adversity and need to control the narrative, that is how it operates”
Alice shared her perspective. For the outside world, the restrictions in Yunnan looked suspicious, even like an admission of guilt. It gave credence and power to that particular “dead-miners” lab-leak conspiracy myth. But isn’t that story also a bad outcome for Beijing? Well, not necessarily. Let’s look a bit deeper.
Interestingly, while a mantle of silence would be thrown over the wildlife trade, bat sampling, and, ultimately, the whole of Yunnan, the notoriously censorious government would not suppress conspiracy myths about WIV. We can only speculate as to the exact reason, but if Alice were to hedge a bet, it was because these myths were perfect for Beijing to use as a prime example of malicious foreigners making baseless accusations. “Within China, any suggestion of a bioweapon was basically pushed back, with Fort Detrick and the military games being the source. It was looked at from the outset as the West trying to blame China without evidence,” Alice recalled. Absurd bioweapon allegations from abroad reinforced the perception among Chinese citizens that they would be unfairly blamed no matter what; it made the propaganda of Chinese victimhood feel true. Emotions are important for shaping beliefs and worldviews. For Beijing, the only perception that truly counted for the stability of the regime was that of its own citizens, not foreigners. They realized the lab-origin idea, with a little tweak to the location, was working in their favor.
Politically, Beijing’s gamble worked. Today, a majority of Chinese citizens still believe that the virus likely originated in an American lab and was brought to Wuhan during an event in October, while others remain suspicious about the US-funded lab in Wuhan. Either way, the US was involved, and few believe that Beijing could have done much to prevent it. Overall, it was silly and reactionary finger-pointing, reminiscent of the Trump administration. But I guess geopolitical blame games are a two-way street that governments are very comfortable with, at least more comfortable than taking responsibility for their numerous pandemic failings.
Meanwhile, Chinese scientists felt the cold grip of rapidly increasing repression surrounding any research that could find something unwelcome or be construed as non-patriotic. The Chinese Academy of Science and the Health Bureau soon began demanding strict oversight over any and all papers, as well as exerting vetoes on publications, collaborations, and data sharing. The public’s right to know was irrelevant to CCP leaders; it seems to me that what mattered to them was not being held or seen responsible for the devastating pandemic. If that meant that some innocent scientists like Shi Zhengli were taking the brunt of the public’s frustrations, that was collateral damage they likely could live with.
With every passing day, abuse and harassment directed at ‘the Batwoman’ became dramatically worse. Hundreds of hacking attempts to break into the institute’s servers prompted the takedown of a viral database. Zhengli was worried about the integrity of her data, but that database takedown in February provided just more ammunition for conspiracy theorists around the world.
The Twitter group DRASTIC went so far as to claim the database was taken down shortly before the pandemic in an attempt to cover up that Zhengli was working on multiple SARS-CoV-2-related viruses, but that is not factual. Today, we know that Shi Zhengli was not hiding any viral sequences, partly through her own publications and partly through a lucky coincidence—forgotten sequences from an unpublished manuscript from 2018 resurfaced in 2022 from behind an embargo. It showed that she did not possess anything closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 and was not interested in this distant clade of viruses because they were just not related enough to SARS-1. In the fifteen years she has spent hunting for coronaviruses, she only ever found one virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2, and that was in that mine in Yunnan. She found just enough damaged RNA leftover in the bat anal swab sample to run full genome sequencing. That the RaTG13 sequence in her computer would be taken as proof of her guilt, while Alice Hughes’s team was not only sitting on a partially closer ancestor but also a handful of other closely related viral family members they had just sampled in China that year from bats in the wild, is likely one of the great ironies of our ignorant times.
Despite living in the information age, with an incredible amount of knowledge at our fingertips, we seem less and less capable of making sense of our world. The idea that some live-action role-playing investigators on Twitter—with no expertise and obvious conspiratorial ideations—had any insights to offer on a scientific mystery should raise a lot of red flags. Indeed, serious journalists could see that these were anonymous amateurs who had no credibility and were not trustworthy. But somehow, they were amplified anyway because they provided stories that were both popular with audiences and served the interests of certain powerful actors. However, news outlets with a reputation for quality were still reluctant to jump on the lab leak narrative. What they truly needed was a more presentable face and a credible background to sell those stories to their audiences. They didn’t have to wait long because, also for them, the information age always seems to deliver.
Reminiscent of the trajectory of the ambitious bioweapon whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan, another ambitious postdoc named Dr. Alina Chan would soon rise to the occasion. After respectable work for her PhD in yeast genetics, Alina moved to Harvard Medical School, working on methods to transfer large chunks of genetic material from yeast to mammalian cell culture. After three years with no first-author publication, she switched labs to a group at the Broad Institute, another prestigious place affiliated with both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, it appears to me that her struggles for impact continued because in these cutting-edge environments, one either gets lucky and makes a name for oneself or is eventually pushed out of academia. Success seemingly did not come fast enough. Alina was already weighing her options and branching out, serving in an advisory role on a longevity start-up company working on human artificial chromosomes for the last 6 months of 2019 I would learn. However, this ran out as well. With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, new opportunities arose.
It was fantastic to see in real-time how half of the world’s biology laboratories wanted to help with COVID-19. What is less spoken about, however, is how many of those research groups lacking historical expertise added to a flood of substandard and flawed preprints, even from renowned labs. And while peer review typically weeds out most flawed preprints, in hectic times, journalists and the public have jumped the gun again and again, amplifying flawed analyses such as the alleged HIV-insertions from Indian researchers that went viral in the media. Equally bad is when sensationalist media coverage and the current news cycle are used by researchers to inform their project ideas.
Alina Chan’s preprint started with a flawed assumption based on contemporary reporting at the time that SARS-CoV-2 seemed not to mutate much in the beginning. Today, of course, we know this idea was rubbish, having seen this virus evolve in real-time and suffer through the various variant waves, from alpha to delta to omicron, sweeping the world. But at the time, with limited sequencing data, bad inferences were easily made by the countless makeshift virologists of the moment. Alina Chan and her two coauthors apparently thought that by making a side-by-side comparison of the genetic diversity of a handful of genomes from SARS-CoV-2 to a handful from the first SARS cases, the stability of mutations could somehow be estimated, and conclusions about evolutionary dynamics could be drawn. They claimed to have discovered a striking result: while the SARS virus had adapted rapidly to humans, no such adaptation happened in SARS-CoV-2, thus the latter must have somehow been already adapted for humans. Where this adaptation happened could not be said for certain. Since at least March, Alina had been quite intrigued by the idea that a laboratory leak was responsible, at least from her social media comments. In her preprint, she suggested that the virus “adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely”—words that would make much hay in the press later.
Good science establishes the facts first before coming to the interpretation, and her “facts” did not hold up. In my opinion, the problems with her preprint ultimately boil down to trivial mistakes and inexperience, as is not unusual for newcomers to a field. Her approach was like comparing apples to oranges because she did not familiarize herself enough with the scientific literature of SARS. By the time SARS spilled over to cause an outbreak that made people notice, it had already diversified its genome for months in animals.
“The first eleven cases of SARS-CoV-1 were geographically dispersed across a wide area from Foshan to Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta area of southern China and occurred over a 4-month period from November 2002 to March 2003”, Robert Garry, a CoV virologist from Tulane University, would dryly note in response to her preprint. “None of these eleven cases were epidemiologically linked. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that SARS-CoV-1 from these human cases had a common viral ancestor from a human.” He elaborated further that SARS did not “rapidly adapt” to humans, but rather those observed cases had a higher genetic diversity because a diverse set of SARS viruses spilled over from an animal population—thus were introduced repeatedly to humans, seven of the 11 being wildlife traders—many independent times over months. Dr. Chan made a dramatic scientific error in modeling these early SARS cases as patients being related to each other—coming from the same introduction event—when they were not. Thus, it appeared to her that the SARS mutation rate was hypercharged from one patient to the next rather than just a flawed comparison.
Her next mistake was assuming that, because SARS had supposedly been adapting “rapidly” compared to SARS-CoV-2, it follows that the latter must have already been adapted to humans. A pretty bold leap for a trivial analysis that basically comes down to counting the number of mutations on a handful of genomes for each virus. But usually, to make such a strong inference in science, a lot more detailed work would usually be required, such as mutational scans, binding studies, phylogenetic modeling, or similar. Something more than simply counting mutations based on a flawed comparison. “Setting aside the naivety of this argument from a virological perspective,” CoV virologist Robert Garry noted dryly, “an extensive analysis utilizing a more complete dataset and taking into account progenitor viruses...” basically showed that the substitution rate—a measure for the speed of adaptation—had actually been slightly lower for SARS-CoV-1 than SARS-CoV-2. In other words, SARS-COV-2 was slightly less well adapted to humans than SARS, even by Dr. Chan’s own naive assumptions. Furthermore, even in those early genomes she used for her analysis, the first dramatic human adaptation, a mutation in the spike protein called D614G, had already occurred but somehow was ignored by Alina and her co-authors. No matter how one looked at it, SARS-CoV-2 was not pre-adapted compared to SARS by any means. Alina Chan’s whole scientific conclusion rested on a naive premise, an erratic comparison, and the ignoring of relevant sequencing data.
With that, Dr. Alina Chan’s venture into virological fame should have met an abrupt but mostly quiet end, like so many other preprints at the time. It was not a factual contribution to our knowledge. However, the boundary between fact and fiction is no obstacle when a story serves the interests of the powerful, the motivated, or the popular. And none other than the motivated conspiracy theorists at DRASTIC would ultimately make sure that Alina’s analysis would be discovered by the right amplifiers.
After Alina published her flawed preprint online, she posted a “tweetorial”—basically a bullet-point version of the findings and their implications on Twitter—on May 4, 2020. At first, nobody cared. Or, better said, nobody noticed. I can imagine it must have stung to get so little resonance. In the following days, Alina seemingly tried to participate in various online conversations about the origin to raise awareness about her preprint, again with little engagement. Then luck would intervene; a conspiratorial Twitter account that had spent the last 16 hours posting on the “RaTG13-dead miners” topic finally engaged with her and started tagging all the DRASTIC members, as well as Peter Daszak to get him to respond to their allegations, all in Alina’s Twitter thread. Tagging can be an efficient way to get engagement.
What followed was that Peter Daszak took the bait. He tried to clarify his role, which was that EcoHealth actually did not fund and was not involved in the Yunnan sampling in 2013 that found RaTG13. Because so many DRASTIC people were tagged and saw Peter Daszak engage—he was already an enemy to them at the time—an epic, multi-day-long, hundreds-of-comments-spanning group argument ensued (referred to as a “pile on”) right in Alina’s preprint Twitter thread. This meant that anyone who saw any of the comments from that fight would see Alina’s post on top. Alina started engaging with DRASTIC members right at a time when their “mysterious deaths at Mojiang-Mine” story became popular. Many amplifiers who followed the story of the miners suddenly saw their timeline fill up with Alina Chan’s replies and, with it, her “pre-adapted virus” preprint. Finally, on May 16th, her preprint was picked up by a writer and long-time lab leak believer from the British tabloid Daily Mail with the sensationalist title “‘Coronavirus did NOT come from animals in Wuhan market’: Landmark study suggests…” referring to her preprint. It further continued:
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that analysis of the coronavirus by specialist biologists suggests that all available data shows it was taken into the market by someone already carrying the disease. They also say they were ‘surprised’ to find the virus was ‘already pre-adapted to human transmission’, contrasting it to another coronavirus that evolved rapidly as it spread around the planet in a previous epidemic.
Well, not only did Alina’s preprint not make most of these extravagant claims about the market, but she also did not bother to correct the flawed reporting, or at least cautioned that it was just a preprint and had not passed peer review. Instead, it appears that she doubled down and gave interviews with more daring follow-ups. Her study was ultimately never published in the scientific literature because of its obvious flaws. But at the time, it did not need to pass any quality control or scientific merit check because it delivered a powerful idea to motivated audiences and media manipulators alike: the virus was pre-adapted to humans, and thus a laboratory origin can not only not be ruled out; it might even be the only logical explanation.
After the Daily Mail article greased the gears of Alina’s meteoric rise, the American magazine Newsweek wrote a front-page cover story about it, a beacon to signal right-leaning audiences and manipulators alike that maybe there is “alternative science” they could use for their political myth-making. A week after that, the British Viscount Matt Ridley, a wealthy conservative writer best known for his climate change contrarianism, AIDS-origin conspiracism, and general rightwing political activism, noticed Dr. Alina Chan. A regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, The Telegraph, and many other mainstream outlets, it seems that he became intrigued by Alina and what role she could play. As a – in my opinion - veteran manipulator on ideologically inconvenient scientific issues, he probably saw the potential of a young, presentable, media-hungry, contrarian researcher with the credentials of elite academic institutions. They struck up a collaboration that would soon yield one of the most manipulative works of fiction of the pandemic, a book called “Viral” that took the Mojiang miner story front and center to argue for a lab leak origin.
Alina had finally gotten her shot in the attention economy. It certainly seemed to me that she was apt at playing her cards. Media interviews, publicly throwing doubt on scientists, catchy memes, false equivalencies, manipulative framings, misleading commentary, and creating new myths to circulate to the press — she proved a natural at playing the contrarian outsider, the underdog against the scientific establishment. After her flawed preprint, she tried to question the authenticity of the pangolin sequences, and positioned the role of the furin cleavage site as likely artificially introduced. Most often, however, I observed that she opted to — mostly dishonestly, sometimes fairly — criticize the work of domain experts. In my opinion, she had a real talent for repackaging conspiratorial narratives into mainstream visibility by giving them a veneer of scientific rigor. The roots of her talking points, however, are not her own creation but rather a recycling of the sleuthing work of DRASTIC, a connection that sometimes led to sour grapes with the conspiracy theorists who felt their work and ownership over certain ideas infringed upon I would learn.
“Chan has sometimes acted as a clearinghouse for lab-leak clues, knocking down the loopiest ones but elevating others,” the MIT Technology Review would write in a charitable profile documenting Dr. Chan’s rise to fame and social media influence. What the article left out is that the falsehoods she would pick up upon were, at least in my opinion, clearly carefully selected to craft herself as a hero-martyr, a truth-teller, exposing a cabal of virologists who hid the truth of their reckless misdeeds and culpability from the world. She presented herself to the MIT Technology Review as a whistleblower who only wanted to get the truth out, then change her name and disappear. None of that was true. Three years on, she has leveraged her name and fame into positions she is scientifically unqualified for, best I can tell, such as the Bulletin’s pathogens project and has enjoyed mainstream platforms and coverage ever since. Scientists might believe that citizens deserve good information, yet influencers use information not to inform citizens but for persuasion, popularity, profit, or power. I would argue that abusing the veneer of scientific inquiry and the trope of an anti-establishment maverick, Dr. Alina Chan managed to leverage her identity and credentials at the right time to tell her audience and the powerful what they wanted to hear.
She was, of course, neither the first nor the most successful contrarian academic influencer to play such a role, nor would she be the last. No matter where one looked online in 2020, academically credentialed influencers and contrarian medical doctors seemed to pop up left and right in opposition to whatever scientific topic made the news cycle of the day. It was an opaque phenomenon that has become a new reality in the information age. From the fearmongering myths about mRNA vaccines to the supposed dangers of masks, from vitamin crazes to alleged repressed miracle cures such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin against COVID, “alternative facts” about anything pandemic-related were starting to dominate our information spheres.
It seems that if enough media attention is kept on a specific topic for long enough, no matter if through organic interest, powerful amplifiers or via inauthentic amplification schemes as we have seen with Scarlett, a fight will eventually break out between two opposing poles: one upholding facts, the other self-serving fiction. These two poles keep the argument alive until it becomes self-reinforcing, even self-sustaining, with no further input required. It is a crowd-sourced phenomenon that seems to create its own supply. The lab leak myth-entertainment complex, a cottage industry of creators, commentators, influencers, politicians, and conspiracy theorists, made sure to create ever-new stories for willing and unwitting audiences alike. Its sole purpose was to nudge, shock, delight, or enrage citizens into engagement and keep them coming back for more. Over time, this entertainment complex created its own heroes and villains, spinning tales about supposed victims, martyrs, and luminaries. As Dr. Alina Chan’s media stardom rose, she gained glowing profiles in the press that would make some Nobel laureates blush. She was invited to scientific panels and even the UK parliament to publicly pontificate outside her expertise, and she was getting a lucrative book deal arranged by the well-connected Matt Ridley. Everything just seemed to fall into place for her.
In stark contrast, actual researchers on the ground, such as Alice Hughes, have seen their lives slowly dismantled, their movements inhibited, their speech censored, their students interrogated, and their research blocked and criminalized. Leaving Yunnan was personally painful and terrible for her career. “Starting fresh at this stage of my career was incredibly difficult,” she explained. She even had to take a demotion in Hong Kong after being a full professor in Yunnan, “and that hurt, as I had to really fight to get it.” Most of all, she missed her team and all the students she mentored and had to leave behind. When she arrived in Hong Kong in late December 2021, she landed in an empty apartment without even a bed to sleep in, lying on the hard floor pondering what to do next. She wanted to build up a small team and try to become a full professor again. “I tell myself it was only a title, and it is not gonna stop me from doing what I care about,” she confessed to me, but she was not naive about the setback and the difficulties ahead.
Doing science to find the origin of the pandemic had put a target on her and other scientists’ backs. Alice would later learn from a former acquaintance that her freedom might have quite possibly been in real danger had she remained in Yunnan. Staggering personal costs for trying to create real knowledge, rather than commentary, for society. “All we wanted to do was good, meaningful science that made a difference,” she told me with a tone of distant sadness I will never be able to forget. “My life has basically been on hold since the pandemic because, yeah, we found significant stuff, and because of that, we had to change our entire life.”
Compare this to merely commenting pundits, contrarians, and influencers with no skin in the game who found themselves rewarded mightily for selling myth, manipulation, and magical thinking surrounding the uncertain origins of the virus. An all-consuming, narrative-creating propaganda machine—one that democratic citizens once believed only possible in authoritarian states—seemed to have found its disturbing crowd-sourced facsimile in our digital spaces. In 2021, we would see that propaganda machine take over elite beliefs, mainstream institutions, and ultimately the world stage, sabotaging the WHO mission to Wuhan and wider scientific inquiry, and with it, our best chance of figuring out where the virus really came from. How was that possible? How can online chatter and narratives have this power?
I believe we might be able to start understanding by taking an insider’s view into the events and mechanisms that drove our descent into collective confusion.
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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