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.
Heavy breaths followed a claustrophobic chase around the hotel room. Peter Daszak was doing his workout run from the showers through the bedroom to the antechamber and back, again and again and again. The Chinese hosts in Wuhan had placed him in quarantine for two weeks, and the pressure, isolation, and restrictions were difficult to deal with at times. He was an outdoor person. Twice daily, a team in full hazmat gear would knock on his door to take his temperature. “It really makes you feel dirty. Contagious,” he remembered thinking. He was not the only one.
Marion Koopmans was two rooms away. “It was amazing; they were so strict. I really thought, ‘Okay, this is how plague victims must have felt.’ You really felt like contaminated waste, almost.” She showed me photos she’d taken at the time. “It’s dystopia; they have made a plastic corridor for us.” Plastic sheeting completely covered the hallway from top to bottom. They were sampled as per instructions: 5-second swabs and not a millisecond less. Everyone was suited up except them. Warning signs and restriction bands were everywhere. China had been COVID-free for months. She just hoped she would not get a fever from anything else because it was not clear what would happen if she did. And yet, they, along with eight other international experts, were finally there, where it all happened. “We had been asked before to be quiet about where we would go before,” she laughed, “then we landed in China and had an escort everywhere and a charade of media following us.”
Peter Daszak and Marion Koopmans were two obvious scientists to reach out to when the WHO was assembling a mission to Wuhan in January 2021. Peter, the British zoologist, and head of the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, had worked for decades on understanding viral spillover from bats, identified the origin of SARS with Shi Zhengli from WIV, and worked together with various emergent disease collaborators all over the world. He would be on the WHO’s animal and environment working group, trying to make sense of what happened at the Huanan market.
I did not particularly want to serve. It irritated me. My big grant was canceled by Trump, and we went through months and months of misery. And I thought, “Why the hell should I help WHO? Doing the work that we should be doing for them?” That just seemed cruel, and then I am asked to volunteer for them?
On the phone, he told Peter Karim Ben Embarek, who had assembled the mission, that he didn’t want to do it. On top of that, his participation would invite terrible political attacks on the WHO. Embarek just replied, “What’s new?” The WHO has been under attack on a daily basis; he naively believed it wouldn’t matter. Then, the WHO mission chief reiterated the enormous significance this work would have for the world. After some back and forth, Peter said that he would be available to the group, but he did not want to do fieldwork. “Ben said okay, but he did not take this as an answer; he kind of treated me like I was on the team.” Peter shrugged at how he ended up on the mission. The WHO team knew what they were doing and why they wanted him. “They wanted access to Chinese scientists, not just [because of] the lab issue, but because George Gao and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were investigating the outbreak… so the WHO needed somebody close to them.” Reports suggested that Beijing had indicated he would be a good person to have on the team. As best I can tell from Embarek’s comments, the suggestion came from Shi Zhengli herself. “It’s obvious if you got a researcher who you’ve been working with for 20 years who has not ripped you off, who had been honest with them,” Peter explained the likely rationale. It is worth retelling how Peter came to be on the WHO team because many conspiracy theorists claim that he inserted himself purposefully to aid in a possible cover-up. His email records with Ben Embarek tell a much different story: one of hesitation and duty. Until October, he still did not want to go to Wuhan.
It was only on our first call when I saw the list that I had to begin to consider it. Fabian Leendertz was there, and a bunch of other people I had heard about. It was a very impressive team. Marion Koopmans was there too, and she is fantastic.
After that first video call, he decided to commit to the mission.
In the end, you just get carried over by the feeling of duty. This is what a scientist is supposed to do. If the outbreak of a global pandemic happens to be from a virus family you have been working on for years in the place you have been working, probably from the animals you have been working with, of course you should be sitting on that committee, trying to do everything you can.
The Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans, who was scanning me with a gazing look behind sharp spectacles and white, spiky hair as she listened in on our conversation, agreed with that sentiment. She has investigated countless outbreaks in her career. She had started with noroviruses, hepatitis A virus, bird flu, and arboviruses. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, she was responsible for the deployment of mobile laboratories in Liberia and Sierra Leone. One would be hard-pressed to find anyone more knowledgeable and experienced to study novel outbreaks. She was very quick and to the point. “Every virus, and with it every outbreak, is different,” she explained. However, “with every spillover, you have a couple of key questions.” Hospital records, patient samples, and molecular and sampling data tend to be spread out over multiple locations, times, and people. Her job was to make sense of it. For her, the WHO reaching out and wanting her on the team was “the honor of a lifetime.” She did not hesitate to say yes.
“I was leading the molecular epidemiology interaction. That collaboration actually was nice." She lauded her team and the Chinese collaborators. They basically had to figure out, from all the available data, which person, which genomic sequence, and what time. Putting that puzzle into place was challenging. The team made recommendations for analysis, and the Chinese side actually had scientists performing the work in real-time. “I think this group was maybe the least political because what you could do with genomics was not clear yet,” she laughed wholeheartedly. Indeed, the early epidemiologically linked sequences her team helped to establish and verify would hold incredibly important clues to the virus’s origin.
She was not a fan of the simple narrative that took hold that the Chinese were not sharing data with them. “Yes, there can be more transparency, but look at all that was shared.” She continued, “It was remarkable. There were no agreements in place. If somebody came to us and said, ‘Give us all your hospital and patient data,’ there is no way this would work.” Yet, as she says, the Chinese scientists tried hard to make much of it work.
That does not mean everything went smoothly, either. The WHO mission had two delegations: one of international scientists and one of Chinese scientists. The latter was constantly monitored and assisted by members of State Security, Foreign Affairs, and translators. “It was clear it is going to be this China-style process—you have these meetings where there is the director’s director, the director, the subdirector, and blah-blah—and everybody has to say something, and only then can you get to business.” Marion rolled her eyes. Working day and night analyzing data and being on group calls and meetings while in quarantine had been a strain, but their schedule afterward would not be much easier. The first two days out of quarantine, January 29th and 30th, they visited the Xinhua Hospital to interview doctors and staff and learn about patients.
There was the obligatory political visit to the “Anti-Epidemic Exhibition Hall,” a memorial to the “heroic” actions of Chinese authorities in defeating the virus in Wuhan. Like in my interview with George Gao from the Chinese CDC, their Chinese hosts felt it was incredibly important to stress to foreigners how well they handled the outbreak. Peter Daszak showed me some footage he shot with his phone, and it was every bit as red communist propaganda as one might imagine. Life-size statues of doctors in various poses, heroic background music, and testimonies running on screens about the greatness of the leaders winning the war against the virus. Not exactly subtle. However, he still found it to be “really moving.” That was the point. The Chinese authorities wanted to convince the WHO mission, as well as the world, of a different perspective on the outbreak. Not of failure, blame, and death, but of heroic strife, folk bravery, and overcoming the odds. China had been COVID-free for many months, while the US and other countries were suffocated by the virus. Doesn’t that show Chinese superiority?
Any hubris that they might have signaled fell short of reality when the WHO team arrived at the next stop.
On January 31, 2021, more than a year after the outbreak emerged from there, the WHO mission finally visited the Huanan seafood market. “You walk into a dark hall; it is smelly. It still had white patches of disinfectant powder. It was eerie, like ground zero.” Marion Koopmans lent me her eyes for this visit. She found it really impressive to be there. “There were these assumptions that, oh, this was a very modern market… This idea went out the window fast,” she elaborated.
“This was a wet market like any other I have ever been to,” Peter Daszak concurred. It had a mix of seafood, vegetables, restaurants, and live animals, all “stacked on top of each other; cages, freezers, [and] tools to move or process animals.” It was not that different from many other wet markets in China and Southeast Asia. Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist from Australia, also elaborated on his experiences. “I thought to myself, you could not script a better place to have an outbreak.” He had been part of the WHO team that investigated the first SARS outbreak in 2003. “Dark tunnels, open drains, cages, people’s… you know. You could see sleeping quarters next, or a perfect place to start an outbreak of anything; doesn’t matter whether it’s a virus or salmonella or whatever.”
The international scientists were allowed to go around by themselves. Marion was still taken in by the experience. “To see how messy the place was. There was an open sewer channel with stuff floating through there.” In wet markets where animals are handled, they are often butchered alive in front of the customers by skilled vendors. The open sewage is for the animal guts that splash on the floor; they just get swept into the sewer. “Sometimes stray cats have a go at it,” Peter offered as an amusing anecdote.
The market had been shut down and decontaminated before the arrival of scientists from the Chinese CDC. The CDC investigators found a hastily abandoned place with no live animals, stocks of frozen food, and few vendors from which to take testimony. Yet that does not mean Chinese scientists didn’t try to figure out what happened.
“People who had done the environmental sampling showed us what they did, what they moved, and it really gives a feel for the place,” Marion Koopmans explained. It was more or less a standard outbreak investigation for the samplers. “Of course, they should have collected and sampled animals; that was a missed opportunity. But the message was that the animals were not there,” she lamented the lost chance. It was an obvious falsehood because everybody involved knew that live mammals, including certain wildlife without the necessary permits, were sold at that market. Peter Daszak elaborated on the “logic” presented by their Chinese counterparts:
Look, wildlife trade is often illegal in China for certain protected species. Certainly without the right permits. If something is illegal in China, it is not happening in China, according to the authorities, because it is illegal. So officially, there was no illegal wildlife at the Huanan market, because that would have been illegal.
But does that logic even hold? At the time of the WHO work, Peter Daszak had some of his staff, including those with fluent Mandarin, check the city, provincial and federal laws. None of them would make trading live mammals of the type that carry coronaviruses illegal. The next day he argued with the Chinese delegation for over 19 hours over the draft of the animal section of the WHO report which he drafted. Despite his repeated requests that the Chinese team cite the law that would have made selling live mammals illegal, no law was ever shown.
He had also been trying hard to get photographic evidence of possible wildlife at the Huanan market accepted by the Chinese counterparts but to no avail. They told him the photos were “unverifiable,” despite their origin being from Chinese social media in December 2019 and the floor tile pattern in the photos matching the floor tiles of the Huanan market. Professor Eddie Holmes, who visited the Huanan market in 2014, also had photographic evidence of SARS-susceptible illegal wildlife locked in the dark metal cages on top of the same checkered floor tiles they had just visited. “I offered… to call Eddie Holmes and verify with him,” Peter explained. But the authorities did not want to hear it. A dispute broke out. “Really argy-bargy here in Wuhan,” Dominic Dwyer, the medical virologist from Down Under, would write in best Australian fashion to his countryman, Edward Holmes, at the time. The international team was fighting hard to get the Chinese scientists to acknowledge that live wild mammals had been sold at the market. “The head Chinese guy said your photos might be synthesized,” he informed Eddie about the ridiculous infighting over something so trivial. Everyone knew that these animals had been there. But in the end, the hands of their Chinese counterparts were bound; they were not to admit anything untoward had happened at the market. “There were no illegal animals when we came,” the Wuhan CDC investigators repeated again and again.
In a narrow sense, I guess that simple retreat was likely true. The animals were gone by the time investigators arrived. “There has been a one-day notice period for merchants to remove them a day before the Wuhan CDC came,” Marion reiterated a rumor I have heard multiple times, although independent substantiation of who gave the notice has been hard to come by. Peter blames the corrupt manager of the market, who told the vendors that the national CDC was going to arrive. “I had asked this guy twenty times whether there were live mammals sold at the market. He lied twenty times.” Back in the last days of 2019, the Huanan market manager had to be notified in advance by the Wuhan CDC and was likely aware of their imminent plans for a market visit. “He probably told the vendors to clean up and get rid of everything,” Peter speculated. Some scientists assumed the warning to vendors came from within the Wuhan CDC itself. Others suggested that social networks relayed the message of an imminent inspection to get vendors to move or cull their animals. After all, clinicians already suggested the market link to the new outbreak on December 27, 2019, and rumors of another SARS linked to wildlife also spread on social media. Yet another set of possibilities are random market checks in December that might have triggered a clear-out of animals. The Associated Press reported about a recording of a confidential WHO meeting that the local authorities had independently visited the market for a spot check on December 25th, before the virus was even sequenced; albeit this date was likely a human mix-up between Christmas and New Year.
Irrespective of who or what told or warned the merchants to remove their animals by December 31st 2019, multiple lines of evidence support the presence of SARS-CoV-2-susceptible mammals until late December at the Huanan market. By the time George Gao’s national CDC arrived, these mammals were gone—and thus were never tested. “That is the missing piece; they could have traced the animals,” Marion lamented. “Why did they step away from following up on that?” To her, it would have been the obvious thing to do. But for Chinese scientists, this course of action had not necessarily been a politically desired one.
As we heard from Alice Hughes, most likely the vendors and wildlife were not tracked by the authorities because they wanted Chinese scientists to find a blameless reason for an outbreak that increasingly resembled the original SARS. Given the emerging facts, that option quickly became untenable. Unbeknownst to the WHO, in early 2019, “multiple vendors at the Huanan market had been fined for selling live animals by the local forestry, market supervision, and quarantine [AQSIQ] authorities,” the freelance journalist Michael Standaert, who was in Wuhan shortly after the outbreak checking official records, would later find out. He wrote:
These are minimal, slap on the wrist fines. The authorities giving out the fines would have been aware of the continuous sales of these and other animals, especially forestry bureau officials. Their office was only a few hundred meters west of these stalls.
Independent Chinese researchers Xiao Xiao and Zhao-Min Zhou from the Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation in Nanchong, Sichuan Province, would publish a study in Scientific Reports shortly after the WHO mission. By chance, they had surveyed the Huanan market between May 2017 and November 2019 for a project on tick-borne diseases following an earlier outbreak in Hubei in 2010. They surveyed 17 shops in Wuhan, seven of which were at the Huanan market, and found that over 30,000 live animals had been sold. They also noted:
Almost all animals were sold alive, caged, stacked and in poor condition. Most stores offered butchering services, done on site, with considerable implications for food hygiene and animal welfare. Approximately 30% of individuals from 6 mammal species inspected had suffered wounds from gunshots or traps, implying illegal wild harvesting. [...] None of the 17 shops posted an origin certificate or quarantine certificate, so all wildlife trade was fundamentally illegal.
To sum up what we know today, from as early as 2014, when Eddie Holmes visited the market, to at least the end of 2019, we know with certainty that there was risky wildlife activity occurring at the market, with at least part of it likely illegal. The local authorities were keenly aware of it but decided to turn a blind eye, which sounded reckless but should not surprise us. The wildlife trade is a 73-billion-dollar industry in China and is culturally accepted by the population. With the right permissions, most wildlife trade is not illegal, even for rather exotic animals. Pre-pandemic sales activities at the Huanan market were not that unusual for authorities. Huanan was just the largest of four similar markets in the same city, and it sold wild animals that might not have undergone thorough source vetting or had vendors whose products did not always fully align with prevailing legal permissions. Everyone can understand this messy human reality. Putting the onus solely on the government to stop any infringements or blaming them for a failure to prevent illegal trade completely seems to follow unreasonable expectations and hindsight bias. No government has the power to completely prevent illegal activities. Offering transparency about wildlife activities and animals at the market, maybe paired with some lax local enforcement to get rid of it, seemed like a small concession to make for any government.
Yet by January 2021, Beijing had no interest in giving even that tiny admission of responsibility, certainly not after many months of blame games from the Trump administration. Especially when the Trump administration started to demand reparations for the pandemic from China in June of 2020, even admitting any bat-to-wildlife-related outbreak became unthinkable in Beijing. Geopolitics had taken over, and thus Beijing fought tooth and nail to deny any susceptible wildlife—illegal or not—had been there. Their new official position was “the virus came from outside of China.” Under the upcoming auspices of the WHO investigation, Chinese scientists found themselves cornered into a position where, really, any alternative scientific theory was desired by the higher-ups. They wanted a blameless reason for how the virus might have come to the market. In preparatory calls with WHO members a couple of months before the Wuhan mission, they had already converged on the idea that the virus did not spill over via any illegal wildlife trade but via various imported cold-chain products. A scientifically flimsy but possible hypothesis, and a politically desired one. If this theory were true, it would make the Huanan market just the first innocent victim of the virus coming from far away instead of being ground zero, with the exotic and live mammalian wildlife trade potentially fostering its maturation and emergence. This cold-chain narrative became the official scientific story during the first call with the international team.
“Right then and there, I knew they were going to make our life difficult," Peter Daszak remembered. To support their cold-chain assertions, Chinese scientists performed studies showing how the virus could persist in the cold and remain infectious for days on frozen products like fish. Even Zhengli had soaked chicken, pork, and beef meat in virus culture supernatant and stored it in the freezer to sample every month. Even 3 years later, those meat samples still test positive, she told me. George Gao also led a study that provided some data that aquatic animals, including whales, might have ACE2 receptors susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection. “So, who is really to say how the virus came to the market?” he asked me. While some leftover frozen animal carcasses tested negative for SARS-CoV-2, environmental samples taken from leftover fish at the Huanan market were contaminated with the virus. The latter is not surprising, given that the market was awash in virus particles from the outbreak before all open surfaces were sprayed down for decontamination. When environmental sampling was performed—spread out over multiple weeks in January 2020—multiple places, including those associated with cold chain products, they found that some viral particles persisted there to nobody's surprise. This is not to say the cold-chain theory was completely baseless per se. In fairness to the sanity of the Chinese scientists, they traced a different SARS-CoV-2 outbreak back to supermarkets via cold chain products imported from outside China after China locked down and enforced its Zero-COVID strategy. So, from a possibility standpoint, the cold-chain narrative cannot be discarded. Plausibility is another question. The cold-chain-related outbreak occurred at a time when the virus had already infected much of the world, and was subsequently on many important products.
However, for the cold-chain theory to be true, the virus needed to get on those frozen products somewhere. This would require a gigantic outbreak of COVID somewhere else that went unnoticed, and it still fails to explain why the first cases would show up at the Huanan market and nowhere else, nor does it account for a host of other correlating lines of phylogenetic, epidemiological, and geographic evidence pointing to the market and wildlife. Chinese scientists were not oblivious to these gaps in their story, but at the moment, the international scientists were not able to disprove the cold-chain theory, which was good enough for Beijing. They really needed the blameless cold-chain alternative to the unwelcome wildlife theory to save face and escape demands for culpability.
Peter Daszak, as part of the environmental and animal team, felt the Chinese pushback on the wildlife trade the most. “We came here almost as diplomats,” he once said, trying to explain how he understood his role. They tried everything they could to get their Chinese counterparts to agree with them. He asserted, “They knew that we knew that they knew this was BS, but there was not much to be done.” Marion Koopmans also understood that some of these cold-chain arguments were flimsy and motivated but took it very pragmatically. “To me, the solution was to stick to what I know and can investigate,” she explained.
They didn’t get to spend more time at the market because the next days were fully booked with visits to the Hubei Provincial CDC, the Wuhan CDC, and the Animal CDC, followed by a visit to the Wuhan Blood Center. In a megacity of over 11 million, there were a lot of labs and researchers involved in the response, after all. Again, the idea was to interview scientists, collect data, and give recommendations for further studies. “We asked them all sorts of questions, such as how did they handle the samples, what samples they took, because part of our strategy was to get those samples to be re-tested in other labs, maybe even in the West.” They also recommended testing samples in the blood bank to see if, in the months leading up to the outbreak, any remnants of SARS-CoV-2 infections could be discerned. This would be informative for both the timing of the outbreak and whether the virus had been circulating for a long time, unnoticed, before it caused a lot of sickness around the Huanan market. Based on these recommendations and contrary to the increasing geopolitical tensions, that lab work was indeed performed and later presented to SAGO, another WHO expert body tasked with understanding the origins of the pandemic. The blood bank study showed that there were no early cases detected in over 34,000 pre-pandemic samples leading up to December, arguing against any asymptomatic or silent spread much before the market-centered outbreak. Yet almost no raw data or samples have been shared with international scientists.
“Clearly, from the get-go, Beijing did not want this to happen. They did not want an investigation, international people to come,” Peter Daszak explained. Not to the market, not to the various CDC offices, and not to WIV. “At first, they said the lab would be impossible,” Peter Daszak elaborated, “but then we got it to happen; I got it to happen.” Dr. Embarek had been adamant that they could not go all the way to Wuhan and not visit Zhengli’s lab, and he knew he could leverage Peter to get it done. They strategized. “What do you want me to do, call Zhengli?” he offered. When he called Zhengli, she had no objections to her lab being visited. But how to get the authorities on board? “My idea was to get her to give a scientific seminar. Marion suggested they all do to make it a research seminar day while we were still on lockdown. Marion gave a talk; I gave a talk; Zhengli did too.” They quietly held the seminar with all WHO and Chinese scientists involved while in quarantine at the Wuhan hotel. It softened things up and built trust. Ultimately, it got them access to the lab a week later.
I personally find this little snippet fascinating; it shows how science can be a tool for diplomacy. Even during the height of the Cold War, scientific collaborations were the channels that often bridged seemingly insurmountable geopolitical chasms. In the end, Peter’s idea and the WHO team succeeded where belligerent grandstanding and virtuous posturing from Western actors failed. They got access to the lab.
On February 3rd, the WHO mission visited the WIV. In this much-anticipated event, reporters who had laid siege to the academic institute began chasing the WHO mission cars all along the street. Once inside, the international team interviewed scientists and took a tour, including the BSL-4 labs. Discussions were in the usual setup, however: a big room with their Chinese counterparts and an entourage of translators. They were allowed to ask ad hoc questions of Shi Zhengli and other staff, including the director of the Institute. “We asked them nasty questions about how they do their work, what protections they use, what viruses they had, what experiments they did,” Peter Daszak recounted.
They also inquired about rumors. “We asked them why they took down the database. What about these rumors of a missing person? What about the three scientists who were supposedly hospitalized?” According to the prevailing conspiratorial narratives, Zhengli had allegedly taken down her virus database as part of a cover-up. In addition, one of her students named Huang Yanling had supposedly gone missing from her lab website, possibly “taken care of” to shut her up. Other allegations had circulated, including one about three sick workers at the large institute potentially being patients zero of the outbreak. Despite these insinuations and their implications, the answers the WHO team got from Zhengli were quite candid. On the database, she admitted that it just never worked that well. “We took it down to make it better and more user-friendly. And then, when we put it back on, they were hacking us, so we had to take it back down again.” Peter tried to recollect the gist of it. On Huang Yanling, “she just moved to a different province and did not want to be contacted.” That's why they took down her profile from the lab website. Regarding the sick workers, she said that all team members had been tested for COVID antibodies in the spring, and all tested negative. “We had the chance to ask unscripted questions; we could catch them in a lie,” Peter said. “The answers seemed to be straightforward and not coordinated.”
Beijing did not admit to this officially, but Zhengli’s lab had been audited twice in the spring of 2020, by both WIV people who were concerned it might have come from their lab and by the Chinese authorities. “Of course, they were, you know, and they were obviously horrified that something could have happened,” Dominic Dwyer explained. “Well, tell me what you did about investigating your staff. Did you collect blood?” They did blood tests, and they were all negative. They monitored staff health. They explained the procedures in the lab, and they had a good biosafety lab built by the French. “We couldn’t find any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was in the lab before the outbreak. They only started culturing after the outbreak started,” Dominic Dwyer said. He added, “They generally published as quickly as they could with anything, you know. So why would they hide that they had SARS-CoV-2?” Before the pandemic, there would have been no need to do so. Research projects are iterative; they take years, and “generally laboratory accidents happen when you're culturing,” which makes the idea of hidden or secret viruses even more untenable.
There was no indication that Zhengli’s lab had anything to do with the outbreak. “All the coronavirus scientists felt pressure, not only me. At this point, the only thing you can do is show your work to the people who want to know.” Zhengli also told me about this stressful period when her lab was under intense scrutiny by authorities in 2020. “They checked everything. Electronic records, sequences, experiments. We were transparent; we had nothing to fear.” Since then, her lab has been free to operate. By the time the Wuhan mission had arrived, Zhengli was no longer treated as if under suspicion by Chinese authorities and thus was free to talk. The opposite was happening in the West, where the default assumption was that she couldn’t be trusted no matter what.
That being said, a deeper investigation into her statements always seemed to corroborate, rather than refute, her story. For example, records of her database server activities have been uncovered, showing not only that the database was not taken offline in September 2019—as conspiracy theories still allege to this day—but that it was online sporadically until February 2020, when hacking attempts finally brought it down. “There had been thousands of hacking attempts since the beginning of the pandemic,” Chinese journalist Jane Qiu would learn from Zhengli, independent of the WHO mission. “The IT managers were really worried somebody might sabotage the databases or, worse, implant virus sequences for malicious intent,” Zhengli had said. So, I guess it was no mystery why they never brought it back online again.
But what happened to Huang, Zhengli’s student? Some of the Western press had confidently declared Huang “COVID-19 patient zero” and “missing,” but the technician had left the lab years earlier after graduation to work for a biology company in Sichuan Province. Chinese journalists quickly traced her whereabouts in 2020; she was doing fine, and they even got a statement from her company that she was never sick or anything suspicious.
Independent people and facts seemed to corroborate every explanation offered by Zhengli. Overall, I found nothing suspicious about Zhengli’s lab or actions, and she also did not have any secret viruses in her database. We know this, again independently, because she was working on a publication pre-pandemic that would contain sequences from all the SARS-related coronaviruses she ever sequenced. The study came out in the middle of 2020, despite strong pushback from Chinese authorities, and there was no suspicious viral cousin closer than RaTG13 in that set, confirming that she did not possess anything that could have been transformed into SARS-CoV-2. Zhengli had submitted the first draft of that paper pre-pandemic—before there might be an incentive to hide or cover up sequences—and her collaborators on that study did not observe any changes, removals, or similar alterations made between the first version and final publication. “The real scientists in the field, they trust me,” Zhengli gave for consideration. “I attended a lot of meetings before COVID-19. I discussed my unpublished work with a lot of scientists. They know everything from my lab.”
These facts of academic minutiae should make us confident she was not withholding any pertinent sequences and certainly not engaged in secret culturing programs. Unless all her collaborators, many of whom weren’t even Chinese, were also in on the cover-up. Which is, of course, what conspiracy theorists would immediately allege after she was allowed to publish all her sequences in mid-2020. But allegations of such a broad international cover-up are unrealistic, to say the least. “If people trust, they trust. If they don’t trust, they don’t,” Zhengli sounded resigned today. For most of 2020, she had been furious; it was taxing on her. “So, I said okay. I gave up pursuing every person to trust me. So, we just do our job and leave everything on the side… to the times,” she waved her hand in a dismissive motion to the side.
Irrespective of trust, in 2022, almost incontrovertible proof of the veracity of her words arrived when a set of embargoed sequences from 2018, belonging to a forgotten manuscript, appeared on a Western database. A student had uploaded them with a standard embargo of 4 years, but the paper was never accepted by a journal, so the principal investigators forgot, and the student moved on without removing the sequences. In 2022, that lucky oversight suddenly unlocked sequencing samples from 2018, showing that at this time, Zhengli’s work focused exclusively on SARS-CoV-1-related viruses, again, not RaTG13 or any other known or unknown SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses. Exactly like she told everybody.
But merely being innocent is unfortunately a poor excuse when the world is looking for somebody to blame. Far too many continue to assert, without any basis, that Zhengli must be lying about a lot of things, regardless of how much evidence is presented to the contrary. To this day, Zhengli has not given a reason to doubt her words, but because she is a Chinese researcher in mainland China, the prevailing assumption in the West seems to be that she is not to be trusted, no matter what.
This does not imply that we should not be suspicious of Chinese authorities and politicians trying to control the narrative. Take the WHO mission, where opaque Chinese politics and a lack of transparency often seeded justified distrust, no matter if it was about market animals or what happened to staff at the lab. The panel discussion got a bit more heated with the director of WIV—a communist party member, in contrast to Zhengli, who is not—when it came to rumors about the three sick WIV staffers. Just a week before, the Trump administration’s State Department put out a statement claiming intelligence reports found three workers being hospitalized in late 2019; the implication was that this proved that WIV had started the pandemic. Because of these accusations in the news cycle, the topic was highly sensitive. The WHO members really ruffled some feathers, just raising the subject. Rumbling went through the back desks. The director, Wang Yanyi, and the assembly of their Chinese scientists with the lead negotiator, Liang Wannian, claimed that “nobody got sick at the WIV” in that period. This caused Thea Fisher—Professor in Public Health, Virus Infections, and Epidemics from the Nordsjællands Hospital in Denmark—and John Watson, an epidemiologist and public health researcher from the UK, to become quite enraged. “Are you seriously saying that, during the peak of flu season, no one would have gotten sick at all?” WIV is a big institute with many people; epidemiologically, this did not make sense. “I just find that very, very hard to believe,” they said. Some more rumbling ensued. “But those guys were smooth,” Peter Daszak explained. Especially the head of the Chinese delegation, Prof. Liang Wannian, the architect of the Zero-COVID strategy, was a seasoned politician. “He clarified that people may have gotten the flu, but then they would just not come into work. But nobody from the lab was hospitalized,” unlike Trump’s State Department memo suggested.
Again, this did not mean that nobody from WIV ever visited a hospital in the autumn of 2019. In China, it is common to visit a hospital as an outpatient, much like someone would go to a house doctor or general practitioner in other countries. There is a difference between being hospitalized and just visiting a doctor in the hospital. After that heated exchange, the mission’s goodwill began to wane. Asked by the WHO scientists whether WIV has been audited in response to various conspiracy theories, they deflected by saying that annual external audits were routinely conducted. A contradiction to what Zhengli had told Peter Daszak—that her lab had indeed been under intense scrutiny. Beijing seemingly did not want to admit that a laboratory leak was a real possibility they themselves had considered. Geopolitically and domestically, they now preferred to project the image that there was never any concern that the virus could have come from the lab. “It’s too political,” Zhengli had told Peter. He, of course, had already observed that at the time of the audit in late spring 2020, Zhengli and her lab had been under immense pressure. The reality was that, at the time, Beijing was very worried the virus came from WIV, and they not only had everybody serologically tested for COVID antibodies—all negative—but they also investigated the clinical records of all staffers. Nothing to point to COVID, but it was likely that some workers had visited a doctor as an outpatient in the hospital for unrelated illnesses back in 2019. Maybe the US spy agencies picked up those records. Again, the Chinese delegation did not admit to any of it. The WHO epidemiologists would not have found outpatient visits suspicious or indicative of anything, but geopolitically, Beijing probably correctly expected that it was a hard nuance to make on the world stage. It was just one of those things that superficially looked too damning. Maybe that’s why the topic became so sensitive.
The WHO mission report is on record stating that no suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 were seen by PCR, and antibody testing of all WIV staff was negative. That they had been tested thoroughly and nobody was found exposed is not unusual or suspicious either. One has to consider that China’s virus surveillance and contact tracing during the outbreak were very strict, irrespective of institute affiliation. For example, it had been found that all staff from both the provincial Hubei CDC and the animal CDC tested negative in that period. Only one of the Wuhan CDC’s staff members was confirmed SARS-CoV-2 seropositive after infection due to family cluster transmission. All other staff had tested negative as well. The point of the dramatic lockdown and the Zero-COVID strategy after had been to spare most citizens an infection.
A day after the heated exchanges at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the WHO mission visited the Jian Xin Yuan Community Centre, a place for senior and elderly citizens that saw 19 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 on January 24, 2020. They were to hear testimony from survivors. It was moving, as well as highlighting the traumatic impact of the pandemic on the elderly. After that, they had some more days of expert interviews conducted at their hotel from the Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan Blood Center, and Wuhan Central Hospital. There were multiple days of discussions among themselves and with their Chinese counterparts for a joint statement and preparation of a summary report. The WHO members left China feeling that they had made some good progress and were hopeful to continue the work in the upcoming months and maybe even years.
By most standard measures, the WHO mission was pretty successful. First, it collected a large body of verified evidence despite political interference from an authoritarian country. The evidence allowed researchers to make succinct recommendations for further work and good estimates about the likely origin of the virus. Second, it was a diplomatic win, bringing together an international team of Chinese scientists as well as providing a basis for further data sharing and collaboration. Third, it provided valuable lessons on how to set up future outbreak investigations. “An outbreak not studied is an outbreak wasted,” Marion Koopmans would say. “We always went in with the idea that this is Step One.” Their goal for this mission was to put all the available information together, which was already a large chunk of work.
“I never expected for a second we [would] come out with full answers, only to focus our knowledge and give recommendations.”
Yet from the start, the WHO mission had been viewed with skepticism by the US, believing that it was nothing more than a guided tour where the Chinese only showed the international members what they were allowed to see. A farce doomed to fail before it was even underway. While the WHO members and other scientists were getting ready for a year-long and arduous scientific investigation, the world was dissatisfied with not getting immediate answers. Hearing that the WHO mission had not definitively identified the origin of COVID, interest in the topic began to spike anew.
Everybody, including citizens, journalists, politicians, and even some scientists, craved a more compelling explanation of where this virus came from. They started looking for clues elsewhere. Many were unaware that their desire for a more emotionally satisfying answer would drive them into an information ecosystem that sought to blame not only some foreign virologists but science itself for the pandemic.
§
Starting around April 2020, the what I call the “conspiracy myth-entertainment complex” already worked overtime to create content that motivated influencers could bring from the periphery to the center of society. Tales of secret government programs and actors, unrestricted bioweapons, or later of a “plandemic,” a failed vaccine experiment, or unorthodox research accidents involving risky bat hunting and genetic engineering fantasies all found their niche audiences online. Conspiracy myths are cash cows for influencers; they have a strong incentive to deploy all their creativity to create larger fictions and narratives that feel emotionally satisfying and cognitively easy. Epic stories that matched the force and trauma of the unfolding pandemic. Is it really a surprise that some of these fictions broke out of their niche and became widely popular?
One of those fictions that took off in our public imagination was all too familiar. Maybe it went viral because it was so familiar to us in the first place. The idea of research gone wrong, of a monster created in a lab by a mad scientist. A Frankenvirus, stitched together in an unorthodox scientific experiment in the best literary tradition. Classics like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have the emotional force and cultural power. They offer a fully formed tale to attach to our understanding of the world. Most citizens have little knowledge about the ins and outs of ordinary virology, but human hubris and recklessness leading to unspeakable catastrophe is something we can all intuitively grasp. “Somebody fucked up, big time” is about as intuitive as it gets. Especially when these easy-to-grasp story patterns are manipulated by deep-pocketed anti-science activists and all-too-motivated narrators.
Take Yuri Deigin, a Canadian-Russian self-proclaimed longevity entrepreneur, hobby blogger, and online sleuth. Despite no formal training in science or research beyond a bachelor's degree, he seemingly learned early how to browse academic papers and pick results to support his theories, whatever they might be. His first claim to internet fame was the rehashing of the conspiracy myth that Jeanne Louise Calment, the record holder for the oldest verified human at the age of 122, was nothing more than a fraud. He claimed that Jeanne Louise’s deceased daughter faked her own death and took over Jeanne Louise Calment’s identity. His evidence? None, but his personal incredulity spurred him to dig up old photos of the mother and daughter to make amateur eye comparisons to bolster his case. Despite the flimsiness of his approach, his blog post went viral and prompted an eye-roll by experts who had meticulously studied and verified Jeanne Calment’s story through interviews, testimonies, public records, contemporary documents, and so forth. They also ruled out the identity-switch idea back when Calment was still alive, dryly noting, “The hypothesis of an identity swap with her daughter appears not even realistic given the context and the facts, and [is] not supported by evidence.” However, for the combative blogger Yuri, the lack of evidence, even contradictory facts, only presents a challenge. In my experience, he appears to thrive when challenged to come up with an alternative explanation for events and loves to build conspiracy thought castles where all evidence against his theory is either evidence of a conspiracy or somehow ought to be discarded as untrustworthy or tainted. On Calment, he opened his blog post with:
Indeed, her documents are impeccable: she was born and lived her entire life in one place — the city of Arles in the south of France — and, coming from a well-known bourgeois family, Jeanne appears in many official sources. However, impeccable documents are no guarantee against fraud, as those documents could be used by someone else, someone younger. For example, your daughter.
Now, for people familiar with conspiratorial ideation and argumentation structures, motivated reasoners like Yuri are a dime a dozen. Arguably, what sets him apart—if anything—is his verbosity, technical vocabulary, and ability to weave stories around selectively chosen and decontextualized scientific results that altogether give the appearance of careful investigation. When the COVID-19 conspiracy myth-entertainment complex got into full swing in April 2020, Yuri wrote a long blog post about how alleged gain-of-function work performed by Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak, and Shi Zhengli might have created the new virus. Much of it is decontextualized to the point of being simply false, but it is aided by magical thinking and what-if speculations to help his story along. He had a talent for collecting alleged or real oddities—be it genomic, timing, personal, or historical details—and portraying them as evidence of sinister machinations. However, what is most striking to me was his gross neglect of key scientific details contradicting his assertions, as well as his general ignorance of standard lab processes and research practices. For example, he offers the following:
Could researchers, having received coronavirus samples from pangolins that were intercepted by customs in March 2019, then want to check whether the RBM in pangolin strains can bind to the human ACE2 receptor? And could such researchers also decide to throw an extra furin site in the mix? …After all, RaTG13 is much closer to the pangolin strains than WIV1.
This description of potential research processes is absolutely nonsensical for people who have ever done any research, as new genetic elements are always tested in a well-characterized system, not haphazardly thrown together. This is just basic science; if one introduces too many unknown variables in an unknown system, it becomes impossible to conduct any meaningful research on that system. Yuri was not only just proposing that Shi Zhengli’s team use the unknown viral system RaTG13 (they could not know whether or how it works, nor had any interest in it because it was too distant to the original SARS virus) to splice in an unknown pangolin sequence on a whim (they likely had no knowledge about at the time and no indication why it would be interesting), but then also decided to modify that hot mess with an extremely unusual and unnecessary suboptimal cleavage motif (that ordinarily would not even work).
Even from a practical time horizon, setting up such a system would take many years, multiple publications, seminars, and presentations, and would leave many public paper trails. Yuri imagines it would have just taken a few months towards the end of 2019. When I discussed with him about this timeline, the missing steps, and publications in between, he just claimed that it is normal to keep all the intermediate steps hidden to not tip off competitors while working on a big publication. But Zhengli’s publication history is exactly as one would expect, sprinkled with dozens of papers with intermediary, gradual, and stepwise approaches to building a more elaborate system for studying SARS-CoV-1. She had neither interest nor incentive to work on building up a system based on a distant SARS-like cousin—one among hundreds—and do all this work in secret. Worse of all, even if all the steps were fulfilled as Yuri imagined, it would still not even match the sequence we observe in SARS-COV-2 all that closely, a pre-requirement for any hypothesis that it at least can explain the observable facts like a genome sequence.
To put it bluntly, Yuri’s theory was not only unsubstantiated but bogus, largely fueled by ignorance and fantasy. By taking real ingredients—the closest known viral cousins and sequences available at the time, no matter if bat, pangolin, or feline coronavirus—he tried to come up with a story of how virologists somehow magically patchworked them together to create the Frankenvirus he believed SARS-CoV-2 to be. Of course, such a fictional story only works when it is well-crafted and ignores critical details. But by leaving a lot of holes for imagination, it puts the onus entirely on audiences to not be fooled after an assault of intuitive and suspicious-sounding connections.
Unsurprisingly, his crafty blog went viral on social media and promptly earned him a spot in the emerging DRASTIC sleuth collective on Twitter, of which Yuri is a co-founder. Conspiracy myths were in demand, and Yuri undoubtedly had the vocabulary and presentation style down to succeed in that genre. His take on the virus origin was superficially convincing to non-experts, and that would prove consequential for two specific reasons. First, it seeded a very specific memeplex—a set of connected ideas—into the discourse. One where phrases like “biotechnology has just moved too far” and “virologists are doing unconscionable risky gain-of-function research” became common sentiments. Second, because of Yuri’s association with DRASTIC and the subsequent amplification via credentialed contrarians like Dr. Alina Chan or the alternative media podcaster Dr. Bret Weinstein, his blog reached many unequipped but susceptible writers, editors, media makers, and other public discourse shapers. They all got sucked into Yuri’s uneasy worldview of research gone wrong. His constant presence and interaction with influencers and popular tastemakers on Twitter also helped him break out of his niche. His long-form, investigative-seeming content validated their beliefs—or, more primal, their biotechnology fears—and multiple newspapers, podcasts, and blogs took up the “gain-of-function" terminology and distributed it into the world. After that, the uneasy feeling was spreading that maybe something “untoward” had happened in virological research for years, and virologists as a group, not just Chinese scientists, have an interest in keeping it secret from the rest of us.
Unfortunately, I learned that emotions are very dangerous in the attention economy, especially those that run unacknowledged just below a thick layer of motivated arguments and cherry-picked facts to seem rationally justified. Emotions expose a vulnerability in us that can be taken advantage of. Unbeknownst to many, in the summer of 2020, it was the fear of biotechnology, chimeric Frankenviruses and gain-of-function research that motivated the anti-biotechnology activist group called “US Right to Know” (USRTK) to spring into action against virologists. Only a year later, they would have success beyond their wildest dreams.
USRTK was originally conceived as a left-wing anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) pressure group to target inconvenient scientists and advocates with harassment. Bankrolled largely by the Organic Consumer Association, which funded USRTK with over 1 million dollars between 2014 and 2021 according to disclosure records, the activists’ modus operandi was to abuse FOIA requests to obtain thousands of pages of material from their targets. Since at least 2015, they have focused on outspoken scientists with public platforms who educate about the safety of GMO crops—or “Frankenfoods”, as the pressure group would fearmonger about them. Once USRTK receives thousands of their target’s documents from FOIA requests, they spring into action. They meticulously search those private messages for any snippet, connection, or oddity they can cherry-pick or decontextualize and put in the worst possible light to smear scientists in the public’s eye. In politics, this approach would sometimes be known as mudslinging: throwing a lot of dirt at the wall, hoping something will stick. As a result of these character assassination attempts, many scientists will choose to disengage from public life. Who wants to get their private address leaked, their families harassed, or their lives threatened by malicious falsehoods?
There is a chilling effect beyond the individuals targeted. Many scientists might feel it is not worth the risk to continue speaking up about their research or evidence-based decision-making, certainly not in public. Yet this intimidation is exactly the goal behind USRTK’s method.
“They extract a high cost for free speech; they coerce the informed into silence”
The prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology wrote about USRTK in 2015. The moment scientific voices considered “inconvenient” to their cause are bullied into silence, activists are free to shape public discourse and emotions on a scientific topic in their preferred direction. “This is how demagogues and anti-science zealots succeed,” the journal article concludes.
Unsurprisingly, when the fear of “genetically modified viruses” was dangled in front of such a ruthless organization, they likely saw an opportunity to expand their mission, scope, and influence. From “Frankenfoods” to “Frankenviruses”, so to speak. In the summer of 2020, USRTK began to abuse FOIA to gain communications between Ralph Baric, Peter Daszak, and the NIH. Conservative activists from the White Coat Waste Project had already focused on Peter Daszak, and his grant had been canceled by Trump live on TV, so he was an obvious target for the USRTK. However, Ralph Baric’s role as a pioneer in coronavirus genetics was less prominent in established media outlets until the gain-of-function fearmongering by conspiracy theorists put a target on his back, too.
By November 2020, USRTK released the first trove of documents they had acquired, which contained nothing extraordinary about both scientists if one would bother to look fairly. Yet this little inconvenience would not stop USRTK from trying to smear them. They had to dig deeper. In drafts of early 2020 emails, they learned that Peter Daszak was organizing a statement of support for Chinese researchers, which would eventually turn into the “Lancet letter” with the assistance of Jeremy Farrar. After hearing how his Chinese collaborators in Wuhan had been harassed, doxxed, hacked, and threatened by bioweapon conspiracy theorists, Peter wanted to create a broad general statement from leading experts that condemned such theories that the virus was somehow man-made. Initially, he contemplated leaving off his and Ralph Baric’s names from the support statement for political reasons. “Otherwise, it looks self-serving, and we lose impact,” he worried. He wanted to invite many independent voices to create a statement that has “some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” It made sense; this was about supporting scientists in China who faced attacks, not his organization. After some back and forth, Peter, however, ended up putting his name and affiliation on the statement, along with 26 other experts, because he decided it was more important to show his support publicly. Months later, USRTK effectively used these early deliberations to tell a different story about how Peter was supposedly scheming secretly and masking his influence from scrutiny. USRTK would allege that the letter was not in support of his collaborators being harassed but to “undermine the hypothesis” that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from WIV and possibly Peter’s own culpability.
How exactly a mere statement of support has all that alleged power to shut down scientific inquiry is still, after many years, beyond my understanding. Science is not a monolith, and scientists are free to investigate whatever they want. No sternly worded letter to the editor, which 99.9% of virologists have never even seen, can change that simple reality. However, Peter’s efforts to support Chinese scientists were painted as malicious nonetheless and worked like pouring gasoline on the fire when it came to eager conspiracy theorists. For them, the decontextualized emails proved some illegitimate coordination between scientists, a supposed cabal of researchers embattled by conflicts of interest to obscure their involvement in risky research. Gradually, these insinuations got laundered endlessly through the press and became the majority opinion, certainly with respect to Peter Daszak. USRTK’s mudslinging had the desired impact, and they were just getting started.
Instigating effective smear campaigns using the allure of supposedly secret documents is what USRTK excelled at, and over the coming months, they would target inconvenient scientific voices one by one. From the outspoken Kristian Andersen all the way to Anthony Fauci, from EcoHealth Alliance members to Chinese researchers at US institutions, from the pioneering CoV virologist Susan Weiss to random editors at scientific journals because they edited publications USRTK did not like. Even ordinary scientists, whose research findings happened to interfere with the idea that this was a “genetically modified” virus, would find all their communications with any federal agency such as the NIH requested. USRTK targeted them all. While their fishing expedition mostly ended nowhere, the allure of some secret messages and hidden documents still proved useful to sow distrust about virology, as well as tarnished the reputation of scientists, whether they actually engaged in alleged gain-of-function research or not. Why was a moratorium on gain-of-function research lifted in 2017? Who performed experiments that seemed risky to the untrained eye? Why were scientists doing this type of work so quick to dismiss a possible lab leak? And what exactly were those virologists doing with chimeric viruses in the lab for years?
“Flask monsters” is how the loquacious novelist Nicholson Baker would christen them in his grandiloquent long-form article “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer in early January 2021. Over fourteen chapters, he took readers on a journey through the history of gain-of-function research, government cover-ups, coronavirus and vaccine research, biosafety concerns, weapons of mass disruption, the mysterious deaths at the Mojiang mine, the BBC team around John Sudworth being stopped in Yunnan with roadblocks, and, of course, the suspicious coincidence of WIV being in Wuhan of all places. To him, it all seemed connected.
Nicholson Baker was, of course, not new to the cover-up conspiracy genre, and the idea of laboratory accidents especially seems to have enamored the writer for years. For example, in his book Baseless, a story woven around his frustration with governmental redactions of 1950-era bioweapon research documents, he casually asserts that “rabbit fever, Q fever, bird flu, Lyme disease, wheat stem rust, African swine fever, and hog cholera all look, to my nonscientist’s eye, like unnatural epidemics that owe their outbreaks to the laboratory.” He felt a deep unease about biotechnology and had the literary skills to put his worries into words.
For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened.
While Yuri’s gain-of-function blog that got the ball rolling I would classify as the work of an eager apprentice, Nicholson Baker’s article was a genre masterpiece. People just could not resist. It ended up becoming the most-read story of the year for the popular magazine. A success kind of unheard of for an article of such epic length, which even won the magazine’s top spot over popular culture evergreens like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s celebrity dramas or political lunacy related to Trump. With eloquence and wit, Baker offered a breathtaking alternative story to how the viral monster causing havoc in the winter of 2020 might have gained his fangs.
But in the climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice and other experimental animals, isn’t it possible that somebody in Wuhan took the virus that had been isolated from human samples, or the RaTG13 bat virus sequence, or both (or other viruses from that same mine shaft that Shi Zhengli has recently mentioned in passing), and used them to create a challenging disease for vaccine research — a chopped-and-channeled version of RaTG13 or the miners’ virus that included elements that would make it thrive and even rampage in people? And then what if, during an experiment one afternoon, this new, virulent, human-infecting, furin-ready virus got out?
Spurred on by the conspiratorial ideation surrounding Ralph Baric’s work, the supposed cover-up attempt by Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli, and the mysterious deaths of the Mojiang miners, Baker was on tour-de-force to take the best pieces of various man-made ideas and package them all into an overarching, emotionally appealing, and truly grandiose master narrative. One where not only the past or present but also the future is at stake.
[...] This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.
I hope the vaccine works.
In his best storyteller fashion, he concluded his epic-length article with a framing that would put the alleged hubris of scientists front and center of the pandemic. They were reckless for years, he asserts, maybe to play God or in a valiant effort to create vaccines, but like with Icarus’s wings, they flew too close to the sun, and catastrophe ensued. No matter if old Greek tragedies or extrapolations into more contemporary Frankensteinian science fiction, Baker utilized the magnificent cultural power of that well-trodden “human hubris before the fall” story trope as best he knew how. Maybe he also understood a bit of our human nature, or what cognitive psychologists would call our “proportionality bias.” We tend to believe that dramatic effects must have had dramatic causes. In the chaos and uncertainty of the devastating winter wave in the Northern Hemisphere, millions would lose their lives, their loved ones, or their livelihoods. As the body count skyrocketed and devastation took our breath, most of us were never going to be satisfied with an ordinary natural explanation for our extraordinary blight. We needed an epic tale to make sense of why this was happening to us. And where there is a desire, there are gifted storytellers who see a demand. An interconnected global infosphere that had never existed before gave the best of them a stage of incomprehensible proportions. Playing into emotions, culture, and, ultimately, our human nature is the bread and butter of entertainers, populists, activists, and influencers. Without any special insight into the topic of arcane coronavirus research, I believe we never stood a chance to resist their allure.
For credentialed lab leak speculators like Alina Chan, the bubbling-up moral panic about gain-of-function research—and Nicholson Baker’s skillful elevation of the Mojiang miner story to public consciousness—could not have come any sooner. In the summer, the ambitious contrarian’s public profile had been boosted by credulous media, seasoned anti-science manipulators, and conspiratorial energy. Everything seemed to have fallen into place for her. Front-page newspaper stories, introductions to some powerful circles, and her preprint seeding the idea into the discourse that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow “pre-adapted” to humans had catapulted her into becoming the face of an “accidental lab leak” narrative. Yet, in the autumn of 2020, her fortunes seemed to have completely changed. The lab leak influencer now found herself thwarted by the rise of Scarlett (Dr. Li-Meng Yan), who started to dominate the lab leak narrative with her salacious bioweapon fabrications and inauthentic right-wing network amplification. Maybe a shock to Alina, but such is the attention economy: fickle audiences lose interest when influencers cannot deliver new bombshells every day or when the competition is just too compelling.
Scarlett’s sudden occupation of the lab leak niche posed a problem for Alina and the conspiratorial community around DRASTIC, who had put their claim to fame into the “dead miners at Mojiang mine” theory. Possibly quite to their spite, Scarlett was not only uninterested in their theories; she simply called RaTG13 fabricated and a false flag to distract the world. Scarlett’s “Yan Reports” were based on the ZC45 and ZXC21 viruses from Zhejiang Province, cousins of SARS-CoV-2, that were found by researchers affiliated with a military academy. She had no use for RaTG13; its existence mostly contradicted her specific conjectures. Yet in the ultra-competitive news cycle during the election season, journalists and public attention kept chasing the new shiny thing. Predictably, the Mojiang miner story lost steam, while large tastemakers on the right went all-in on Scarlett’s bioweapon myth. As an observer, it seemed to me that Alina Chan could not compete for attention in this new heated pre-US election environment and had to trot an uncomfortable line of defining her sub-niche without upsetting her main audience, which had been taken in by the bioweapon saga (and subsequent media attention and scientific criticisms of it). So, it appears that she came out defending the cultivated whistleblower she very likely knew was not speaking truthfully with a type of whataboutism:
Reading about top experts bashing Limeng Yan in the media for unscientific preprints, and cornering her on political motivations and dependencies. What about the actually peer-reviewed top papers that have serious research integrity issues in them? No issues. Data “looks fine”?
Or, more explicitly:
Seriously, who should a SARS2 origins whistleblower go to? Besides this anti-CCP billionaire + Bannon et al.?
She offered lengthy explanations of how difficult it can be to be a whistleblower in a foreign country and that we all should be sympathetic to Scarlett, but also that Scarlett might be a bit confused about the science given the stress of the experience. In my opinion, Alina understood all too well that Scarlett was selling pseudoscientific nonsense, nonsense that sabotaged Alina’s whole argument. Yet she tried her hardest to find common denominators with Scarlett despite advocating for mutually contradictory theories. Attacking the integrity of ordinary virologists and the “mainstream narrative”—as Scarlett was doing—seemingly was the larger common ground for them and their audiences. No matter what theory they advocated for, they agreed that scientists are to blame for the pandemic. So, she wrote in one of her long Twitter threads at the time:
I’m glad Yan is shining the spotlight on these research integrity issues. But I worry that framing the verifiable misdirection surrounding RaTG13/pangolins within a specious article may actually hurt the legitimacy of research integrity inquiries regarding SARS2-like viruses.
After endlessly paying tribute to the alpha influencer, Alina finally comes out with her niche-defining positioning:
I urge a shift away from bioweapons speculation back onto solid ground: the research integrity concerns surrounding some of the closest viruses to SARS2. These are discussed in Yan's report, but completely overshadowed by claims about SARS2 being an “unrestricted bioweapon”.
It was a difficult line to walk, and she was not very successful doing so given the heated pre-election environment. I guess that lamenting about some alleged conflicts of interest and speculations about arcane research methods just doesn’t cut it when there is a billionaire-sponsored fake whistleblower willing to come out swinging for the red team. Something in the lab leak discourse needed to change.
Luckily for Alina, it did so in what was perhaps the most spectacular fashion possible.
Scarlett was always a time bomb, with her “unrestricted bioweapon” preprint built up to detonate right before the US elections as an October surprise. It did not work well enough. When Trump lost the election, public interest in her quickly evaporated. Additionally, election steal conspiracy myths had become all the rage, culminating in the storm on the US Congress by whipped-up conspiratorial mobs on January 6th. It was a rough wake-up call to political and media elites enthralled by the MAGA myth-making machinery. The appetite for more political fantasies was at an all-time low, and for a precious few weeks of sanity, Trump and anything associated with his brand had turned toxic. This included everything related to the bioweapon myth, including a memo from the outgoing Trump State Department that caused a problem for the WHO mission.
Yet the conspiratorial energy and audience demand for any lab leak suspicions did not disappear when President Trump lost power. Once an emotionally satisfying narrative has been catapulted to the peak of the attention economy, it is hard to put the conspiracy demons back into the box. Rather, the bioweapon myth’s downfall created the attention space for alternative origin theories once again. The internet abhors a vacuum, after all. With Alina Chan, DRASTIC, and USRTK digging into the background of virologists for months, their particular rabbit hole had gotten quite deep and detailed when Nicholson Baker’s article finally pushed their profiles into the spotlight again.
[...] Consider the cautious words of Alina Chan, a scientist who works at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “There is a reasonable chance that what we are dealing with is the result of a lab accident.”
Baker had heavily and favorably quoted Alina Chan in his story, including her meritless preprint about the virus being pre-adapted to humans. Within days after January 6th, tastemakers and interest returned to Alina Chan, who by the time likely had learned how fickle the spotlight can be. I believe she was not going to let it fall off again. Leveraging her cultivated amplifier network, she had plenty of comments about how the soon-to-start WHO mission was doomed to fail. From Daily Mail-style UK tabloids to the pages of The Wall Street Journal, she became instrumental as well as instrumentalized in expressing criticism of Chinese obfuscations surrounding the origins of the virus. She was a young scientist with Asian roots, born and raised in Canada, trained at Harvard and MIT, alleged bastions of left American liberalism. No matter how one looked at it, she was not a right-wing lunatic, and she certainly was not aligned with the Trump administration that had fallen out of favor. Other political commentators quickly joined in on her skepticism of China. The WHO was too financially dependent on China, they argued, and its director general, the Ethiopian public health researcher, diplomat, and politician Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was seen as being in its pocket. Geopolitics, power, and blame games were always expected to overshadow the Wuhan mission, and many tastemakers did their dearest to convey one message: WHO was ill-equipped to investigate the laboratory origin theory.
What chance did the international scientists ever have by writing a dry report full of complicated data, details, and recommendations but not definitive conclusions? Rumors and leaks about the mission, its difficulties, Chinese obstruction, and weak conclusions spread quickly. The international scientists were torn apart before the report was even released.
Once the chattering classes online had decided to treat the WHO mission as a complete failure—often before it had even concluded—because it did not satisfy audience demand, the public discourse door was slammed wide open for alternative origin narratives to have a go. Chinese intransigence and obfuscation were suddenly re-interpreted as evidence of a lab leak cover-up, possibly of secret research gone wrong. Alina Chan seemed in her element. Weeks before the final mission report came out in late March, major newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal uncritically printed an open letter from Alina Chan and other DRASTIC amateurs calling for a “full and unrestricted international forensic investigation.” Activists and trolls were dominating the discourse on social media, bringing scientists into the defensive to somehow prove a zoonotic origin, which was, of course, not something they could reasonably do given the state of the evidence and uncertainties involved. The public pressure to hold China to account for its obfuscation likely contributed to the WHO director-general’s decision to prove his independence from China. In a press conference in late March, Tedros threw the work and recommendations of the international team that went to Wuhan under the bus:
Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy. We will keep you informed as plans progress, and as always, we very much welcome your input. Let me say clearly that as far as WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table.
These comments would cause a gasp amongst journalists in the room, and many took away that the uncertainty about a possible lab leak has not closed but was actually widened by the WHO mission. Over the next few weeks, calls for more investigations were sounded in science, the media, and the public.
One by one, conspiratorial, contrarian, skeptic, and heterodox voices were given ever bigger platforms to air their suspicions and theories about how the virus came about. The feeling that scientific hubris caused the pandemic and that the scientists who were supposed to give answers seemed reluctant or unable to investigate themselves started dwelling. Nicholson Baker best explained the prevailing political sentiment in an interview from the time by stating, “There are a lot of questions to be asked. …we have to approach this as a problem of science in general.”
However, it would be another conspiratorial author who would land on the most persuasive framing for transforming the dubious unease about research and scientists into strongly held lab leak beliefs. Nicholas Wade is a former science writer who had a long career in established media outlets, from scientific journals to The New York Times. In his later years, he seemingly became somewhat obsessed with the emergent field of genetics and the topic of human evolution. After a relatively well-received first book in the early 2000s, his later works saw his writing turn towards more and more unsubstantiated hypotheses about human nature. For example, his 2014 book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History reportedly ended up as a widely decried work in speculative racism. He was misrepresenting the emergent field of population genetics, much to the horror of the scientists whose work he supposedly leaned on. Jonathan M. Marks, a professor of biological anthropology, would critique Wade’s literary thesis, calling it “entirely derivative, an argument made from selective citations, misrepresentations, and speculative pseudoscience.” “There was a feeling that our research had been hijacked by Wade to promote his ideological agenda,” Rasmus Nielsen, a population geneticist organizing a joint response from experts in the field, would tell the journal Science. He would add, “The outrage… was palpable.”
The almost 80-year-old Wade had seemingly lost touch with scientific reality in favor of promoting personal beliefs. After that faux pas, it seems to me he turned bitter towards scientists and media critics alike and took a pause from public writing. Until 2021, when he possibly saw an opportunity to air his grievance and redeem himself. He self-published a blog post on the writer platform Medium titled “Origin of COVID — Following the Clues: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” Wade was no stranger to stirring controversy with flimsy genetic analyses, and his article came out swinging. His 10,000-word story not only cherry-picked data to make the case for a genetically engineered, gain-of-function COVID origin reminiscent of Yuri Deigin’s blog (which he directly credited) and Nicholson Baker’s popular article, but he also finally delivered what many people were truly craving: someone concrete to blame. And I mean that literally.
He would explicitly write, “Here are the players who seem most likely to deserve blame,” before listing each of them with a paragraph detailing their culpability. He named Chinese scientists, Chinese authorities, the worldwide community of virologists, and the US role in funding WIV. Given the prevailing conspiracy theories and moral panic about gain-of-function, no real surprises there. But then he adds another group to blame, one that must have deeply stung his former science writer colleagues and media elites:
To these serried walls of silence must be added that of the mainstream media. To my knowledge, no major newspaper or television network has yet provided readers with an in-depth news story of the lab escape scenario, such as the one you have just read, although some have run brief editorials or opinion pieces. One might think that any plausible origin of a virus that has killed three million people would merit a serious investigation. Or that the wisdom of continuing gain-of-function research, regardless of the virus’s origin, would be worth some probing. Or that the funding for gain-of-function research by the NIH and NIAID during a moratorium on such funding would bear investigation. What accounts for the media’s apparent lack of curiosity?
The “mainstream media,” meaning his former colleagues at The New York Times, Science, Nature, and similar outlets, was largely responsible for discarding the lab leak theory, he asserted. He offered two reasons. The first was that:
Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives; most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses. So when their sources won’t help, these journalists are at a loss.
The second was:
Another reason, perhaps, is the migration of much of the media toward the left of the political spectrum. Because President Trump said the virus had escaped from a Wuhan lab, editors gave the idea little credence. They joined the virologists in regarding lab escape as a dismissible conspiracy theory. During the Trump administration, they had no trouble in rejecting the position of the intelligence services that lab escape could not be ruled out.
Like Li-Meng Yan’s pseudoscientific preprints, which had been effective in triggering influential virologists and biosafety experts into a response, Wade’s pseudointellectual allegations did not sit well with many influential journalists and news outlets. He had been one of their own, a former science writer and NYT journalist, now putting the blame for a failed origin investigation on them. Because they had been too credulous to virologists and politically biased against Trump, he alleged, while ignoring serious people on the other side of this issue.
In his article, Nicholas Wade had quoted the Nobel laureate David Baltimore, who had falsely called the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 a “smoking gun for engineering”, giving weight to his assertions that some experts disagreed on the origin question.
Parallel to this, the virologist Jesse Bloom and microbiologist David Relman, together with other experts who felt like the origins had not been properly investigated, wrote a letter to the journal Science asking for a “proper investigation.”
This added further weight to the Wade’s allegation that journalists were biased and ignored these serious scientists for political reasons. Wade’s article and the science letter went viral.
In US journalism, there is the cultural notion that there are always two sides to a story, and journalists are expected to be “neutral transmitters” of information; they should take no sides, have no stake, no ideology, and no political or personal views of their own. The journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen argues that journalists constantly feel pressure to “demonstrate their innocence” to audiences. Allegations of political bias clouding their judgment on the origins issue, whether factual or not, prompted at least some journalists into self-reflection and admittance that they might have prematurely dismissed the various man-made theories or ignored the contrarians in favor of established experts. The idea of political bias also spoke dearly to right-leaning op-ed writers sitting at major newspapers, like Bret Stephens at The New York Times, who cemented Wade’s allegations with his NYT article titled “Media Groupthink and the Lab-Leak Theory.” It became public perception that this whole thing was a media failure. Unfortunately, that mattered for beyond the lab leak controversy.
Criticizing the “mainstream media” has been the bread and butter of a different, and very influential, online community: alternative media influencers, heterodox podcasters, and political pundits, who saw their numbers skyrocket during the pandemic for a range of reasons, including the fact that many people were being stuck at home and consuming more online content. Like vultures, they tried to hack out juicy pieces of attention from the apparent “censorship” failure of mainstream media—their direct competition in the discourse game of persuasion, popularity, profit, and power. They were the better media because they always took the laboratory origin theory seriously instead of censoring it, they would claim. One by one, major newspapers came out with new stories revisiting the lab leak theory, often uncritically printing the words of former Trump administration staffers and online conspiracy theorists to signal their journalistic innocence and unbiasedness. A false overcorrection, if not an outright inversion of factual reality.
How else could one explain the Wall Street Journal coming out with an alleged bombshell story on “3 sick WIV workers” on May 23rd 2021, an unsubstantiated allegation that can quite easily be traced back to the fabrications of ex-Trump state Department advisor and bioweapon conspiracy theory pusher David Asher? A story he had told multiple times with mutually contradictory details, sometimes adding seemingly random fabrications for narrative effect, such as saying that a spouse of one of the lab workers died, sometimes telling it was a supposed monkey bite that infected a worker. In the Wall Street Journal, Asher’s tale was framed as “anonymous government sources” spilling the beans about an intelligence report referencing three sick WIV workers that had been hospitalized in November 2019, implying not-so-subtly that these would be all but proof of a lab accident. Worth noticing that the journalist in question, Michael R Gordan, was also the first to say that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction back in 2003. Our skepticism ought to be heightened when, in my opinion, some media makers already have exhibited a pattern of regime propaganda to manipulate the news cycle, but that is a sidenote. Unsurprisingly, that unsubstantiated WSJ story went extremely viral, adding even more to the lab leak media frenzy. With that dramatic shift in media coverage and tone also came a shift in public perception and beliefs, despite no changes to the underlying evidence, which still strongly pointed towards a zoonotic explanation. A rift between what scientists and society believe was forming.
Overall, I think Nicholas Wade’s story that kicked-off that discourse vibe shift appeared to have hit a sweet spot, being published at the right time after the WHO “failure,” substantiated by appeals for an independent investigation by serious scientists and supposed new intelligence assessments, hitting the right emotions by playing into the gain-of-function moral panic and putting the blame on a class of media amplifiers all too eager to demonstrate their journalistic innocence. His story, and the subsequent science letter and WSJ article, broke out of their niche, and, as we have learned in a previous chapter, this brought the viral narrative into contact with a lot of new audiences who either had never thought about the topic, were not familiar with its context, or were very vulnerable to its emotional appeal. Citizens who feared that biotechnology had gone too far, or that mainstream media cannot be trusted, or that scientists and experts are arrogant and culpable, or that ominous China is hiding what really happened in Wuhan all merged into a belief that scientists might have “opened Pandora’s box,” as Wade put it. This uneasy belief would also serve as a beacon for a very specific type of audience that would prove consequential: the Beltway establishment and those whose salary is dependent on protecting the nation from existential threats, real or imagined.
“What I did not detect was that there was this growing drumbeat”
The former China correspondent Gady Epstein told me. The Harvard-educated journalist had covered the original SARS outbreak 20 years ago and was reporting for The Economist from New York about China’s relationship with the world when the Wade story was published. He told me that was not fooled by the prevailing conspiratorial narratives, had no desire to demonstrate his innocence, nor did he believe that the story needed to be covered just because other media were suddenly covering it. He had seen no evidence to support the current speculations and did not believe them to have any merit, but he found himself advocating strongly inside the newspaper for covering the lab leak theory again. Confused, I asked him to walk me through his reasoning.
He had a vivid memory of when and why he decided the new lab leak myth had to be covered, and it was related to Nicholas Wade’s article, or better said, somebody’s fervent endorsement of it. “When I saw Richard Haass’s tweet, I was shocked that somebody ‘serious’ would endorse the lab leak theory.” Richard Haass was an American diplomat, director of policy planning for the United States Department of State during the Bush administration and was president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) until June 2023. With their offices in the Upper East Side, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C., CFR was a think tank where the establishment elites, including former politicians, secretaries of state, CIA directors, bankers, lawyers, and media elites, mingled to talk about foreign policy. As CFR president, Richard Haass was a “very known quantity from the Bush administration,” a conservative who was never a “MAGA head or radical” but rather a “quintessential establishment figure.” Now he was tweeting praise for Wade’s article and adding that the science “increasingly supports” that the virus “escaped from the Wuhan lab”.
Haass’s endorsement of the article and of lab leak theory shocked Epstein, who had covered foreign policy with respect to China for a long time. He pulled out his phone to check the messages he had exchanged with a CFR insider who knew Richard very well. “This strikes me as an irresponsible endorsement from Richard, I’ve seen credible pushback from experts to this non-expert piece,” he had written to the insider. “I am curious if this is becoming the establishment’s view?” After some back and forth it became clear that his contact agreed with Haass. This was someone Epstein greatly respected, and now both his trusted insider and Richard Haass were openly endorsing the lab leak theory.
“It was at this point that I realized [the] lab leak theory had gotten its tentacles deep into the establishment and that, at the very least, we needed to write the political story of it”
Epstein explained to me. He noticed early that the lab leak theory was becoming an accepted, if not desired, position in Washington and the foreign policy establishment, so it was going to “stick around and must be reckoned with, both on the scientific question but also on the political/policy implications.”
Epstein understood that the beliefs of the most powerful in government matter—for everything from foreign policy to partisan lawmaking to domestic popularity. That is why mainstream media coverage tends to closely follow elite beliefs, sometimes even parrot them. Just a few weeks later, Epstein would be right on the money. President Joe Biden had just ordered the intelligence services to conduct a 90-day investigation into the lab leak theory. That announcement from the highest level of government left no doubt that the lab leak theory had finally shed its ugly beginnings, mired in Trump-era propaganda. It was now official business. Domestic and foreign politics suddenly relied on addressing a scientific question or maybe even putting a visible check on what those virologists were allegedly doing in the first place.
Much of the context, circumstances, and details behind these elite events remained invisible to ordinary citizens, however. Most of us were left to observe—in just a few short months in 2021—an extraordinary amount of activity in our information spheres with respect to the lab leak theory.
“They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into an idea that the virus came from a lab,” a glowing profile by the elite publication MIT Technology Review cemented the contrarian postdoc’s marketing image as a hero-martyr. Popular late-night comedy show hosts, such as Jon Stewart, would poke fun at how obvious it is that a “novel coronavirus” causes a pandemic right next to the “Wuhan novel coronavirus lab,” and we were left to agree in our disbelief why supposedly nobody had ever looked closer at the lab.
The lab leak theory dominated the news cycle, late-night TV, magazines, YouTube, and social media. “Somebody in that lab fucked up, big time,” was an easy enough intuition to sell to millions, after all. For citizens, even myself, for a few hot weeks in May 2021, the lab leak hypothesis seemed logical; it made sense. Facebook also reversed course. The social media company had removed claims of the virus being engineered or a bioweapon for a few months in early 2021 to reduce re-emerging misinformation and disinformation spreading on its platform. They announced that, because of recent events, they would no longer reduce content speculating about a man-made virus. That action empowered alternative media manipulators and clout chasers to pounce on the lab leak story with claims that they had been unfairly censored.
If the “lab leak” moderation could be toppled, what about other scientific topics such as vaccines? Or climate change? What about moderation policies in general? Activity from anti-science activists, influencers, and propagandists reached a fever pitch as they could smell blood in the water. It was an opportunity they had been waiting for; the moderators seemingly messed up, “censoring” users on a topic of geopolitical relevance. They would soon achieve incredible success with a momentous propaganda campaign in which they recast Facebook's narrow lab leak origin moderation policy as a cross-platform and cross-society conflict between “free speech” and “censorship”. In the future, they would accuse all attempts at platform moderation (even against hateful and illegal content), even fact-checking and community notes (which, technically, is just adding more speech), as a violation of their First Amendment constitutional rights. Many also accused the platforms of targeting, “censoring” and “silencing” conservatives specifically. However, later studies showed that right-wing and conservative voices were in fact disproportionately amplified and not censored by these platforms. But facts matter less than feelings in the attention economy. Republican politicians, and at least one eccentric billionaire would capitalize on this energy, and they began to present themselves as self-described fighters for free speech at this point. Using the lab leak myth as a token supposedly proving their false narratives, the ensuring outrage, and political headwinds against any moderation efforts eventually neutered most platform moderation teams. As a result, what I would call a political culture of “consequence-free” lies, hate and harassment began their march to become the new normal. Ever since, the worst and most reckless media manipulators and hate preachers have had unmitigated access to the attention of the masses.
The wider world also reacted to the US government’s 90-day announcement and renewed lab leak allegations, with the European Union and other countries joining calls for another origin investigation, signaling their loyalty to US foreign policy. In return, China completely shut down all collaboration with the US, WHO, and international scientists. A geopolitical stalemate ensued that continues to this day. Peter Daszak had initially hoped that President Biden would ease tensions with China so they could work together to get to the bottom of the origin question and, more importantly, implement measures to prevent the next zoonotic pandemic. But politically, a hard stance on China was desired, even from a democratic president. The WHO was left paralyzed and ultimately gave up on the planned Phase 2 work, a would-be follow-up mission with the international team. The lack of a way forward abroad would turn public and political scrutiny inward, with conspiracy theorists, investigative reporters, and politicians leading the charge against virologists who might have “committed the crime of the century” or aided and abetted in its cover-up.
“Let the reckoning begin,” the last words in Nicholas Wade’s article rang prophetic into the night.
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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