By James B.
Meigs
Monday, June 28,
2021
‘Someday we will stop talking about the
lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is
not yet here,” a writer named Apoorva Mandavilli recently posted on Twitter. It
would have been easy to scroll right past the comment—Twitter is full of people
ranting about COVID and calling everyone racist—but for the writer’s Twitter
bio: “Reporter @nytimes on mainly #covid19.” Later that day, the Times reporter
took down her tweet, saying it had been “badly phrased.” The day in question
was May 26, 2021. The mounting evidence that the COVID-19 coronavirus escaped
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously emerging from
nature, had become the hottest topic in journalism and potentially the most
consequential science story in a generation.
If researchers had manipulated the
SARS-CoV-2 virus to be more virulent, and then that virus had escaped the lab,
it would mean the pandemic was arguably the worst manmade disaster in history.
(A slightly less creepy—but still horrifying—possibility: COVID-19 is caused by
a naturally occurring virus that happened to leak while being studied at the
Wuhan Institute.) Many observers have compared the accident to the Chernobyl
meltdown, another high-tech screw-up compounded by government deceit. But, with
a global death toll likely to approach 4 million, a Wuhan lab leak, if it did
in fact occur, would be perhaps 10,000 times deadlier than the Ukraine nuclear
accident.
For a science journalist, helping figure
out the true genesis of this catastrophe would be the opportunity of a
lifetime. And yet here was one of the New York Times’ top pandemic
reporters fretting that too many people were interested in the question. In a
way, you can understand her frustration. Elite institutions and media outlets
had been trying to get people to “stop talking about the lab leak theory” for
over a year. From their perspective, the issue was raised by the wrong sort of
people—including Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton and President Donald
Trump—and giving the story oxygen might mean lending credence to conservative
talking points. Moreover, focusing on China’s sloppy research practices and
possible cover-up would distract the public from the media’s preferred COVID
narratives: Trump’s incompetence, racial injustice, and red-state recklessness.
Desperate to avoid those risks, media outlets, health organizations, government
agencies, even the scientific community labored seemingly in concert to
discount the lab-leak possibility and discredit anyone who raised it.
But, to the frustration of gatekeepers
like Mandavilli, evidence that COVID-19 did originate at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology keeps getting stronger. In recent months, there has been one bombshell
disclosure after another. Even some scientists who initially pooh-poohed the
idea are now demanding an investigation.
The dam is breaking. And with the surging
floodwaters, comes a stunning realization: Almost across the board, our elite
institutions got the most important question about COVID wrong. Worse, they
worked furiously to discourage anyone else from getting it right. The leading
scientific experts turned out to be spinning the truth. Our public-health
officials put their political agenda ahead of any scientific mandate. And the
press and social-media giants eagerly played along, enforcing strict rules
about which COVID topics were acceptable and which had to be banished from the
national conversation.
During the Trump years, we heard a lot of
hand-wringing about the public’s unwarranted “distrust” of our society’s
designated experts and leaders. But to be trusted, people and institutions have
to be trustworthy. The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a profound
corruption at the heart of our expert class. The impact of that revelation will
reverberate for years to come.
Interestingly, the idea that the virus
might have leaked from a lab wasn’t particularly controversial in the early weeks
of the pandemic. Initially, no one thought it was “racist” to note the
coincidence that a disease caused by a virus similar to ones found in Chinese
bats just happened to emerge at the doorstep of the world’s top laboratory
devoted to studying…Chinese bat viruses. But once Senator Cotton brought up the
possibility in a January 2020 Senate hearing, the lab-leak notion had to be
squelched.
Our country’s most esteemed media outlets
moved as one. First, they twisted Cotton’s question. He had said we should investigate whether an
accidental leak had occurred. But the Washington Post suggested
that Cotton had called COVID-19 a deliberately released bioweapon. It was all
downhill from there: Politifact labelled that idea a “pants-on-fire” lie.
The Post accused the senator of “fanning the embers of a
conspiracy theory that has already been debunked by experts.” Slate attributed
the notion to “good old-fashioned racism.”
Overnight, the self-appointed
fact-checkers all agreed that the lab-leak question was “a lunatic conspiracy
theory,” as Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting put it last year. Of course,
that meant anyone who raised the question couldn’t simply be searching for the
truth—such a person had to have a political agenda. When Trump mentioned “the
theory from the lab,” last April, CNN’s John Harwood concluded that the
president was “looking for ways to deflect blame for the performance of his
administration.” In an interview on CBS, China’s ambassador to the U.S., Cui
Tiankai, showed a surgical deftness in manipulating elite American opinion: He
cagily warned that pursuing lab-leak questions “will fan up racial
discrimination, xenophobia.”
Our leading institutions took their cue,
universally declaring that the Wuhan theory wasn’t just incorrect but dangerous
and malicious. The World Health Organization called the spread of the idea an
“infodemic” of misinformation. Social-media platforms tweaked their algorithms
to ensure that these dangerous notions wouldn’t infect the defenseless
population. When a New York Post opinion writer raised the
possibility of a lab leak, Facebook slapped a “False Information” alert on the
piece and made it impossible to share. Facebook also warned it would throttle
the accounts of any users who persisted in spreading such wrongthink,
ensuring that any dissenters from the approved COVID talking points would fade
into the social-media background.
It almost worked.
For nearly a year, mainstream news outlets
barely mentioned the lab-leak hypothesis (except to ridicule it). The
scientific community, too, largely banished the topic. In February 2020, a
group of 27 eminent virologists had published a statement in the influential
medical journal the Lancet, soundly rejecting the idea that the
virus might have emerged from a lab rather than passing to humans from bats or
some other animal. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories
suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the scientists wrote.
One of the organizers of that letter was Peter Daszak, an epidemiologist and
president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a group that helps distribute federal
grant money to researchers studying viruses. Not surprisingly, discussions
about a potential lab leak tapered off dramatically. Working scientists’
careers depend on getting their papers published and winning research grants.
How many want to contradict the biggest names in their fields? Only later did
it emerge that Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had funneled some U.S. government
research money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak’s efforts to shut
down debate on the question of that lab’s role in the disaster entailed a
massive conflict of interest.
Perhaps most disturbing was the response
of the U.S. intelligence community. Two different teams in the U.S.
government—one working out of the State Department, the other under the
direction of the National Security Council—were tasked with examining the
origins of the outbreak. According to a blockbuster investigation by Vanity
Fair reporter Katherine Eban, those researchers faced intense pushback
from within their own bureaucracies. Four former State Department officials
told Eban they had been repeatedly advised “not to open a ‘Pandora’s Box.’”
In particular, they were urged not to
reveal the role the U.S. government might have played in helping fund the Wuhan
Institute of Virology’s controversial “gain-of-function” projects.
Gain-of-function research involves manipulating potentially dangerous viruses
to see if they might more easily infect human cells. Advocates, including Peter
Daszak, say the process can help scientists anticipate future outbreaks and
possibly develop vaccines. Critics say, “It’s like looking for a gas leak with
a lighted match,” as Rutgers professor of chemistry and chemical biology
Richard Ebright told Eban. Either way, the possibility that U.S. research
grants might have helped finance the creation of a super-virus was a revelation
some members of the intelligence establishment were loath to see exposed.
Despite the resistance, the State
Department team uncovered some stunning intelligence supporting the leak
hypothesis. In particular, researchers discovered that three WIV scientists
studying coronaviruses had fallen ill in November 2019 and had gone to the
hospital with COVID-like symptoms. The first confirmed cases of COVID-19 began
erupting around Wuhan less than a month later. In the chaotic last days of the
Trump administration, the State Department released a vague statement about its
Wuhan finding, but the news didn’t gain much traction at the time. Then the
incoming Biden administration promptly disbanded the State Department’s Wuhan
team.
The whole investigation into COVID-19’s
origins might have petered out at that moment. The story of why the line of
inquiry survived is not an account of leading scientists and health
organizations dutifully parsing the evidence. Instead, it is largely the story
of little-known researchers—many working outside the bounds of elite institutions—who
didn’t let the political implications of their findings derail their efforts.
Much of what we know today about the Wuhan Institute’s risky research is thanks
to these independent skeptics who challenged the institutional consensus. Some
risked their careers to do so.
One key group was an international
assortment of independent researchers—few of whom were established
virologists—that self-assembled on the Internet. The group called itself the
Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19, or
DRASTIC. The name made them sound like a band of online gamers, but the group
diligently uncovered a series of damning facts. Defenders of the Wuhan
Institute often describe the lab as a virtually fail-safe Biosafety Level 4
facility. But one DRASTIC researcher discovered that much of the work at the
Wuhan lab was performed at lower levels—BSL-3 or even BSL-2, a degree of
protection similar to that in a dentist’s office. Another showed that SARS
viruses had previously leaked from China’s top research labs with alarming
regularity. “The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S.
government,” a State Department investigator told Vanity Fair.
Alina Chan, a young molecular biologist
and postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, was
particularly fearless in challenging the premature consensus laid down by the
elders in her field. She zeroed in on the virus’s genetic structure. If the
virus had gradually evolved to target humans, those changes should have left traces
in the genome. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 appeared “pre-adapted to human
transmission,” she wrote in May 2020. Other researchers confirmed that the
virus contains a particular genomic sequence that doesn’t typically occur
naturally in this family of viruses but that is commonly inserted during
gain-of-function research. By early 2021, these sorts of revelations were
building into a compelling argument that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab.
Meanwhile, researchers trying to find the natural “reservoir” of the virus—in
bats or some other animal—were coming up shockingly empty.
Throughout the pandemic we’ve often heard
admonitions to “follow the science.” Looking back we can see that few
scientists—and even fewer journalists—really did. 60 Minutes, which
aired a skeptical report on the WHO’s milquetoast COVID-origin investigation,
was a rare exception. But most journalists who aggressively pursued the Wuhan
story tended to work slightly outside the mainstream. In January 2021,
Nicholson Baker—a novelist, rather than an established science writer—published
“The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” in New York magazine. In May,
former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade published a
massively detailed argument for the theory on the self-publishing website
Medium. Wade (who has faced criticism on the left for his writings on genetics
and race) quoted Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist David Baltimore saying that
a specific genetic modification at the virus’s “furin cleavage site” was “the
smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Two weeks later, Donald G. McNeil
Jr.—who was humiliatingly forced out of the Times last year
due to his perceived violations of woke etiquette—posted on Medium a piece
entitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lab-Leak Theory.”
Notice the irony here: While two refugees
from the New York Times were publishing deep, well-reported
articles on an alternative outlet, the Times itself was still
mostly ignoring the Wuhan-lab story. And one of its current pandemic
specialists, Apoorva Mandavilli, was on Twitter urging everyone to “stop
talking about the lab leak.” Fortunately, people didn’t stop talking. The
lab-leak hypothesis had moved into the mainstream. Scientists and journalists
could finally discuss it without fear of excommunication. Facing mounting
pressure, the Biden administration reversed course on May 26, announcing it had
asked U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the “two likely scenarios” for
the virus’s origin. But so much damage had already been done.
When the pandemic hit last year, we were
all urged to fall in line and listen to the authorities. Scientists and
bureaucrats were elevated to near-divine status. “Let us pray, now, for
science,” Times tech columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote last
February. “Pray for reason, rigor and expertise…. Pray for the N.I.H. and the
C.D.C. Pray for the W.H.O.” Now the public is waking up to the fact that,
prayers notwithstanding, those institutions largely failed us. The WHO kowtowed
to China’s deceptions. Anthony Fauci trimmed his public statements to fit the
prevailing political winds. Some of the nation’s top virologists didn’t just
dismiss the lab-leak possibility, they appeared to be covering up their own
involvement with Wuhan gain-of-function research. Journalists and social-media
companies conspired to suppress legitimate questions about a disease that was
killing thousands of Americans each day.
We may never get complete confirmation
that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute; certainly, China will never
allow an honest investigation. But the idea that the virus resulted from
scientific research—and that some U.S. scientists then tried to hide their
involvement—is already gaining acceptance with the public. How will Americans
react to this perceived betrayal? Not well, I’m afraid. “We may very well see
the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public
anger,” writes Thomas Frank. The financial crisis of 2008 triggered widespread
suspicion of elite institutions and free markets, burning over political ground
that eventually became fertile for both Bernie Sanders and Trump. If the public
concludes that COVID-19 was, in effect, an inside job, the political fallout
could last a generation. I don’t mean people will believe the virus was
deliberately released—although far too many will embrace that
idea—but that they will see the disease as a product of an elite power
structure that behaves recklessly and evades responsibility.
It would be tempting to cheer on a
populist uprising against elite expertise and institutions. But that would be a
tragic mistake. The vast majority of scientists, health-care institutions—even
many public officials—did vital heroic work during the pandemic. Just look at
those miraculous vaccines! Moreover, we can’t survive in a complex and dangerous
world without expertise. Replacing today’s expert class with conspiracy
theorists, anti-vax charlatans, and populist mountebanks might satisfy the
public’s anger for a time. But it would only make our society more
vulnerable—to domestic unrest, pandemics, you name it. Can we reform the
institutions that failed us? Can they reform themselves, perhaps to be more
humble, more attuned to facts and less focused on power? I wish I
could say I’m optimistic.
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