Science Counterpunch

Is a cosmic rock truly an alien spaceship that the government does not want you to know about? Misrepresentations of scientific inquiry or hypotheses often aren’t an accident, but a structural by‑product of how curiosity, media incentives, and speculation collide. Space science, especially the search for alien life, sits at the perfect fault line: high uncertainty, high awe, and enormous public attention. The result is a constant churn of overreach, misinterpretation, and claims that outrun the evidence.This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by astrophysicist David Kipping—director of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University and creator of the Cool Worlds channel—to examine how serious science pushes back. We unpack why astronomy and astrobiology attract so much distortion, how careful speculation differs from storytelling dressed up as science, and what it means to communicate uncertainty without killing curiosity.We talk about:* why space and alien life grab the public imagination—and why that makes audiences vulnerable to grifters* the difference between compelling speculation and testable scientific hypotheses* working with institutions like NASA, and where institutional communication succeeds or fails* the risks and rewards of engaging massive platforms that don’t consistently respect scientific limits* what scientists, creators, and audiences can do better or differently to stop misrepresentation before it hardens into beliefBeing careful and evidence-driven isn’t about shutting down wonder or fun speculations. It’s about protecting them—by keeping evidence in charge.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

Anti-science isn’t a bug in the modern information ecosystem—it’s the feature. Today’s secular gurus don’t need robes or rituals; they wield academic credentials, technical jargon, and a galaxy-brained confidence that turns YouTube, Twitter, and podcasts into pulpits. Their gospel? That institutions are corrupt, science is suspect, and only they have the answers.This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Chris Kavanagh and Matt Brown, hosts of Decoding the Gurus, for a forensic look at the rise of anti-science influencers and the cult dynamics that keep their audiences loyal. We dissect how “decorative scholarship” and anti-institutional rhetoric undermine trust, why audiences crave affirmation over information, and what happens when universities and media fail to defend the basics.We talk about:* the anatomy of a secular guru—and why credentials are both weapon and shield* how online communities form around grievance, identity, and ritualized in-group policing* the psychology of audiences: why emotional energy, resentment, and narcissism fuel the ecosystem* why institutions struggle to respond; and what academic freedom really means in the age of information warfare* practical strategies for fighting back: critical consumption, evidence, and refusing to feed the fireThis isn’t about dunking for sport. It’s about understanding the playbook—and arming yourself for the next round.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

Modern authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with tanks. It announces itself with spreadsheets, budget cuts, accreditation fights, and the quiet capture of institutions most people barely notice—until they’re gone.This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Professor Christina Pagel, Professor of Operational Research at UCL and creator of the Trump Action Tracker, a data‑driven record of nearly 3,000 actions documenting the attacks on democratic and scientific institutions in the U.S. Drawing on her public communication work with Independent SAGE, Christina now raises the alarm about US politics with hard-to-refute data; explains why universities, regulators, media, and science itself are always early targets, and how fear and anticipatory compliance do much of the authoritarian work for free.We talk about:* her data collection project “Trump action tracker” and the administration’s method behind the madness* why modern authoritarianism is quiet, bureaucratic, and strategic* how controlling data and “official numbers” beats outright censorship* why institutions don’t protect themselves—and often can’t* how vulnerable UK institutions really are (even the ones you assume are safe)* and why paying attention, speaking up, and refusing to disengage still mattersThis isn’t about doom-scrolling news. It’s about pattern recognition—and a warning from someone who knows how quickly “it can’t happen here” turns into “it already has.”Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

What happens when fringe anti-vaxxers move from fleecing online communities to the highest halls of power?This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Dr. Dan Wilson, molecular biologist and creator of the Debunk the Funk YouTube Channel, to dissect how anti‑vaccine narratives became mainstream—and why so many institutions seem unprepared to stop them.Dan walks us through his journey from being conspiracy‑curious as a teenager to becoming a meticulous science communicator, explaining why teaching the scientific method matters more than just throwing facts at people. We unpack the rise of COVID contrarians, the business model behind misinformation, and how grifters learned to weaponize frustration, identity, and “medical freedom.”We also talk about:* Why journalists keep asking the wrong questions* How figures like RFK Jr. slip past accountability* Why being polite to ordinary people is imperative, yet being polite to grifters a recipe for disaster * What burnout looks like when misinformation keeps winning* And how ordinary people can still make a difference without losing their sanityThis isn’t about losing faith in humanity. It’s about learning how bad ideas spread—and how to push back with evidence, empathy, and better questions that spark curiosity rather then reactance.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we welcome epidemiologist, MacArthur Fellow, and lifelong AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves to talk about what happens when politics is at odds with public health.Gregg was on the front lines of the AIDS epidemic with ACT UP in the 1990s, helping force institutions like the NIH and FDA to accelerate research and expand access to lifesaving treatments. Later, he brought that same activist-scientist playbook to South Africa, confronting deadly AIDS denialism at the level of government policy.What happens today in the US not only echoes but in many cases exceeds the terrors of the past.We talk about state-sanctioned pseudoscience, the capture of public-health institutions by political actors dead-set on burning down the house, and what has already been destroyed for a generation. We also dig into what activists and scientists did in the 90s to change the course of history—and what those lessons mean now, as global health systems face funding cuts, political sabotage, and a new wave of anti-science ideology.How do you defend public health when the notion of reality itself is under attack?You speak up. You organize locally. And you fight them for every school board, city council or community leadership seat at the table where you can make the lives of people around you better.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

Ancient aliens. Lost Ice Age civilizations. Atlantis hidden under the pyramids.Pseudo-archaeology is having a moment—and it’s not just harmless fun.In this episode of Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with archaeologist Flint Dibble and science YouTuber Kayleigh Dunning to break down how conspiracy history took over the internet—and what it takes to fight back.We talk about the rise of viral pseudo-history pushed by figures like Graham Hancock, why “secret knowledge” narratives spread so easily online, and how social media incentives reward myths over evidence.But this isn’t just about bad history. It’s about anti-intellectualism, harassment campaigns against scholars, and the growing gap between academic knowledge and public discourse.So how do you push back?By stepping into the arena. By meeting audiences where they are. And by showing that our human history is far richer than grifter fantasies want to make you believe.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to amplify lies.This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to dissect the machinery of modern disinformation. We explore why falsehoods leave a cognitive footprint — and why even highly educated people can fall for propaganda and reason themselves into nonsense.We dig into:* The psychology of “sticky” misinformation* Why intelligence isn’t immunity* How social media architecture supercharges conspiracy thinking* What the EU’s Digital Services Act gets right about platform power* Why democracy depends on “epistemic integrity”* And what scholars can do when autocracy pressures academiaDemocracy runs on shared facts, so what happens when those facts are systematically undermined?We take a hard look at how cognition, algorithms, and power collide — and what it will take to defend reality.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments!Subscribe for free to receive updates on my work and join the fight for an evidence-based worldview. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

Protest isn’t radical. Silence is.This week on Science Counterpunch, we’re joined by Colette Delawalla, clinical psychology PhD candidate and founder of Stand Up for Science, for a furious, clear-eyed breakdown of how American science is being dismantled in real time—and why scientists can’t afford to stay “above politics” anymore.From mass purges at federal agencies and frozen clinical trials to banned words lists and regime-sanctioned pseudoscience, Colette lays out how the Trump administration has turned science into a political weapon. This isn’t abstract policy debate: patients lose hope, researchers lose careers, and the public loses protection.We dig into how a single act of defiance—“f**k it, let’s protest”—sparked the first mass mobilization against Trump 2.0, why appeasement by legacy science institutions is a dead end, and what actually works when democracy and evidence are under coordinated attack. Along the way, we talk whistleblowers, organizing under pressure, why “science is apolitical” is a myth, and why bringing white papers to a political war guarantees defeat.This episode is about harvesting anger productively, taking up more responsibility, and drawing lines.If science is a public good, defending it means showing up—and saying no.No neutrality. No appeasement.Just resistance, strategy, and a counterpunch.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

This week on Science Counterpunch, we step into the ring with one of the most uncompromising voices in online science communication: Dave Farina, better known as the creator of Professor Dave Explains.Dave joins Sam Gregson and Philipp Markolin for a no-holds-barred conversation about the modern pseudoscience economy: how misinformation spreads, why it pays so well, and how grifters, influencers, and political actors exploit distrust in science for profit and power. From antivax propaganda and flat-earth cults to billionaire-backed “anti-establishment” narratives, we break down how the science denial ecosystem works—and why it’s more dangerous than ever.We dig into Dave’s famously combative style of debunking, the ethics and effectiveness of punching back hard, and whether politeness has quietly helped misinformation go mainstream. Along the way, we talk burnout, audience capture, cult dynamics, algorithmic incentives, and why factual discourse so often loses to flashy lies online.Most importantly, this episode asks a hard question for scientists and communicators alike: if science denial is now institutionalized, what does fighting back actually require—and who needs to get into the trenches?No false balance. No kid gloves. Just evidence, context, and a right hook straight to pseudoscience.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

What do vaccines and climate science have in common? The same political actors, media ecosystems, and financial interests have worked to discredit both.In this inaugural episode of Science Counterpunch, Dr. Peter Hotez and Dr. Michael Mann go head-to-head with the modern anti-science machine—petrostates, plutocrats, propagandists, performative media, wellness grifters, and the platforms amplifying them.We break down the tactics: gaslighting, false balance, “freedom” rhetoric, debate traps, and the weaponization of uncertainty. More importantly, we ask what it costs when societies can no longer agree on basic facts.This is frontline testimony from scientists who’ve taken the hits—and refused to stay quiet.If you care about science, public discourse, or the future of evidence-based policymaking, this is one to listen to.Science Counterpunch is a punchy YouTube-first podcast that exists to defend the Enlightenment in an age of information warfare. We expose merchants of doubt, amplify experts under attack, and arm you with the tools to spot anti-science rhetoric before it spreads.Evidence matters. Reason isn’t optional. Let’s counterpunch.Push back on disinformation and help amplify the voices of scientists under attack - share this episode.Find the full playlist of Science Counterpunch here.Follow, like and subscribe to Sam´s YouTube channel to watch the video recording and not miss any upcoming episode. Any thoughts and feedback? Let us know in the comments! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.“Murderer! Murderer! Smug murderer!” The threatening calls from an unknown conspiracy theorist followed Peter Daszak down the seemingly endless hallway of the US Capitol building. Some of his detractors were trying to get him rattled—any reaction, really—holding their phones to his face so they could blast it out to their followers. Also there: Emily Kopp, working for the anti-biotechnology activist group USRTK. She was chastising Peter for causing trillions in damages to the US, following behind him with a professional camera team recording her monologue. This would potentially be good footage for her next attack piece or possibly a movie. After countless books, op-eds, podcasts, and YouTube videos, the lab leak conspiracy genre was lacking a big-screen cinematic experience; rumors about its production had been circulating for months now.Peter knew it would get bad the moment US Republicans took control of the House in 2022. They had been campaigning as the party of accountability and oversight. A false promise. In reality, they wanted to direct the emotional energy of voters for political gain, whitewashing President Trump’s pandemic failings by using scientists as scapegoats. They also wanted to use the spectacle of public witch trials as campaign events—the offline version of the omnipresent pile-ons from social media. The agitated online mobs had called feverishly for a party that would exert revenge for the trauma of the pandemic, and Republicans were keen to ensure that it was the scientists and their democratic opponents at the other end of that particular pitchfork.Many pseudo-events had led up to this moment for Peter, from the White Coat Waste Project, using Matt Gaetz and Marco Rubio to cascade awareness of his WIV grant towards an irascible Trump, resulting in its unlawful cancellation on live television. The USRTK playbook included decontextualizing Peter’s emails to give ammunition to conspiracy theorists, while the relentless media onslaught about gain-of-function research stoked a moral panic. Then, the “leak” of DRASTIC’s re-interpreted DEFUSE proposal, the supposed blueprint for creating the pandemic virus. Katherine Eban’s hit pieces cast him and Shi Zhengli as the main villains. All of these were an avalanche of events, in addition to his supposed arrangement with Anthony Fauci as the “kingmaker” of grant funding and the many virologists in cahoots circling the wagon.Simultaneously, virus hunting had been demonized as well. Myths about the supposed dangers of discovering viruses were powered by biosafety activists, catastrophizing influencers, and sponsored in considerable part by the cryptocurrency fraudster and effective altruism fanatic Sam Bankman-Fried, who donated millions to various media outlets to write scary existential risk stories about virology. EcoHealth Alliance’s mission was recast as creating the conditions for biological warfare, treated by some commentators as the equivalent of nuclear testing. The utility of virus discovery for research and pandemic prevention was ridiculed. Even Republican senators missed no opportunity to blast Peter regularly in the Daily Mail and New York Post for uploading something as innocuous as a short video of a bat eating a banana. Each time he made the news, allegations against him would be recycled and refreshed in people’s memories. No matter what Peter Daszak did or did not do, no matter if he spoke up or withdrew, the drumbeat continued.The media landscape about him was a bizarre mixture of directed fan fiction and choose-your-own-adventure stories, with multiple co-created narratives about Peter, his role, and his supposed fault mixing, converging, and spinning into ever-new reasons to hate him. His supposed villainy was entertainment at this point, and the third act of his story arc was already prewritten.“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) led by Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup tweeted in June 2023. They all had big plans for the lab origin myth. In early 2023, they were laying out a path for the public shaming of scientists, first and foremost Peter Daszak, his colleague David Morens at the NIAID, and including Dr. Anthony Fauci. The HSSCP and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA) were the main tools for those ambitions.On November 14, 2023, behind closed doors, they pestered Peter with questions for over nine hours. “It is clear that they take it as a fact that we did reckless gain-of-function research,” Peter told me at the time, despite the NIH disagreeing. They also constantly hammered him about his role in the WHO mission and the supposed NIH-sponsored gain-of-function experiment The Intercept had homed in on. And, of course, the DEFUSE proposal, or more accurately, the distorted media version of it. His lawyers had advised him to not argue and contest the many false interpretations of technical details; he would come off as adversarial, and the politicians would blame their scientific ignorance and confusion on him. Rather, he should keep it simple and reiterate that this experiment was not gain-of-function based on the NIH definition and that the DEFUSE proposal was never funded, nor was the work ever conducted. He tried to stick to the advice, but he could not prevent himself from clarifying why certain technical allegations were just false and nonsensical. After the arduous interview, he left uncertain of what would happen next.Then, radio silence.Sometime in March 2024, Peter naively thought that he might not be called in for a public hearing. The vibe had seemingly moved on; the HSSCP was focusing their efforts on giving anti-vaxxers a platform, chastising school closures, lockdown measures, and issuing a subpoena to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “to answer for these deadly policy failures.” The usual political clown shows in a heated election year. The rewriting efforts of Trump-era policy failures had apparently shifted towards blaming the Democrats. Perhaps the lab leak narrative was just not that interesting or useful anymore after four years? Some virologists expressed the same feeling; the story was an old and tired trope at this point.They would be wrong.Shortly after Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the primary campaign, thereby securing the presidential nomination of the Republican Party again, the winds shifted quickly. His enablers in Congress focused on getting him elected, mobilizing voters anew. With Trump’s chances of winning the White House against an aging Joe Biden looking increasingly promising, they needed to create momentum for the next Republican policy agenda—an agenda that became known as Project 2025.Briefly, Project 2025 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks. The 922-page conservative policy magnum opus and “mandate for leadership” set out to radically transform the US. It aims to remove a lot of checks and balances necessary for a democratic society, bestowing the executive with unilateral power to implement their agenda and replacing tens of thousands of apolitical bureaucratic positions with pre-screened MAGA loyalists, including in the Department of Justice and scientific institutions such as the NIH, FDA, or CDC. Public health measures and climate action would be virtually impossible under the new regime. It would strip influence and independence from scientific bodies such as the CDC and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and bring them under tight political control. Similar plans have been laid out to remove FDA drug approvals for reproductive health care. Project 2025 is an all-out political assault on US science and institutions. Scientific American quoted Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, about the Project 2025 agenda: “The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document.”Such a radical anti-science policy agenda needs many motivated rationalizations to convince ordinary conservative Americans (who remain overall supportive of science) of its appropriateness. The HSSCP and other congressional committees were ideally positioned to create the right pseudo-events for that purpose. Any epic drama starts with a great villain, and the lab leak myth had just the right story ingredients to give politicians what they needed.The HSSCP announced Daszak’s public hearing on social media on April 4, 2024:🚨BREAKING🚨EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will testify at a public hearing on May 1, 2024.Dr. Daszak must answer questions about COVID-19 origins, dangerous gain-of-function research, and his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.They claimed that “Dr. Daszak and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research” and that “mounting evidence continues to show that COVID likely originated from a Wuhan lab.” They urged Peter to come to clarify his statements, insinuating he had “directly contradict[ed] previously uncovered evidence about his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology & his oversight of gain-of-function research.” Throughout April, the HSCCP would ramp up their attacks along the same line. Familiarity. Repetition. What they were missing was novelty. So, what’s the twist this time?The online absurdity reached a tragic peak when scientifically illiterate House representatives started to impose their ignorant interpretation of the DEFUSE proposal upon Peter’s supposed intention, alleging nothing less but a thought crime about a proposal that was never funded and work that was never conducted.Lying to Congress is a crime.@EcoHealthNYC President Dr. Peter Daszak told us he intended to conduct risky gain-of-function research in North Carolina. However, recent evidence suggests he actually planned to conduct the research in Wuhan.On May 1 — we will seek the truth.Open intimidation. The politicians threatened publicly that if Peter didn’t concede to their interpretation of unreality, he would be in criminal jeopardy. Now, that is new enough.Like a marketing campaign before a big event, the HSCCP regularly used their Twitter posts as teasers about the spectacle they had prepared for viewers:In less than one week, EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will appear before @COVIDSelecT for a public hearing.✔️ COVID-19 origins✔️ Gain-of-function research✔️ Wuhan Institute of Virology✔️ Dr. Anthony Fauci…and more are on the table.May 1, 2024 | 10:00am ETWhile conspiratorial communities online and Republican-aligned niche media had covered the upcoming public hearing of Peter Daszak throughout April, the overall traction in wider discourse was still limited to a few hundred thousand online people. Sizeable, but not news-cycle defining. That was to change exactly seven days before Peter Daszak’s hearing. Rep. Brad Wenstrup announced the bombshell in the best velocity hacker fashion: Dr. Anthony Fauci was up next. His hearing would happen in June, a few weeks after Peter’s. Now that announcement got the attention of mainstream outlets such as The Daily Caller, The Washington Post, and Fox News, putting Peter’s hearing on the map. Dutifully, Fox News framed Peter’s hearing as the preamble to the main blockbuster:Wenstrup said that the panel will also hold a public hearing with EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak on May 1 that will serve as a crucial component into the origins of COVID-19 and provide essential background ahead of Fauci’s public hearing.Free advertisement for the upcoming HSSCP-choreographed influence campaign. Finally, on May 1, 2024, the show was ready to start. And it did with a big bang.Precisely 12 minutes before his scheduled public hearing, as Peter was still being chased down the hallway, the HSCCP Twitter account posted an official-looking document. It was the Republican majority interim report “recommending EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak be formally debarred and criminally investigated.”Criminal investigation? Debarment? These are radical actions, especially as their sole evidentiary merit seems to lie in the fact that EcoHealth Alliance sent an NIH progress report in too late. However, with the lab leak narrative, the lack of supportive evidence was never a barrier to action. Peter was indeed referred to the Justice Department for allegedly lying to Congress and misleading funding agencies about conducting gain-of-function research. The NIH was not off the hook either. The report leveraged the same charge of facilitating dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan “contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci.”In other words, heads were finally going to roll.Even more cynically, the report openly tried to rewrite history, claiming that “the Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the WIV and instructed the NIH to fix the problem” and that “this intervention likely prevented EcoHealth from continuing to conduct dangerous research.” The shutdown of EcoHealth’s grant in 2020, which had to be reversed because of illegality, was now whitewashed as a necessary and just action. The purpose of scapegoating Peter Daszak and NIH officials was pretty clear:[According to] evidence collected by the Select Subcommittee, there are serious and systemic weaknesses in the federal government’s—particularly NIH’s—grant-making processes. The weaknesses identified by the Committees not only place United States taxpayer dollars at risk of waste, fraud, and abuse but also risk the national security of the United States. These weaknesses can only be remedied through both executive and legislative action.Project 2025 officially kicked off.All of this happened before Peter even read his introductory testimony. But if the verdict was already in, why go through with the public hearing after the fact? Virality, of course. To cement the rewriting of the past in the public’s mind and prepare them for the atrocities of tomorrow. If you make it trend, you make it true.“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the HSSCP had announced. After all, nothing flies in our gladiatorial arena of social media more than a public witch hunt. In the factional war of all versus all, consensus can only be found when we come together around shared enemies. Politicians know this best.Peter’s hearing went predictably with posturing politicians trying to look good on camera while reading their prepared monologues. Peter, aware that the verdict was already out, was sitting in as a campaign prop, facing his accusers, getting cut off any time he tried to clarify or correct the record. An exercise in cruelty. He was still fighting for his reputation when the string had already closed around his neck. The setup, imagery, and his futile attempts to satisfy the accusers just provided the gravitas to the choreographed event.In their monologues, Republican representatives really did not offer to lay out any evidence or examine his charges; rather, they would try to find ways to insinuate and link Peter Daszak´s work to various grand conspiracy myths of the day. First and foremost, he facilitated gain-of-function research in China, helped the Chinese which caused the pandemic. But there were also some tangents and other dog whistles. For example, Rep. James Comer from Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Accountability and Oversight, tried to paint him as a spy or CIA asset, or at least somehow in cahoots with the intelligence agency. “Does the intelligence community know what happened in the Wuhan lab? Did the intelligence community believe that China was manufacturing a bioweapon?” A nod to MAGA Republicans who believe that the “deep state,” including the intelligence community, was somehow involved in creating the pandemic, to institute vaccine mandates, totalitarian control, or whatever. Peter Daszak answered that it was a question for the intelligence agency, then referenced the 2023 ODNI report, where all intelligence agencies ruled out that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon.Rep. Michael Cloud from Texas used his five minutes to ask if Dr. Daszak had been engaged with social media companies and whether he agreed with their moderation policies. Nothing to do with Peter, but a dog whistle for a different battle over misinformation and disinformation research, another field of science that Republicans are attacking along with public health, medicine, climate change, and a general evidence-based worldview. He also questioned Peter Daszak’s patriotism and allegiance, given that he works with a country that does “unrestricted warfare against the United States.” More red meat to the broad anti-China coalition in the US. Peter replied that to stop pandemics, we need scientists to go to the places where they emerge and that, ultimately, this is in the interest of US citizens.Rep. Morgan Griffith from Virginia spent his five minutes in a virtual monologue, talking himself into a rage about Dr. Daszak being a supposed liar while not letting Dr. Daszak address any of his contentions. Overall, a lot of grandstanding was expected from this side of the political spectrum that had long made up its mind about the myths they wanted to buy into. Their verdict and recommendations were entirely expected.The real surprise for Peter was the other side of the political aisle. Representatives from the Democratic Party had very different goals and talking points prepared, potentially to the surprise of many who did not pay close attention. Their overall goal was to paint Dr. Daszak as dishonest, self-serving, and even fraudulent.Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz from California spent considerable time claiming Dr. Daszak was conflict-of-interest-ridden given his involvement in the Lancet letter. Why did he not acknowledge he was working with the lab that was the focus of conspiracy theories? The intelligence communities say the question is still open, but “the statement you authored attempted to summarily close the question,” Rep. Ruiz claimed. Peter Daszak explained that conspiracy theories at the time were about bioweapons, HIV inserts, and snake DNA—all prominent conspiracy theories. He did not imagine, back in February 2020, that this statement condemning these circulating conspiracy theories would be a conflict of interest. But Rep. Ruiz was not interested in his explanations, emphasizing that Peter Daszak did not explicitly state that he was working with WIV. Why was Rep. Ruiz so hell-bent on a conflict of interest statement for an opinion letter?Rep. Debbie Dingell from Michigan took up a conspiratorial talking point about the 2018 DARPA proposal, which was never funded. The anti-science pressure group USRTK had claimed that earlier drafts of that proposal would expose an attempt to mislead the federal agency because of a side note stating that some assays might be performed in China. In reality, the submitted draft to DARPA had more specifications and did not support any assertions that misled the agency. Also, if the proposal had been funded, the agency had to submit and agree on a detailed work plan with exact allocations of where and what work would be performed. Either way, there is no substance to these assertions of a supposed thoughtcrime.Yet Rep. Dingell was not interested in Dr. Daszak’s explanations of how these allegations made no sense given the grant-making process. She just said, “Well, there are appearance issues here… We won’t accuse you of creating COVID-19, but to the extent that you have considered misrepresenting facts, we consider this a very serious mistake,” she cut him off.Rep. Deborah Ross from North Carolina went all in on another completely unrelated project that the NIH had awarded to Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli to study coronaviruses in China. The multi-year grant had annual reporting requirements, and there was a problem with the year-five report, which Dr. Daszak had not uploaded on time in 2019. The reason was a supposed banality; a software or related error in the NIH system prevented EcoHealth from uploading the report. “The system locked us out; we contacted NIH; we received no response,” Dr. Daszak explained. He had emailed his grants manager to upload everything; the committee had the emails corroborating that EcoHealth intended to upload the report. However, once again, nobody seemed to care.“The NIH has conducted an electronic forensic investigation into their report submission systems and found no evidence of a lockout,” she claimed. Rep. Ross went on to state that the rules need to be followed when taxpayer money is involved, and although EcoHealth Alliance had been “exemplary” for four years, that it did not happen in year-five invited questioning from her colleagues. But what exactly were the Democrats questioning? Again, none of this has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19 or the pandemic but about a reporting mishap (at most, a violation) on an unrelated grant.On and on the Democrats would go about these trivialities, as if EcoHealth Alliance was not an organization with dozens of people, multiple projects, collaborators worldwide, and a million things going on that might sometimes have human mistakes in the mix. The 18-month-long audit of EcoHealth by the Department of Human Health and Services (DHHS) has found some errors but no significant violations, after all. So why were the Democrats so hell-bent on painting Dr. Daszak in a very negative light? Rep. Ruiz stated in his final summary:I wanna be clear, nothing produced for the Select Subcommittee over the last 14 months, 425.000 documents, over 100 hours of close-door testimony substantiates claims that federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance and the Institute in Wuhan caused the pandemic.But somehow that would not excuse Dr. Daszak’s alleged lack of transparency. “I do think, at the end of the day, Dr. Daszak, your responses here are unsatisfactory,” Rep. Ruiz would finish up. “You claim you submitted, and yet it was not submitted.” “Your administrative responsibilities and lack of reporting in a timely manner are concerning.” “You are explaining things to your convenience to avoid consequences, and that is concerning.”Remember, the Subcommittee’s report was released before the public hearing; no matter what Dr. Daszak explained to them, their agreed-upon verdict with Republicans was already in. “It is important that you and your actions as grantees are held accountable,” Ruiz finished his monologue.The Republican counterparts were happy, congratulating each other for their bipartisan agreement. Rep. Wenstrup had the final word and closed the hearing with skepticism toward scientists. “We cannot just blindly trust the scientists because they are scientists.… Especially when they are not forthcoming and honest,” pointing at Dr. Daszak. “Getting money for a federal grant? That is a problem,” he listed Peter’s supposed crimes. “Hiding behind different definitions of gain-of-function research,” he continued with performatively raised eyebrows.Rep. Wenstrup clearly enjoyed his moment. “There are scientists in China,” he reminded everybody. “A country that is an adversary to the United States of America.” And Peter was supposedly masterminding a “misleading grant application to DARPA, downplaying the Chinese part,” he gleefully added. “You did not disclose your collaboration with the WIV in The Lancet,” he raised his eyebrows again. “This is a troubling pattern of behavior that we are seeing,” he paused briefly, “and conduct as well,” he added for impact. The hearing between Democrats and Republicans was then closed amicably.I had watched the hearing live with increasing discomfort, and I wasn’t alone. Scientists from three continents were chatting with me about their unease. “Shitshow” and “The whole thing makes me sick. Political theater at scientists’ expense” would be some of the sentiments expressed. But I think something a bit more concerning was going on.The Democrats attacked Dr. Daszak because he was considered a weak point in the coming Project 2025 assault on the CDC, NIH, NIAID, and other agencies. Especially with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing scheduled just weeks later, throwing Peter under the bus quickly might be the right defense strategy. Already in the interim report, the HSSCP Republicans stated that their goal is to “reign in the unelected bureaucracy, especially within government-funded public health.” Institutional expertise and independence out, political decision-making in.The Republicans further recommended granting the NIH director or the HHS secretary, both political appointees, not career public servants, “the authority to immediately suspend a grant determined to be a threat to national security.” In other words, they want to make President Trump's action by canceling EcoHealth Alliance’s grant on TV in 2020, which NIH unlawfully enacted, legal for the next Trump administration. In that future, all scientific grants will henceforth be up to the whims of the executive. Good luck with getting funding to study any politically inconvenient topic.The committee also wants to “incorporate the national security and intelligence community into the grant-making process,” specifically for countries they deem a concern—another vehicle to curtail the independence of science in the US and bring it under political control.Given these larger political circumstances and the immediate threat to independent institutions, I believe the Democrats decided to try to direct heat away from the NIH and other federal agencies. These organizations awarded EcoHealth Alliance with grant funding for research and are responsible for oversight. They approved the work done in China. They also made themselves liable by canceling Peter’s grant unlawfully at Trump’s orders.By painting Peter Daszak as this dishonest, conflict of interest-hiding, deceitful actor, the Democrats laid out their defense strategy for institutions. Even if these agencies were found to have financed risky research, or even gain-of-function research, as they all deeply believed to be true, it was without NIH approval. It was not a failure of oversight but deliberate fraud by Peter Daszak. And the unlawful cancellation of the grant in 2020 was just and reasonable given these circumstances.A convenient political framing. They upheld their oversight but were misled by the uncooperative Chinese and their conduit, the “shady” Dr. Daszak (whose character they just smeared). They then acted decisively to shut them down. In my opinion, they were throwing EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak to the wolves in hopes they would get their fill and relent from pressing Democrats in an ailing presidential campaign. Sounded pretty good if the Republicans let them have this one. Which, surprisingly, they did, at least for now.Again, this is my interpretation of their actions, as I am not privy to any concrete backroom deal, they may have made with their Republican counterparts. Maybe the Democrats independently decided on that strategy simply because nothing makes for better bipartisanship agreements than a shared villain. The Democrats probably felt that it was a smart move in order to protect the institutions from false allegations of willingly financing gain-of-function research in China.Nobody at the HSSCP cared that SARS-CoV-2 had nothing to do with gain-of-function research and that no lab could have produced a virus like SARS-CoV-2. The tragic reality was that politicians did not care about any facts or scientific reality, only about their voters’ desires.Today, 66% of Americans believe the virus came from a lab, many of them feverishly. In a general election year with razor-thin margins and everything at stake, the Democrats certainly did not want to open new avenues of attack against them. No party wants to be in a position of having to educate citizens about technical gain-of-function definitions or defend a complicated scientific reality their voters do not want to believe in anyway. No politician wants their party blamed for the trauma of the pandemic. For the Democrats, it was just too risky to be perceived as defending EcoHealth Alliance, or worse, as the party covering anything up, especially with China involved. The Biden administration has always taken a hard stance on China; the origins investigation was a good topic to show. All Democrats needed to do to create parity with Republicans was to get in on the spectacle. Be even more vicious than them. Who cares about the fate of a non-profit organization with no power to push back? Especially one led by a scientist who makes such a great villain? With democracy itself at stake in the upcoming election?Politically, they likely saw it as the right move, given the circumstances. Yet by making that political maneuver—that it is better to play into popular sentiment rather than risk exposure by sticking up for facts—I worry that Democrats in the House have embraced the same pugilistic worldview of their opponents and information combatants online, where power and perception matter much more than an evidence-based worldview.If you make it trend, you make it true. And scientists all over the US felt the political wind shifting.Prof. Angela Rasmussen told the magazine Science that she “was disappointed that the Democrats joined the Republicans” in what she described as “essentially an attack on science.”It’s a very dangerous situation because most scientists who are approaching any problem — whether it’s the origins of the pandemic, whether it’s anything else — are going to think twice: should I actually get involved in research that is high impact but potentially politically controversial?While all these House committee hearings have the makeup of an interrogation and imbue a courtroom feeling, they are anything but. Peter came to testify, but his verdict had been posted on Twitter before he had even read his opening statement. There was no defense lawyer or jury present. Politicians constantly interrupted him to deliver their prepared five-minute soundbite monologues. It was a televised witch trial, not a legal ruling. However, most media treated it as a definitive case anyway.EcoHealth Alliance and its scientists felt the impact immediately. A five-million-dollar research grant for analyzing the risk of bat viruses interacting with wildlife farms in Vietnam, all but finally approved, suddenly was pulled from the process without comment or justification. This type of work is exactly what scientists believe could elucidate the emergence of COVID-19 through the wildlife industry. Now the human cost and fall-out was real. “It’s crazy to see the death knell of my scientific career mentioned so casually,” Dr. Cadhla Firth, a talented evolutionary biologist who studies zoonoses and works at EcoHealth Alliance, wrote on Twitter in response. Laughs and derision ensued, with commentators happy to point out how she had it coming for causing the pandemic. She replied:I didn’t start working for EHA until 2021, so I’m not sure what I have to do with any pandemic-related b******t? You clearly aren’t aware, but EHA isn’t just Peter, there are a lot of amazing scientists in the organization that have never even spoken to Peter.Two weeks later, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) sent a letter to EcoHealth Alliance, informing them of their suspension from procurement programs and proposed debarment for years. With these actions, politicians hung a Damoclasian sword over the organization, stigmatizing it to the outside world.“I want to remind everyone that we have not yet been given the chance to respond to allegations.” Peter would clarify on Twitter a few weeks later. He was now gearing up for a legal case because, in the end, the courts need to decide whether or not it is lawful for the DHHS to debar an organization from funding. A measure like that would need to show evidence of substantial wrongdoing, not mostly meritless allegations, and a late grant report submission. “We will contest every one of them, with substantial evidence, both to the HHS & publicly,” Peter showed some fighting spirit.In an evidence-based world, his chances in court are pretty good, for as long as “innocent until proven guilty” remains a core American legal concept. In a law-based society, everybody deserves a fair hearing and a proper process. Only in the witch trials of old, as well as autocratic regimes, does the burden of proof get inverted. There, the accused have to somehow prove their innocence to the satisfaction of their accusers. Often an impossible task. I fear that, at least in our modern media ecosystems, we have once again reached that point.“Covidselect has not received anything that proves your innocence, and NIH moved to debar you,” the HSSCP mocked in response to Peter’s above tweet. The cynicism was staggering. After their publicity stunt and blatant abuse of political power, the politicians were the ones who get to define reality now, continuing: “EcoHealth Alliance, under your direction, facilitated dangerous gain-of-function research in China and repeatedly violated the terms of its NIH grant.”Their implication was clear: he helped create the pandemic and could not prove otherwise. He was guilty until proven innocent. Bystanders reacted accordingly. The comment sections under the exchange were full of calls to put Daszak in jail without trial or sometimes directly to the guillotine. Often replies were accompanied by the hashtag “Nuremberg 2.0,” in reference to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals. Many celebrated that the HSSCP, and by extension, “their team,” finally got the first one of those responsible for the trauma of the pandemic.It was disgusting to watch, and not over by far. Pouring gasoline on that fire was Alina Chan, with the help of The New York Times. On the day of the Fauci hearing, June 3rd 2024, they published an elaborately crafted and highly manipulative op-ed with full graphic support from the NYT’s editorial team. The article must have been months in the making, timed perfectly to create buzz for the witch hunt and to legitimize the Republican attack on gain-of-function research and Dr. Fauci, who the op-ed advised to “cooperate with the investigation.” Scientists were shocked to have the paper of record invite a well-known activist to do political propaganda. Multiple outlets featured scathing commentary from scientists about Alina Chan’s piece and NYT’s enabling role in the weeks after. The NYT’s responsible editor did not answer my request for comments about the peculiar timing either. Either way, it was too little, too late to make a difference. The NYT’s op-ed, along with the buzz from Dr. Fauci’s hearing, hit the infosphere like a meteor. A masterpiece of velocity hacking, from the misleading graphics to the headline to the timing of publication. The world reacted. Virologists told me that random bystanders from their social circle who had not thought about the pandemic origins since 2021 asked them whether it was now proven that it leaked from a lab because they had read the NYT article. If you make it trend, you make it true.While virology, in general, faced the brunt of Alina Chan’s article, the aftermath was even more torturous to Peter. The New York Times’ unethical op-ed legitimized the HSSCP witch hunts in the eyes of the public and elites. Peter explained to me that, for EcoHealth Alliance, it was:…pretty damaging, because everyone here reads it in New York. And the people who run foundations read it, and the donors read it, and they all think it’s true because The New York Times has done a glossy thing about it.With the paper of record going all-in on the gain-of-function lab leak narrative, prospective donors and steadfast supporters of EcoHealth Alliance grew hesitant to further support the organization. They had to think of their own reputations. If there is so much smoke, how could there not be fire?Then came the killing blow. “So, at first the agencies didn’t instantly terminate all the grants,” shared Peter. His organization was involved in many critical research projects around the world, outside of coronaviruses and bats. Studying the impact of deforestation in Brazil or conservation efforts in Liberia would be among those. They were also cooperating with many US universities on projects in South Africa and Borneo. The DHHS suspension and proposed debarment did not demand these multi-year projects immediately stop. EcoHealth Alliance scientists involved in these financed projects would still have some runway to finish up—at least usually.But that lasted a few weeks, and then Senator Joni Ernst… She wrote to all the agencies, saying, ‘Explain to me whether you have suspended EcoHealth Grants or not.’ So, after that, they started terminating them.One by one, upon pressure from the same US senator who was outraged by Peter’s “giving a bat a banana” video he shot in Thailand, agencies felt pressured to terminate successfully running and paid-for projects. Projects that were often awarded primarily to US universities with academic researchers in the lead and EcoHealth Alliance only as a subrecipient in a supportive role. Details did not matter. “EcoHealth should never get their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars again,” Senator Joni Ernst stated in her press release.With these actions, they have been made the ultimate pariah, ending any further cooperation even with US universities. The politician’s signal to the academics and academic institutions was clear: cooperate with EcoHealth and face termination of your grants too.Systematically, the actions and influence of news outlets, politicians, conspiracy theorists, influencers, and media activists worked together to dismantle any revenue stream to keep EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization for the public good, in existence. An NGO does not sit on a lot of cash; they do not turn a profit; all their grant money goes out to research materials, scientists, and collaborators. If EcoHealth Alliance runs out of money before the court trial about the legality of their debarment starts, even a successful legal defense becomes meaningless. The organization and its people will be long gone. That seems to be the plan—letting them bleed out rather than making their case in court.By the time we chatted, the court hearing had already been pushed back a second time to a later date. EcoHealth Alliance had to let go half of the staff, often rapidly, because their grants were terminated out of the blue. Brilliant scientists working for the public good are suddenly out on the street. Others hang on by the thinnest of threads, but likely not for much longer either; that includes Peter himself.“People are very unhappy,” Peter acknowledged, as if life had been sucked out of him. I quickly asked what happened to the international collaborators of EcoHealth Alliance, some of which I got to know. “It’s been a bit of a mixed bag. They all lost our money. Some of them are angry,” he said.Scientists in Malaysia took it best. When they were cut off, they also had to let go of some staff as well, but “they are determined to raise some money elsewhere.” To not give up. Other collaborators retreated. According to Peter, Supaporn stopped responding. They had a paper:…that was ready to go on this new virus that’s close to SARS-COV-2; it binds to human ACE2. A clear and present danger… We need to do some more analyses. That’s gonna take some time. We don’t have any money to do that, and that’s not gonna come out. She’s basically not going to publish that work.Of course, virus hunting has become very controversial in Thailand as well. Supaporn faces a lot of hardship on her own. No Southeast Asian country wants bat scientists to create new data about the pandemic’s origin. Nobody wants to be blamed by a world that has not made its peace about natural risks that span borders, industries, and peoples.Other EcoHealth collaborators, especially in Africa, were hardest hit. Critical projects and conservation efforts stopped. Rescued animals are again without protection and care. People lost their livelihood or purpose. Anger, depression, and despair had gripped some formerly funded collaborators. The grim reality is that many people, animals, and communities will suffer because of US representatives playing politics with science. Politics with pandemic prevention efforts. Some critically important science will not be done; some will not get published. Training of regional experts and educational interactions with communities will subside. Progress of the last decade will be reversed.This fallout is a lot to put on a person’s shoulder. Peter Daszak was always proud of the meaningful work EcoHealth Alliance did. To see it all come crashing down is tormenting. “This is, you are going through a horrible psychological torture,” the haunted zoologist confessed to me. The events flashed past his inner eye. What could he have said differently? Done differently? Was he trapped from the start? He confessed before trailing off in thought:The day after the hearing, I started dreaming about the politicians attacking me. For every day since… every time I’ve fallen asleep, I’ve dreamt about it. Every night I wake up having had nightmares about it. Every time I fall asleep during the day, anytime… It’s straight in there.Despite the difficult years, the Peter Daszak I got to know a bit in late 2022 was still a hopeful guy, embattled but not bitter. He had a can-do attitude toward problems; it was part of his charisma. Now, our conversations were more stagnant, almost like an eerie distance had emerged, separating him from the ground he was standing on. His recurring nightmares haunted him because his brain struggled to find a solution to a problem that was not of his creation and remained elusive to his control. He can’t even wrestle control from his lost thoughts anymore. “So it’s right there, and then you wake up, and then it’s reality. And then you have to face your reality.”§The HSSCP was not the only Republican-led committee formed to do pandemic revisionism and political propaganda. Four other Republican-led committees also wanted to extract their pound of flesh from scientists, including EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak. Virologists would not be their only target either. Ever since 2023, these revenge committees have called public health experts, institutional leaders, scientific journal editors, and even disinformation researchers in front of Congress.Innocence was no protection from punishment. In 2023, the HSSCP called in Prof. Kristian Andersen and Prof. Robert Garry to testify about the “proximal origin” paper and Fauci’s alleged role in suppressing the lab leak hypothesis. While the virologists did absolutely nothing wrong and admirably held themselves to the public grilling, making the Republicans look stupid, one might think that they came away well. But that would be wrong. Because Republicans had abused their power and issued subpoenas for troves of private messages of scientists, they could immediately retaliate for their botched hearing. They “accidentally” leaked subpoenaed private messages of virologists to motivated propagandists, effectively tasking them to smear virologists through decontextualization. The USRTK playbook, if you want, but hypercharged by the might and resources of a political party in power. Client propagandists on Substack did much of their propaganda, crafting a malicious character assassination through decontextualizing private slack messages that went viral.The smear campaign proved not only profitable for the propagandists, but also very effective. Not only did they discredit Prof. Kristian Andersen and his coauthors’ reputations in the eyes of the public until this day, but it was also creating doubt about all virologists and science in general. A year later, right after the Fauci hearing, a New York Times op-ed columnist was given the space to falsely allege that it was scientists like the “proximal origin” authors that destroyed public trust in science. The misleading of the public all started with those lying virologists and “Dr. Fauci’s teleconference” for them. Revisionist history from punditry is all too eager to show scientists their place. In reality, the virologists’ only real offense was to do good science that happened to interfere with political myth-making and popular sentiment.Unfortunately, politicians wielding the power of the state against scientists will find many influencers and commentators in big newspapers and elsewhere all too willing to legitimize their abuse. Especially when their interests are aligned to shut up and marginalize those pesky fact-checkers and myth-busters that sabotage the popular narratives that made them powerful.“The point of the exercise was punishment, not oversight,” Renée DiResta would write about these congressional hearings. Disinformation researchers like herself were facing the same treatment by Republican-led revenge committees. She and others had come under fire by Republicans because they tracked disinformation around election interference and influence operations. Their research findings tended to somehow always interfere with what right-wing influencers and politicians tried to sell the public, such as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or that social media had censored conservatives. So, of course, these researchers had to pay for their audacity to speak the truth, too.The wild theories spun in the online fever swamps can serve as a pretext for something even more sinister: Politicians, who wield real power, citing propaganda as justification for sham investigations and other forms of retaliation.“They retaliate, however, because real power is at stake, and discrediting the people exposing them is the best way to cast doubt,” Renée DiResta would further explain. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where her research group was based, was bombarded with subpoenas and lawsuits, racking up legal costs into the millions for the university. Ultimately, Stanford got the message and did not extend Renée’s employment, effectively shutting down the research group. As a reward for her stellar research, Renée also found herself the villain of a networked smear campaign, alleging that she was a CIA spy masterminding the deep state’s censorship-industrial complex. She, of course, knew what would come her way once the ridiculous narrative was picked up by the influential:It was glaringly obvious to those of us who study propaganda and disinformation what was going to happen: documents and excerpts of interviews would be leaked to ideologically aligned propaganda outlets, and those mentioned in the resulting coverage would be targeted by online mobs.Retreating from public life offers no remedy against these networked attacks.Playing ostrich does not stop the rumors or end the story; it simply lets somebody else control the narrative. If you are sufficiently interesting or useful as a villain in a conspiracy theory, the propaganda machine and rumor mill can keep recycling claims and allegations endlessly.Renée wrote about her experiences in her book. Having a front-row seat to a modern-day witch hunt is certainly not how she expected her research on propaganda to go. As attacks on scientists across the board mounted, we kept in touch. She was not happy but remains steadfast for the moment, hoping that reality will eventually exonerate her work and reputation. “The people who stood up to McCarthyism are the ones history remembers,” she said, referencing another era where the allegiance of scientists was questioned by an authoritarian political movement. A movement empowered by the “red scare” moral panic and enjoying broad societal support.Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist, sees parallels between the current anti-science aggression experienced by biomedical science and the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union under Stalin. While history does not really repeat itself, it certainly likes to rhyme. I would offer that such anti-science aggression has become a necessity for old and new powers in the information age who want to entrench their particular worldview and consolidate their grip over public discourse and with it, wider society.The lab leak narrative enjoys the buy-in of the wider public, as well as motivated conspiracy theorists, activists, influencers, dark-money-funded NGOs, tabloid newspapers, mainstream outlets, politicians, diplomats, even some intelligence agencies, and the leaders of nation-states. A diffuse coalition of convenience, profit, and power, aligned by a shared narrative. That makes the current lab leak alliance no less forceful or dangerous than past ideological movements or moral panics in my opinion.This is not solely a US problem either. Science is under pressure globally. A broad anti-science coalition aligned with a grand geopolitical narrative is scary and dangerous for any scientist whose research tends to interfere with said narrative. All around the world, virologists and scientists I’ve gotten to know see their work threatened, find themselves targets of abuse, and face general suspicion about their motives from international institutions, governments, and citizens.We already heard about how Prof. Alice Hughes has tried to pull her life back together. Shi Zhengli has not left China since and has recently felt renewed pressure on her because she dared speak to foreigners, including me. Many Chinese scientists faced repercussions for sharing data, albeit these are rarely as public as when Zhang Yongzhen, who published the first genome with Eddie Holmes, was found sleeping in protest outside his lab. He had lost it. One of my contacts told me about another Chinese scientist losing his position for greenlighting the upload of the Huanan market meta-transcriptomics data that Florence Débarre discovered. Others, who will not be named, are in a precarious situation because they have been talking to Western scientists informally or privately.Linfa Wang from Singapore, who tried to keep a low profile and not speak up until recently, has somehow evaded being dragged into the worst abuses, although I learned his name is regularly flaunted by Republican Senate staffers. I wonder what happens when the documentary movie comes out to raise public awareness of him. Either way, his students like Wee Chee and other young virologists look into a future of hardship because, on top of all the professional challenges—the painstaking work, the long hours, the isolation—their research brings with it, they will have to contend with a hostile society. A society that does not want them trained and removes funding for the profession, sabotages their publications, and punishes them if they get too visible. Bat researchers everywhere face suspicion and riled-up regional communities that do not want them around anymore for fear of governmental repercussions. That Supaporn Wacharapluasedee in Thailand has broken off contacts is maybe less surprising. She’s had her fair share of hardships, losing her lab once already because of the origin myth, being investigated, and having her collected bat samples destroyed.Even in healthy democracies, scientists are not necessarily safe. Eddie Holmes and Dominic Dwyer in Australia faced their hardships, with the former recounting a harrowing experience and security incident at his home during the height of the “proximal origin” witch hunt in the US Congress. The Murdoch media empire in Australia is influential, and Eddie makes a great domestic villain for Australian audiences. Even today, conspiratorial mobs insult him, write him messages, and sabotage his institutional email address. British scientists are very much in the same boat. Anti-science aggression has gone global everywhere, and it correlates with how outspoken scientists are.Merely talking to me was also not without risk. Uploading our interview on YouTube got Brazilian parasitologist Carlos Morel in trouble with the WHO press office. As a member of SAGO, another advisory expert committee to investigate the origins of pandemics, he dared to say there was no evidence of a lab leak. Because he keeps speaking publicly, fighting the good fight for evidence over fiction, he has become a target of conspiracy theorists and their media outlets. Other researchers reach out in private to me, not keen on becoming the next target of online hate mobs or politicians. Junior researchers worry about their careers, but even established professors try to avoid attention in this climate.Even if not directly attacked, virologists and public health scientists feel pressure mounting from every side. Already on a shoestring budget, frontline defenders against avian influenza and other emerging diseases like Erik Karlsson and Filip Claes in Cambodia need at least five times the manpower to uphold their responsibilities for pandemic anticipation and prevention. However, that support is unlikely to arrive. The WHO has been paralyzed and made ineffective by the geopolitical tap dance around US and Chinese interests. Governments, funders, and NGOs everywhere seem to have lost interest in public health and abdicated their responsibilities of acting to prevent the next pandemic. China even pulled out of international collaborations for wildlife and wet market surveillance and loosened its laws against this industry again. What future are we building for ourselves? How can we mend the bleeding scars of the growing chasm between societal beliefs and scientific research?Virologists who have been hit hardest have been sounding the alarm not only about their research but also about the damage the false lab leak myth is doing to science.Science is humanity’s best insurance against threats from nature, but it is a fragile enterprise that must be nourished and protected. The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. Yet, the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.We must understand that scientists are a minority in every society they are embedded in. Science values evidence over tribal affiliation, which is why it has no friends among political camps or extremists that tend to spearhead attacks on them. Because scientists are just not part of any larger political tribe, and most of society is oblivious to what happens to them in today’s fragmented information ecosystem, nobody comes to their defense when anti-science aggressors come for them.This has some very direct consequences. First, inconvenient scientists are picked off one by one. Second, anybody who speaks up in their defense might become the next target. Third, nobody is safe to pursue independent research that might interfere with popular beliefs or power.Take Marion Koopmans, whose role in the WHO mission has been questioned in her home country’s parliament several times. “Right-wing politicians were immediately attacking me,” she recounted what had happened to her. Lawsuits followed. “We had several court cases,” not necessarily restricted to the lab leak myth but often related. For her, it cascaded from the “PCR gate” conspiracy theory to “plandemic” and various anti-vaxx movement-associated narratives. After the WHO mission, she explained, “There was a bombardment of harassment.” She was now part of the origins cover-up as well. When the WHO looked to recruit her again for SAGO, activists bullied them out of the idea. “There was a coordinated effort against me,” Marion said. Alleging conflicts of interest, corruption, cover-ups, and worse. She sent me an Excel file documenting over 200 different attack pieces against her in the media, from bloggers to contrarian outlets to mainstream sources.Now “We are bringing Marion Koopmans to justice” posters were plastered. Her students are approached by political operatives and conspiracy theorists, trying to get them to go to court against her, supposed witnesses to her many crimes. “I have been told by security advisors that it will go on for some time,” the sharp-eyed virologist admitted her frustration. Yet she was not giving up. The experience has invigorated her sense of importance in explaining science to society. That is the reason she still speaks out, albeit it comes with so much hardship. She has avoided traveling to the US because of safety concerns in such a radicalized country. She’s had security for three years; guards checked every physical meeting she attended.These worrying experiences abound, especially in the last few years. I have witnessed events that I thought were largely impossible in a democratic society, yet they happened. I have had conversations with scientists who do not feel safe anymore, who self-censor, and who stopped communicating to the public entirely. I have seen essential research projects scrapped, defunded, and scientists giving up pursuit of certain areas of research to protect their careers, their lab members, and their families.These are not trivialities about social media harassment, trolls, or random junk from the internet. These are existential problems facilitated by an aggressive anti-science movement that saw an opportunity in the lab leak myth. Scientists, abandoned by society, have no chance against their onslaught. Ask yourself: When did you have to change your home address and scrub the internet of private information because you and your family receive daily death threats from hate groups?When people are continually calling your place of work, protesting outside it, filing lawsuits, and your employer loses funding, do you have the capacity to continue your work?When your private messages can be subpoenaed by political activists and then leaked to their client propagandists to instigate a national smear campaign, would you feel comfortable talking about a controversial topic even in private?When New York Times columnists work closely with conspiracy theorists to build their hit pieces against you, are you thinking twice before speaking up for scientists even as a bystander?When you get dragged in front of Congress in a witch hunt, where they lie about you to your face and afterward refer you to criminal prosecution, do you want to roll the dice that the justice department has not been tainted by the institutional rot impacting every other area of government?“Where is the public outcry?” Marion asked me. When innocent scientists get harassed, threatened, buried in lawsuits, dragged in front of politicians to denounce their beliefs, or face criminal prosecution? Why does nobody lift a finger? Or worse, why are so many seemingly cheering on the spectacle? “That is worrisome.”§“There is no true insight into the nature of reality without liberating ourselves from the noise,” the documentary filmmaker Christian Frei explained to me how his thinking has evolved on the topic. How can we make sense of the present moment?I believe informational conflicts between our various bespoke worldviews and objective reality are inevitable. It is a battle that has plagued humanity ever since we formed tribal societies with different creation myths, religions, and politics. For most of our histories, these conflicts between worldviews often led to repression of others by various forms of power, subjugation, or bloodshed. Might decided who was right.With the scientific revolution in the late Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, humanity started on a different project. While still often shaped by power and privilege, the scientific method gradually transformed our knowledge of the observable universe into a more coherent picture. No matter our idiosyncratic, magical, or personal worldviews and politics, science works whether or not we believe in it. Scientific evidence—not might—suddenly could decide what ideas about reality were right (or at least who was the least wrong). Raw power still often won, but over time, the superiority of this new “weight-of-evidence”-based approach became impossible to deny.Today, the scientific method has been awarded the inherent authority to create, assert, dispute, challenge, and correct information about objective reality. It is the ultimate arbiter of solving informational conflicts or contradictions that constantly arise within our colorful, bespoke worldviews. Science has become the pin that holds us attached to shared reality and, I would argue, each other. It may offer one of the greatest services an enlightened society could wish for: the formulation of a consensus reality based on shared facts. A common ground that allows us to work together and solve problems larger than ourselves. If we want to, that is.Since its inception, the scientific method has always faced pushback from certain segments of society. Science is a constant danger to religious ideology, shady businesses, and pseudoscience peddlers that rely on myth, manipulation, and magical thinking. Attempts to discard science and discredit scientists by these motivated actors are not new.In a world of increasingly bespoke realities, what if science has become an existential threat to all our most cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews? To our recently developed online politics, identity, and community?I believe that today, an entirely new front of informational conflicts has opened between shared reality and our digital world. We all have found ourselves participating in and co-creating bespoke online communities. When the pandemic pushed scientists and scientific topics to the center of society and into the middle of the attention economy, many underlying tensions just escalated, drawing near the breaking point. All that was needed was a good emotional hammer to shatter the glass around the moral panic button about science. Both fringe and well-funded anti-science movements seized on the opportunity. The pandemic, and the lab leak narrative specifically, was their once-in-a-generation chance to topple the supremacy of science and tear society away from supporting and trusting it. An opportunity brought about by technological disruption, vulnerable information ecosystems, and a traumatic global crisis.The unleashed information war over reality now constantly pits science and scientists (as well as investigative journalists, educators, and other defenders of an evidence-based worldview) against crowds and information combatants arising from all layers of society. Even worse, researchers now regularly find themselves in the crosshairs of those with real power and influence. Science as a global public institution for humanity poses a considerable threat to grifters and snake oil salesmen, populist influencers and narratives, ideological billionaires, unethical businesses, tech platforms, and, of course, state actors and autocrats. They all currently dominate in the world of fragmented and bespoke realities. They all cling to their newfound power tooth and nail, seeking to shape public perception in their favor and to entrench themselves and their separate little epistemic fiefdoms permanently. But how to go about it? In the information age, leading attacks against scientists, gaining ground against the scientific method, and winning decisive battles against an evidence-based worldview have become their avenues of choice to project and defend their influence over society.With so much at stake and so much to gain, participating in the current anti-science (or anti-reality) movement rewards many networked agents of influence handsomely. Almost anybody can gain popularity, profit, persuasion, or power by undermining the authority, function, and perception of science sufficiently well in the information age.The marketplace of motivated rationalizations is constantly looking for new, valuable products. That’s why all these networked agents, activists, and agendas seek to portray science and scientists as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. Rather than a public good for the benefit of all, they work hard to cast scientific insights as the opinion of a weird, secretive niche interest group, tribe, or cabal. They paint inconvenient scientific research as ideologically subversive and existentially threatening. Independent science is a thorn in their eyes, something that needs to be beaten in the fight for societal supremacy, public perception, and political power. Their acts of anti-science aggression are what we see playing out in real time today.But what happens when their viral narratives and emotional falsehoods remain unchecked? When any semblance of a science- and evidence-based worldview is relegated to a thing of the past?Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky has studied how conspiracy theories and misinformation impact democracies. He and others view the rise of anti-science activism and sentiment as a hallmark of democratic backsliding. “Everything that is a counterweight to power is being undermined,” he explained to me. “I think the goal is to abolish accountability as a stepping stone. That means you got to discredit science.” He and his coauthors argue that science is a critical guardrail for the “epistemic integrity of democracy.” We need a shared set of facts to function in a democracy; without them, any collaboration on shared issues becomes impossible.“Once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore,” the Kyiv-born journalist and propaganda researcher Peter Pomerantsev said in his Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America. The congressional witch hunt against Renée DiResta had caught his eye.Democratic decline has become the topic du jour in intellectual circles. Many scholars, intellectuals, researchers, and historians point towards misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, authoritarian politics, social media, and polarization as root causes. I believe everybody looks at a valid subset of the larger phenomena, which I would offer is that our modern information environments have changed how information flows through society and thereby restructured our societies into conflicting and mutually incompatible bespoke realities. Unfortunately, the current information ecosystem asymmetrically favors emotional myths and viral narratives over scientifically accurate content, all while incentivizing us to form our identities and communities in opposition to science.Yet without science as a pin that keeps us attached to shared reality, I worry about losing everything that we have taken for somewhat granted, including living in a democracy.Or, as the Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist, puts it even more bluntly:Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.I’d say that if scientists can indeed be seen as canaries in the coalmine of democracy, carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber. Many scientists went silent and retreated from the public after years of reckless onslaught. Who is going to speak up in the future when the next viral falsehood comes along? We need to act now before it is too late.As I write this, the false lab leak myth is gaining steam once again, readily invoked by right-wing politicians and MAGA Republicans in the US. It is used not only to target their domestic enemies or activate voters by giving them scapegoats but also in service of a more sinister authoritarian agenda. Leading the efforts again is the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks and the key organizer behind Project 2025, the current playbook for enabling the authoritarian takeover of the US. One of their main goals, called “Schedule F,” is to replace tens of thousands of politically independent public servants and career scientists with loyal party apparatchiks, bringing all institutions under the unilateral control of the presidency. Consolidating power in the executive branch might be a terrible idea for both the independence of science and the future of the republic.On July 8, 2024, the Heritage Foundation laid out its grand plan for the false origin myth. They assembled “what we believe will be the most important commission in decades” COVID-19 origins group, consisting of former Trump officials involved in the false bioweapon myth like former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Deputy HHS secretary Robert Kadlec, and former CDC director Robert Redfield. The group also included lab leak activist Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton National Security staffer and anti-China hawk looking for influence again. The HSSCP chair, Brad Wenstrup, was there as well for the launch of “a report with actionable recommendations for the president and legislative branch of government to implement right now.”These people, all very familiar with weaponizing the government, would decide what to do about the lab leak myth in the future when the Republicans gain power again. Here is their fundamental position: make China the enemy. Jamie Metzl, from Heritage’s origin commission, asserted:There can be little doubt… that the Chinese government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.Various segments in the US, predominantly but not exclusively on the right, have long cast China as an existential villain, not just a geopolitical adversary anymore. In the factional warfare between bespoke realities, we only come together around a shared enemy. Seasoned politicians understand that principle deeply. You do not work on solving shared problems with your mortal enemy.Subsequently, the commission outright rejected, even mocked, the idea of ever collaborating with China on shared environmental, climate, and public health challenges. According to a snide comment from one of their speakers, working with China in the past was always a misguided idea that had failed spectacularly. The pandemic supposedly proved this. Jamie Metzl further summarized their points of action, asserting that the pandemic resulted in “18 trillion in losses to the United States,” arguing the only path forward, and “as a means of establishing accountability and discouraging similar behavior in the future, …Chinese companies and the Chinese State must be held accountable and liable for these losses.” Doing anything else would just further incentivize the CCP to engage in “dangerous, aggressive, and secretive behavior,” they claimed. In other words, they will make China pay 18 trillion dollars in reparation to the US, and this will somehow stop the next pandemic, which many of them believe was a bioweapon anyway. An absurd demand and non-sequitur from anti-China hawks designed to escalate tensions further. “We also want other countries to use what we have done as a blueprint to hold China accountable,” John Radcliffe added. He is proposing nothing less than basically a return to a Cold War era with China.Yet, should the Republicans win political power and even the White House, these fringe positions of the Heritage Foundations will likely become official positions once again. The weaponized lab leak narrative is a trigger they can pull again and again for enemies, domestically and abroad. Other efforts are already planned. Next to ongoing activities by the HSSCP that burned Peter Daszak at the stake of public opinion, there is the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability led by McCarthy-era wannabe and lab leak truther Rep. Comer and the powerful Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The latter will likely see long-term gain-of-function fearmonger Rand Paul take over chairmanship with the election and Senator Josh Hawley in the driver's seat of the new inquisition.The first sham hearings were held on June 18, 2024, to smear the virologist and “proximal origin” coauthor Prof. Robert Garry as a propagandist while giving Rand Paul’s close collaborator Richard Ebright the stage to spew politically desired falsehoods about bioweapon agents and research. In September, Josh Hawley accused Dr. Carrie Wolinetz, former chief of staff at the NIH, of “actively misleading the American people.” His fulminating monologue was clipped by Forbes Breaking News and received over 1.8 million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. Thousands of approving comments made it clear that people wanted more of this. Self-serving theatrics aside, much worse is expected to come from these revenge committees weaponizing the conspiracy myth.After years of viral propaganda, the lab leak community has grown to include ordinary citizens, online mobs, client propagandists, commentators, as well as mainstream journalists, and has captured media outlets all the way to both chambers of Congress. With such a powerful amplification network in place, it’s easy to imagine how the emotionally captivating myth could be quickly re-deployed by another Trump administration. Utilizing the right-wing outrage machine, agitated crowds, willing influencers, and mainstream media enablers, political leaders might want to recycle the lab leak myth to stir popular demand for further escalation against China, even to justify military aggression. When the other is cast as an existential threat, all manipulators need to do is fabricate a few novel twists to justify the larger narrative. Instigate some fresh pseudo-events that seem to support what most Americans already believe in and ensure that many dedicated amplifiers are willing to push it repetitively.If you make it trend, you make it true. How about a new story arc about the evil CCP supposedly working on bioweapons to be deployed against Taiwan? Now, that would catch eyeballs if it could be made to look real.Novelty, familiarity, and repetition are not only key ingredients to virality but effective manipulation tactics to persuade the masses and shape their bespoke realities. While absolutely far-fetched from today’s point of view, some type of military escalation would not be an unprecedented US response either. After the traumatic events surrounding the 9/11 terror attacks, popular fears and misconceptions about terrorism and old tropes about Muslim fundamentalism were merged and weaponized by politicians. The so-ignited emotional energy could later be directed skillfully with the right set of fabricated pseudo-events. Pseudo-events like the supposed existence of compelling “reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq’s military,” as NPR reported. These misrepresentations were subsequently brought forward by ostensibly credible voices like US Secretary Colin Powell to support the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) narrative. Emotionally activated citizens, their critical faculties blinded by trauma, rage, and grief, ate it up. The mainstream press not only failed to calm the situation but fanned the flames. Instead of critically questioning the evidence and narrative, The New York Times did the most to legitimize the WMD narrative. Ultimately, elite belief in its veracity and the constant media drumbeat created wide public support for the military invasion of Iraq. A remarkable outcome considering that political tensions with the country have been going back decades. Escalations have come and gone. War was certainly not inevitable. Few doubt today that the evidence-free invasion the Bush administration was obsessed with would have been possible without 9/11 as a traumatic catalyst.Do we really believe the trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic that killed far over a million Americans is any less potent a catalyst if hardline warmongers and anti-China Republicans get their way? Especially if we talk about the authoritarian MAGA movement winning power again? Russia’s Putin already used the fabricated “US Biolabs in Ukraine” narrative (another variation from the lab leak genre) as one of his supposed justifications for invading Ukraine. A sizable proportion of Russians (and sadly, also Americans) readily bought into these fabrications. Every dictator and strongman stirs the emotions of his nation’s people by creating an enemy abroad or starting a war. The purpose of war for autocratic leaders is to legitimize their iron rule at home to call for unity while using it as a pretense to crack down on domestic dissenters. What might an authoritarian second Trump administration, keen to enshrine power and supported by the Project 2025 apparatus handpicked for loyalty by the Heritage Foundation, be willing to do if given the chance?I honestly do not know what could happen; the example is provocative on purpose. A scenario to highlight that our failure of imagination often makes us blind to how badly things can escalate if we let them. We need to find our way back to epistemic clarity about the world we live in. As Russian dissidents will tell you, when nothing is ever really true, any justification for political actions, no matter how absurd, stupid, evil, or unimaginable, becomes possible. Or take the words of Hannah Arendt, a scholar of totalitarianism:If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And people who no longer believe anything cannot make up their minds. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please.That is why I want to fight our epistemic paralysis of the moment.Conspiracy myths specifically have always been tools for mobilization against certain individuals, groups, races, or even nations. They are part and parcel of the fascist and totalitarian playbook that we have no excuse not to wise up about. How effective conspiracy myths can rouse our feelings and mobilize voters will be shown most prominently in the next US presidential election. I strongly believe the all-consuming political myth-making and the ensuing grand narratives of perpetual conflict against a foreign enemy should be relegated to the past, where they belong.Irrespective of the outcome of world events, we have to understand that an evidence-based worldview is and will remain under attack globally by networked anti-science aggression and viral meta phenomena within our information spheres. That is the new tragic normal, enshrined in the circumstances and systems we inhabit today.This means that all types of blatant exploitation of our emotions and crafty manipulations of the public have become much easier with the many vulnerabilities that emerged with our new information ecosystems, no matter who is in power and who happens to catch our eyeballs. We all have to do our part to build resilience and protect our democratic and scientific institutions, ourselves, and our agency from the power grabs of cynical politicians, self-serving influencers, media manipulators, motivated crowds, exploitative algorithms, and the viral narratives that rose out of our collective interactions online and that prey on us from within. That is a tall task for us today, and possibly the only task that matters if we want things to turn around for the better. I also believe that we have the power and will to create the future we want to live in.One of the most important direct actions that defenders of an evidence-based worldview can take immediately is to not be bullied out of the conversation by (what is in my experience) just networked losers, loudmouths, and lunatics. We all have some influence online. Do not let media manipulators and activists preemptively rob your voice and your impact on others with empty posturing and mob tactics.We also have to create social friction to slow the spread of harmful viral narratives. Let’s ask for evidence and time to assess before participating. We need to resist the seduction of story tropes when they seem to neatly support our team or worldview, especially when they villainize and dehumanize others. The world is much richer than the usual make-believe villains and heroes conjured up by gifted storytellers. We need to build new online systems that allows rationality and plurality to florish online. Most importantly, we need to hold the line against falsehoods and their amplifiers instead of giving in to bluster, pressure, or nihilism. Let’s defend the scientific method as the best tool we have to approximate ever-more accurate views about our shared reality. It will not always be convenient to do so. Speaking up for something incurs some risk of pushback.I have no doubt that I will get attacked, smeared, and discredited by the usual agitated lab leak believers just for writing this book. I also expect the book will likely be downrated by organized campaigns on rating websites and ranking systems, as happened to Renée DiResta’s work. Lab leak influencers will likely cherry-pick passages to fabricate outrage or to dismiss my words, and the book will quite probably be overshadowed by the next shiny manufactured pseudo-event anyway. C’est la vie. If that is the outcome, I am okay with it. What is important is that for all their asymmetry of passion, they could not stop me from writing, nor can they stop you from reading the inside story of the COVID-19 origin controversy.If my book, against the odds, threatens to gain any traction in mass media, it will possibly lead to fiercer pushback. The same tried and tested containment strategies and character assassinations that motivated lab leak believers previously used will be deployed again to try to shut down and discredit the findings of scientists whose remarkable trajectory we followed over twelve chapters. But will their detractors succeed again? Containment is difficult, for good or bad. I would wish for the book to give the scientists another round of attention and a fair hearing to tell their story.But no matter what happens in the media, I would urge to not let activism and anti-science aggression rob you of your right to hear the scientific evidence from the very scientists who painstakingly produced it. The facts are in; the pandemic was not created in a lab. It is essential to democracy that we do not let those in power rewrite history to their convenience.On the origins of SARS-CoV-2, scientists did their job admirably, sometimes in the direst of circumstances and at high personal cost. Now, I believe it is on us, society at large. We all can do our part to aid those scientists, help them get the evidence and their stories out, and help each other show up for reality—every defender of evidence-based worldview matters. If we learned one thing from how events unfolded, it is that we need to be networked when it comes to sticking to evidence, too. We all have a circle of influence; how we choose to use or not use it cascades outward. Even a little bit of compassion for science and scientists, and ultimately ourselves and the society we are embedded in, can make a lasting difference.Science often seems untouchable and locked away in ivory towers, but the reality is quite different. Science is a powerful yet fragile enterprise, done primarily by curious and good-willed humans like you and me. They need the support of society just as much as society needs its scientists. While often not delivering answers as fast, intuitive, or satisfying as we would like, the scientific method as a humanity-spanning collective endeavor still deserves our trust. We would not be who we are without it. Science certainly serves as a critical guardrail against the excesses and abuse of society by politicians, governments, media manipulators, and gladiatorial influencers who crave power, cater to our intuitions, and utilize misleading information as their weapon of choice.Lastly, we need to become clear-eyed about what is at stake because the sobering reality of our present conundrums does not change when inconvenient science is shut up.We are integrated into vulnerable information ecosystems we don’t fully understand. We live in an interconnected world that seems currently ill-equipped to face viral threats, both online and offline. Our democratic societies have taken a turn for the worse. We have to deal with perilous political movements while being divided into increasingly bespoke realities. We are currently marching toward a new dark age of myth, manipulation, and magical thinking that all of us hoped to have left behind. The outlook is dire.But we also have the tools to work against these trends. In Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World, the compassionate communicator offers us science as a candle in the dark. It can illuminate our way forward and keep the many demons of our human nature, as well as of our own making, at bay. We just need to remember that science does not exist in a vacuum; it is deeply embedded in society and done by ordinary humans like you and me. That makes it both beautiful and fragile, and certainly vulnerable to all-out societal assault.I believe that we all need to reclaim our role as the perpetual guardians of that precious light of the Enlightenment. We have to recognize that we have been sleeping at the wheel as the forces of anti-science aggression, of manipulation and myth-making, of autocracy and nihilism, have been building up their digital war and propaganda machinery. They learned that by using the most compelling emotional conduits who channel our frustrations, fears, and trauma into activism, we could be lured to participate in the gladiatorial spectacle of viral anti-science narratives. They learned to target our tribal human nature and desire to belong to funnel us toward bespoke communities in opposition to science. They learned to root our online identity in their manipulative falsehoods. As a consequence, scientific illumination is once again quickly fading from society.The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.It falls on all of us citizens to learn that we have to hold the line and stand up for an evidence-based, democratic worldview. To find community and build identity once more based on our largest shared humanity, not the lowest common denominator. All we currently have to get us out of our self-imposed epistemic crisis is ourselves. No cavalry is coming to magically rescue us from the encroaching darkness. We can't wait much longer on the sidelines either.Welcome to shared reality.Let’s get to work.FinAdapted 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.Related links: The anti-autocracy handbook for scholars.Related links: How social media destroys democratic discourseRelated links: The playbook of anti-science actors - 3 part seriesNote: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.If you enjoyed this serialized book release; share it with others! I put over 4 years into this book to create at least one trustworthy account of the pandemic origin; and I made it freely available because it is a question we all deserve an honest answer to.Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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

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.“I was always the ‘zoonati’ they could talk to.” Professor Stuart Neil, a virologist from King’s College London, chuckled about his perceived diplomatic role for DRASTIC and some other lab leak proponents. “I intrinsically thought this was an interesting story,” he said, remembering how he became intrigued by various ideas of how SARS-CoV-2 could have come about via a research-related accident ever since the Mojiang miner story blew up in the summer of 2020. Scientists are not averse to discussing controversial ideas; quite the opposite, many are attracted by them. Stuart came across some of the online figures who promoted it, and he thought there “were some people of good faith in this grouping.” He still believes they “were at some point,” but now laments that ultimately, even polite discussion and good faith engagements were made impossible by the emergent group dynamics of increasingly radical believers. “Gradually, that all got poisoned.”Open inquiry and exchange are as important in science as in a democratic society. When my sci-comm colleague Sam and I first interviewed him in November 2021, Stuart had advised us to “avoid people that think they have all the answers.” He was curious about new developments and cautious about drawing hard conclusions. In many ways, his attitude was a good sounding board for some of the more creative lab leak proponents to test their ever-new speculations, at least in the early years.Stuart’s open attitude in this controversy is representative of the free-for-all, evidence-driven approach characteristic of most scientists. He does not care who makes the argument as long as they bring the evidence to back it up. This was always the power and promise of the internet: to prevent group thinking and empower unusual voices to be heard where traditionally they would not get the chance. Stuart enjoyed entertaining alternative scenarios and engaging in good-faith speculations. He might have often been a bit rough on others and undiplomatic when it comes to nonsense, but he would acknowledge if they had made a solid point. Of course, like the rest of us, he migrated between amusement, bewilderment, and eye-rolling about the quality of popular discussion on the topic.However, as the scientific evidence continued to stack up against any type of research-related accident and uncertainty about what wild theories could still be entertained in good faith shrank, the fronts hardened beyond repair. Building bridges to reach lab leak believers became impossible. Eventually, even scientists who had previously established good rapport ended up being considered enemies by the lab leak camp. Soon enough, he found his safety threatened, his private communications FOIA’d, and even his kindergarten-age kids were stalked and doxxed. All for the simple sin of following the evidence.I reached out to Stuart because I felt it was time to tackle the most misunderstood and polarizing element in the whole origin controversy: the infamous furin cleavage site (FCS). What is known, what is still unknown, and what we can learn from it.The FCS is a short amino acid motif in the spike protein that is recognized by furin-like proteases, which are cutting enzymes. It is a dramatic functional element for those various factions captured by the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow created in a lab. It is alleged to be the pandemic’s secret sauce. A trigger that was artificially inserted to turn an ordinary bat virus into the pandemic blight pathogen we have today.Indeed, the FCS is critical in SARS-CoV-2; it increases virality and is required for efficient human-to-human transmission. Yet, it’s almost a mythological force in popular discourse that is entirely based on two misconceptions.First, there is the common misunderstanding that the alleged introduction of a single genetic element has the power to create a pandemic pathogen. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is deliberate deception about how likely it is that nature or human engineering came up with the nucleotides insertion that led to the FCS we observe in SARS-CoV-2.We are going to have to get a bit technical to address both points. But it will be incredibly worth it to understand, so bear with us.As a molecular virologist, Prof. Stuart Neil was well-positioned to talk intelligently about the nuances of this topic; his research lab focuses on host-encoded antiviral mechanisms, and he has investigated the role of the FCS in that context. Viruses need to constantly adapt to beat immune systems since immune systems tend to evolve to beat back viruses. Stuart’s lab studied how “this evolutionary arms race plays out in the context of HIV1 envelope proteins, so the spike equivalent,” and he elaborated on where he traditionally came from before SARS-CoV-2 entered the scene.The vast majority of enveloped viruses need membrane fusion with a host cell to enter it, which can happen directly at the outside cell wall or after being ingested in a big bubble, also known as endocytosis. Either way, the viral proteins responsible for entering host cells need some help from the host environment.“In general, a lot of them are activated by having a protease cleavage site midway,” meaning our own protein scissors do the deed for the virus. The virology professor used both hands to illustrate how a cleavage site usually liberates a hydrophobic (water-insoluble) part of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein. This part “burrows itself into the nearest target cell membrane.” Imagine a harpoon ready to fire as soon as the gun ports are opened. In fact, talking about a single spike protein is a bit imprecise because, on the virus surface, three spike proteins are always intertwined, forming a type of trillium flower with three such spring-loaded harpoons that are ready to shoot once liberated by a protease cut. The activating cuts by a human protease prime the viral proteins to launch their invasion into a new cell. But where does this activation happen?For many viruses, the most important part of that cutting activity often happens after the virus is already attached to the host receptor, which would be the human transmembrane protein known as ACE2 for SARS-CoV-2. Once the SARS-CoV-2 virion is bound to ACE2 on the outside of a new cell, a human protease called TMPRSS2, a molecular cutter also embedded in the host cell membrane, activates the bound viral spike proteins via multiple cuts. Then the membrane fusion starts.That’s one way. However, there is another option. For some viruses, such as HIV1 or H5N1 influenza, activating cleavage of their invader proteins can happen even before they leave the production factory, so to speak. Their most critical cutting steps predominantly occur still inside a currently infected host cell, where the next fleet of virions is assembled to start a new invasion.In this “pre-cleaved” scenario, the viral battleships come out, guns blazing and ready to attack. Stuart explained how that could be quite consequential for cell invasion:Not only is the virus going out into the space and then getting activated and breathed out, it’s [also] being able to come out very rapidly and infect the next-door cell, or come out the back end of the cell, and that sort of... makes it go bang straight through that epithelial way.Unfortunately for us, Stuart acknowledged, coronaviruses “live in this happy medium, where they can deal with both [activation scenarios], and that was always a worry.”Coronaviruses can get both pre-cleaved in the factory or cleaved directly at a new host cell’s door. Even worse, Stuart said, “They can be very promiscuous about what protease they allow to do that.” This is where the FCS comes into play. Furin is a protease that sits inside a cellular compartment called the Golgi apparatus, basically the very last station of protein production where assembled proteins get various modifications, such as sugar shields (glycosylation). Having an FCS motif would allow SARS-CoV-2 to get pre-cleaved in the host cell, right on the way out.Why that works so well for SARS-CoV2 is not completely understood and was largely unpredictable beforehand. Virology is complex. However, what we have since learned is that pre-cleavage of spike proteins by furin does two very specific things to SARS-CoV-2. First, it opens up the structure of the trimeric spike protein, which makes it a lot less stable in its 3D configuration but allows for better epitope binding to its host receptor, ACE2. Second, it primes the TMPRSS2 cutting work, making this specific route of viral cell entry through direct membrane fusion faster and favored over alternative entry routes.This matters because it is not only the availability of host cell receptors that define what tissues in our body are most susceptible to a specific virus but also the concentration of activating proteases in the cellular environment. Higher ACE2 and TMPRSS2 co-expression are found in respiratory tissues. These tissues would find themselves especially vulnerable to spike proteins that were pre-cleaved by furin proteases.Think of the whole thing as an efficiency hack. Pre-cleavage favors TMPRSS2-expressing respiratory cells and enhances virion entry via the direct membrane fusion route, ripping open the host cell membranes to deposit the viral cargo inside. The increased fusogenicity at the outer cell membrane has the additional benefit of dodging some intracellular antiviral defense mechanisms that would come into play via endosomal entry, such as virions being chewed up, sliced apart, or boiled in acid inside the endosome. This efficiency hack overwhelmingly favors respiratory tropism and circumvents some of our innate host defense. The end result of the tiny FCS motif in the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, through a complex set of molecular processing, environmental factors, and host biology, is that it happened to aid both in pathogenicity and respiratory transmission of the virus, to our detriment.This outcome was not given by any means. If you switch the host or environmental context, for example, by putting SARS-CoV-2 into human cell culture, the FCS motif is lost very quickly. In that similar yet different human cell context, harboring an FCS destabilizes the spike protein critically and slows down the virus, thus the FCS motif gets outcompeted. Same virus, same genetic elements, different outcome. Only real-world selection pressures during respiratory transmission seem to favor and preserve the FCS motif in SARS-CoV-2.Stuart cautioned that we should not be fooled by overly simplistic notions, either. “Finding an FCS does not a priori mean respiratory spread,” the virology professor warned. Nor does an FCS turn a random bat virus into a respiratory virus. Multiple changes, large and small, must happen iteratively to reach a point where a bat virus can expand its cellular tropism. This includes stabilizing mutations to compensate for pre-cleavage lability and new structural or conformational changes; gaining or losing glycosylation sites; avoiding or surmounting prior host immunity; finding ways to subvert the cellular machinery of the host; and somehow using new routes for transmission. No researcher anywhere in the world has yet been able to optimize a virus for human transmission in a laboratory setting. The widespread notion that merely introducing an FCS will do the trick, or is even likely to do the trick, is simply false. Context is king when it comes to viruses.For example, MERS-CoV from 2012 and SARS-CoV-1 from 2003 both caused epidemics, one with and one without an FCS. In the case of SARS-CoV-1, some experiments have shown that the artificial addition of an FCS does not increase virulence or pathogenicity. Additionally, SARS-CoV-1 without an FCS is no less infectious in respiratory transmission to ferrets compared to FCS-containing SARS-CoV-2. Adding an FCS to 96% similar bat virus cousins, such as RaTG13 or Banal-like viruses from Laos, does not turn them into human respiratory pathogens either, although they do tend to show increased fusogenicity. Feline coronaviruses, which actually tend to have a furin cleavage site as a baseline, are usually mild but become much more virulent when they lose their FCS, a direct opposite to SARS-CoV-2. Some of our endemic human CoVs—common cold viruses infecting the respiratory tract—have an FCS but do not even use ACE2 as an entry receptor, while others have no FCS but still use ACE2. The human CoVs without an FCS do no worse in respiratory spread either. The point is that we should not be overly focused on the FCS or any other single genetic element, as Stuart and other virologists have cautioned me over the years. In nature, no genetic element acts alone; they follow their own logic born from constant adaptation and genome-wide optimization.“It is hard to explain to people that this is not something you design, and it just works,”Stuart lamented. The reality is that for a pandemic virus, the right genetic elements, host, and environmental conditions have to fall together to create a perfect storm. We should also expect that any natural virus that is capable of starting a pandemic has a lucky combination of some unusual genetic tricks up its sleeve. Otherwise, every ordinary virus would cause a pandemic. So why was there so much fuss about this one genetic element?As best as I can tell, the main reason why the short FCS sequence in SARS-CoV-2 (a 12-nucleotide out-of-frame insertion encoding four new amino acids) has been hotly discussed is because it stood out like a sore thumb in side-by-side sequence comparisons to known bat coronaviruses in early 2020. The llama in a supposed herd of viral sheep. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, and it was something we had not seen before that looked obviously out of place when lined up with bat viruses. This supposed uniqueness, coupled with the misconception that an FCS has the power to turn an ordinary virus into a pandemic pathogen, has since been perpetuated endlessly as evidence of human villainy.And where there is villainy, there are those who believe they can become heroes.Enter Columbia University professor of economics, celebrity academic, and political power broker Jeffrey Sachs. He has been an establishment figure for decades, most prominently involved in the economic “shock therapy” doctrine for post-Soviet Russia transitioning away from a planned to a market economy. “He was preaching privatize, privatize, privatize,” Dr. Carlos Morel, a Brazilian parasitologist and former WHO director who was very familiar with Sachs, once explained to me. Unfortunately, Sachs’s shock therapy mainly caused chaos and suffering, leading to millions of deaths from despair as well as seeding the roots of kleptocratic oligarchy, which he was later harshly criticized for, such as in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. Sachs’s role as advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General, working on sustainability goals and poverty, has seemingly aged a bit better. “In 2001, he chaired the macroeconomics and health book,” Carlos explained. “For the first time, in this report, they showed that investment in health is good for economic development,” which shaped thinking and policies for developing nations. However, many of Sachs’s advocated policy initiatives in Africa, such as the Shiny Millennium Villages project, have had mixed results at best. No matter what Jeffrey Sachs gets involved in, he seems to relish exerting influence on world matters and hanging out with celebrities such as Angelina Jolie and Bono from the Band U2. According to a profile in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: “Sachs’s ambitions are hard to overstate... His ultimate goal is to change the world—to ‘bend history.’”Is it any surprise that after a traumatic pandemic, he anointed himself to litigate the origins of COVID-19 as well? The economics professor became the head of the Lancet Commission, which was convened by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet to collect lessons from the pandemic and make recommendations for public health policy. Initially, Sachs was against the lab leak theory, which he believes unjustly blames China, a country he often championed and has some undisclosed affiliations with. Yet it would not take long for him to be taken in by a very specific version of the lab leak myth, forcing Peter Daszak, whom Sachs himself had first invited to head the Lancet’s origin task force, to resign and disband his group.“He is a very good speaker,” Carlos admitted. “But his role as the head of the Lancet commission… my God,” he shook his head and threw his hands in the air. He was happy to have not been on that commission. In his opinion, Sachs was very authoritarian. “Some of my colleagues who had been in the Lancet Commission said, ‘No, I quit. I cannot be in a commission where the chair orders what to do.” But that seems to be how politics often works these days. With the dissenting experts out of the way, Sachs could exert control over the origin narrative, which, surprisingly for people less familiar with his ideology, ended up pointing the finger of blame not at China but at the US instead, blaming “US biotechnology” for creating the virus. In parallel, he had written an opinion paper for the journal PNAS proposing, based on the most naive and cherry-picked sequence comparison to a human protein called ENaC, “that a ‘molecular mimicry’ between the FCS of SARS CoV-2 spike and the FCS of human ENaC” had taken place. He confidently asserted:For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung) of the target organism (human)—might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously. Of course, the molecular mimicry of ENaC within the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein might be a mere coincidence, although one with a very low probability.To experts, the quality of these naive arguments is laughable; they are the equivalent of typing in a random string of six letters into Google and taking the inevitable positive search result as evidence that the word exists. It was the “HIV inserts” level of analysis all over again. “The paper takes a sharp turn and gets into some serious furin cleavage site trutherism,” Prof. Angie Rasmussen commented. Stuart Neil was even more poignant and less indulgent: “All these arguments of intelligent design without any actual evidence to support them are simply creationism by another name.”Stuart was correct, of course. However, Jeffrey Sachs cared little for the virological details. They were pretense because he had much bigger fish to fry. He gets very explicit about what he wants, arguing:A US-based investigation need not wait—there is much to learn from the US institutions that were extensively involved in research that may have contributed to, or documented the emergence of, the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Only an independent and transparent investigation, perhaps as a bipartisan Congressional inquiry, will reveal the information.Sachs has always been critical of “US hegemony” while seemingly being comfortable cozying up to autocratic regimes. In recent years, that has apparently led him further and further towards fringe positions, such as denying the plight of the Uyghurs in China and arguing that NATO is responsible for the Russian invasion and war on Ukraine. Blaming the US and the genetic engineers at the University of North Carolina for the pandemic was very much par for the course. It was rather absurd to propose that US scientists created the virus and shipped or shared it to Wuhan where it broke out of a Chinese lab, even ignoring all the evidence in favor of zoonosis and against any laboratory involvement. But when somebody so influential speaks for the lab leak myth, allies in the media are easily found.The Intercept would run “Jeffrey Sachs Presents Evidence of Possible Lab Origin of COVID-19” as a headline, charitably eating up Sachs’s creationist opinion paper. For them, it was a logical continuation of the DEFUSE proposal coverage, featuring the same story tropes and villains in the form of Ralph Baric’s lab but now adding a supposed “EnAC mimicry” story element as the supposed “inspiration” for the furin cleavage motif used by American engineers. Jeffrey Sachs, in turn, started doing media rounds, using the publicity around the Lancet Commission report and the opinion paper for PNAS that he had shaped for his self-serving cause.No matter where he went, the skilled orator got away with claiming that he was “pretty convinced” that COVID-19 came out of US biotechnology. He made quite a few headlines, much to the pleasure of Chinese state actors it seems to me, who giddily amplified his message. In such a media environment full of motivated actors and power plays, finding our way back to evidence and fact-based discourse becomes increasingly difficult. But we have to try.Stuart agreed on the basic tenet of why the FCS is unusual. “What was never seen among the sarbecovirus family, and this is obviously why it’s controversial, is the presence of one of these things in bats.” But he was not overly surprised by that. In bats, all coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS-related family members, are in general found to be gastrointestinal, not respiratory viruses. That is why Shi Zhengli and others have been collecting bat guano pellets in their multiyear surveys. Furin-cleavage sites in the wider beta-coronavirus family are relatively rare, but they do exist sporadically. Yet, so far, none have been found in close bat virus cousins of SARS-CoV-2, making the FCS unique for this particular branch of the family tree. The llama in the flock of viral sheep.That being said, we already learned about very suggestive insertions at that critical S1/S2 region, which, for example, Alice Hughes and Supaporn Wacharapluesadee had discovered. The alpaca and guanaco within the viral herd, so to speak. Researchers in Germany around Christian Drosten have since discovered that these insertions at S1/S2 can indeed also contain polybasic cleavage motifs; however, they occur both at very low frequencies and do not seem to be maintained very well in bats. So, as best we can tell, these polybasic cleavage sites pop in and out of existence without giving an evolutionary advantage for transmission in bats. They are short-lived in that particular host and gastrointestinal context.“I always thought that the FCS that SARS-CoV-2 picked up seems to me like it’s very recent,” Stuart argued. “It is a first pass. A first try. It works well enough as a toehold to respiratory spread.” However, that toehold does not come for free. Stuart’s research has found that these advantages come at the cost of protein stability, and the FCS also seems to play a role in how well pH differences are tolerated. This is because the FCS “is not just liberating the fusion mechanism,” he explained; “there can be long-range conformational effects on the whole of that protein” that might be beneficial or detrimental depending on the context. All these nuances and dynamics are incompletely understood and even harder to explain to non-experts.“You can’t think of these proteins as rocks,” he advised. “They are living breathing things that are moving around like this,” he said as he waved his fisted hands upside down while explaining how spike proteins are configured very flexibly, “and the receptor binding domain sits on the top of that spike and goes up and down.” These dramatic conformational changes can work to a virus’s favor or detriment, depending on the environment.Stuart elaborated, “But you know if you're going through an intestinal compartment, you're going to be exposed to a much greater pH and temperature, or whatever it might be in the way an upper respiratory tract is not.” This means that maintaining spike stability in the bat gut may exert significant evolutionary pressure on bat viruses; ergo, having pre-cleaved virions around that are less stable just might not work well in the merciless competition for survival these sarbecoviruses find themselves in. They are short-lived because selection does not favor them. However, if this harsh bat gut environmental context were to ever switch, let’s say after spillover into an intermediate animal, new evolutionary pressures would come into play. That’s where Stuart would put his money—that the FCS can start to grow out and become evolutionary favored. Keep this in mind for later. Because the question posed is not whether nature can come up with it, which it obviously can, but rather whether or not humans had their hands involved in creating it.Here, my own viral vector cloning experience from my PhD came in handy to judge the evidence. Because from a genetic engineer’s point of view, using the unusual and likely ineffective FCS motif (RRAR) we observe in SARS-CoV-2 never made much sense. Why choose this crippled sequence when one could use a perfectly canonical sequence like RRSRR instead, which would guarantee efficient cleavage? Inserting four new amino acids—rather than substituting existing amino acids—is another thing genetic engineers tend not to do because it unnecessarily risks disrupting the overall protein structure, making the virus unviable. In fact, scientists have introduced furin-cleavage motifs through substitution multiple times, for example, in 2006 in the original SARS virus. Other labs have also worked on this over the years, all using substitutions of existing sequences. No one has ever documented a single example of a de novo motif insertion like we see in SARS-CoV-2. Lab leak proponents, such as Jeffrey Sachs, not only propose that the FCS was inserted (which is not even accurate, the staggered nucleotide insertions create PRRA, which forms a minimal FCS motif RRAR only with an already existing R in the viral backbone), but that an extra amino acid up front, a helix-breaking proline was thrown into the mix for no good reason. Beyond odd.Anybody who knows anything about genetic engineering will admit that the FCS we observe in SARS-CoV-2 was always unlikely to be rationally designed. Because in addition to its odd, crippled cleavage motif and a superfluous proline amino acid that risks the integrity of the whole protein, the insert itself has a very high GC content that genetic engineers try to avoid. Even more tellingly, all the nucleotides are inserted out-of-frame, oddly breaking the insertion in staggered nucleotide triplet ends. No engineer would do that either; there is simply no reason other than to confuse oneself for fun. However, natural mechanisms that can create sequence insertions, such as viral recombination, are completely reading-frame agnostic. With recombination, the odds are two out of three that new inserts will be out-of-frame, too. To me, it all made the notion of a rational designer rather far-fetched. Yet merely pointing that out in my first blog article about the topic in 2021 got me into this hot mess, with lab leak proponents feverishly arguing that we cannot presume to know what Chinese (or American) engineers would do just because textbook genetic engineering and some experts would do things differently. We can never know their motives, they assert; therefore, we can never exclude that the FCS was artificially introduced. Apparently, experimental precedent, basic biology, experience, and parsimony did not count to judge the odds.Luckily, we do not need to dive into the supposedly twisted minds and motivations of mysterious Chinese or American engineers, because nature is more creative and intricate than our naive human suppositions.Unequivocal evidence that no human could have designed the FCS emerged from subtle mechanistic studies published in 2022. Researchers from the University of Texas in Galveston had investigated a short amino acid motif called QTQTN right upstream of the FCS motif. It's next-door neighbor, so to speak. QTQTN had garnered curiosity because, when SARS-CoV-2 was cultured in human cell lines, this motif would get lost over time, just as the FCS motif does. This was considered odd.The two seemed to be a package deal: keep both or lose both. When researchers deleted just the QTQTN motif but kept the FCS intact, they found that the FCS could not be cleaved very well anymore. They discovered that the QTQTN forms a little loop on the side of the spike protein, positioning the FCS motif in just the right spot so that proteases like furin can cut it efficiently. Imagine holding it out like a ribbon so that the molecular scissors can quickly fly by and cut it. As a result, the deletion of the QTQTN loop made the FCS less accessible, reducing the proteolytic processing of the spike protein and, with it, the ability of virions to enter new cells. It was a symbiotic interaction, one genetic element empowering the other.Further investigation revealed that there is a third component to that particular package deal: a glycosylation site (sugar shield) that would be assembled on the threonine amino acid (the second T in QTQTN). When the researchers in Galveston kept both the QTQTN loop and the FCS intact but removed the ability for the sugar shield to form on it, the spike protein would get pre-cleaved by furin but somehow had trouble interacting with the TMPRSS2 protease on the next target cells, reducing viral infectivity as well. The sugar shield served as a homing device for emerging pre-cleaved virions to find TMPRSS2. It became clear that SARS-CoV-2 needs the full molecular trifecta of glycosylation, loop extension, and cleavage motif to make the FCS efficiency hack work. This finding, although hidden deeply in the nitty-gritty of molecular virology, is absolutely remarkable and devastating to any engineering hypothesis.Co-dependency and synergy between proximal genetic elements are hallmarks of evolutionary selection. These types of complex interactions are virtually impossible to design even with perfect knowledge of all structural components, which nobody anywhere in the world had in 2019. Also, consider that the QTQTN motif is an uncommon but natural element that is occasionally found in SARS-CoV-2-related bat viruses. So how does a symbiotic interaction—a package deal—come together between a supposedly “artificial” FCS and its natural neighbor? In 2019, there was simply no conceivable way that engineers could have ever anticipated, designed, or stumbled upon the observed, but hitherto unknown, mechanistic synergy in any laboratory setup. For me, this mechanistic discovery was the final nail in the coffin of the “engineered” FCS speculation.Other differences were also found. While the FCS was one critical element for respiratory transmission that made headlines for its uniqueness, it was only one among many unique genetic elements in an intricate virus full of surprises. Since this discovery, researchers have found other such unique respiratory adaptations, including two single amino acid mutations called A372T and N519H. None of the related bat sarbecoviruses seem to have these, but SARS-CoV-2 maintains them strictly. Why?We talked about three spike proteins forming a trillium flower; what we have not yet explained is that there is an open and closed state of that flower. When closed, the viral particle is better protected against the host’s immune system but cannot bind to the ACE2 receptor as well. To bind better, it has to adapt to an open conformation. One way to picture this is that the trimeric spike proteins oscillate between open and closed conformations, with mutations defining how much time the trillium flower spends in either. When a virus jumps from its natural host to a new, "naive" species without existing immunity, mutations favoring the open state are often selected. This is what we observe in SARS-CoV-2.In short, researchers found that, for example, the A372T adaptation (a mutation of a single amino acid, unique to SARS-CoV-2 among the sarbeco bat viruses) destroyed yet another glycosylation site in the receptor-binding domain. This site is basically an anchor for a sugar shield that covers parts of the spike. The loss of this highly conserved (in bat viruses) glycosylation site, in turn, prompted a conformational change in the larger trimeric spike protein assembly, causing the RBD to turn outwards into a more respiratory-infectious “open” position. Great for facilitating ACE2 binding on respiratory cells. In lab experiments, reversing this single mutation decreased viral titers (a mark for infectivity) by fiftyfold. Similarly, another recently discovered respiratory adaptation called N519H is a flexibility mutation, lowering the energy barrier to overcome the conformational change between “open” and “closed” conformation. The closed form in bats protects against the host immune system, but makes binding to ACE2 more difficult compared to the open form, which reduces infection efficiency. Once SARS-CoV-2 jumps from the bat into an immune-naïve host animal, mutations that flexibly favor open confirmation are advantageous for transmission.None of these 3D conformation-altering genetic kinks could have been anticipated by any engineers, nor could any of these host-context-dependent impacts have been reasonably stumbled upon in any laboratory setup. Apparent “uniqueness” based on limited comparisons to known bat viruses is not a good argument for a genetic element to be “artificially created.” It is a non sequitur. Nature is far more creative and capable of developing these genetic innovations because it runs trillions of such exploratory experiments each day, and when the circumstances are right, some viruses will hit the jackpot. For viruses capable of causing a pandemic in humans, the presence of such unusual genetic elements is fully expected, and it is not suspicious if related bat viruses do not contain them while inside their bat hosts.Most lab leak proponents are perfectly capable of following the above reasoning based on the emerging evidence. Unfortunately, none seemed willing or able to let the myth of the engineered FCS go.Since then, conspiracy theorists have proposed that Shi Zhengli must have had an unknown but perfect progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 in her lab. One that not only already included the receptor binding domain found in bats in Laos in 2021 but also had all these other synergistic genetic elements, conformation changes, stabilizing mutations, etc., required for respiratory spread already in place. Basically a perfectly capable human respiratory pathogen where Chinese engineers only needed to splice in an unusual and crippled furin cleavage motif that would ordinarily not even work, for some reason introduce it out-of-frame (something no engineer would do), add an extra proline spacer (that would usually break the whole protein structure) for fun (or to extend the loop length they did not know about), all so they could stumble upon a hitherto unknown mechanism by luck that made the FCS trifecta package deal all work together magically. Oh, and of course, Zhengli has kept all of that amazing molecular virology work worthy of a Nobel prize, as well as the hundreds of intermediate steps in between, secret for years before the pandemic started for no particular reason.Stuart Neil and his two coauthors, Peter Jacobs, a climate scientist and communicator familiar with the dynamics and arguments of science deniers, and Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of cognitive psychology focusing on conspiracy theories, would write in a prominent article for Scientific American:In normal scientific inquiry, as evidence emerges, the remaining space for plausible hypotheses narrows. Not so with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. One of their hallmarks is that they are self-sealing: as more evidence against the conspiracy emerges, adherents keep the theory alive by dismissing contrary evidence as further proof of the conspiracy, creating an ever more elaborate and complicated theory.As Stuart Neil would say:This is always my dividing line… Scientists go with data. And these guys never go with the data if the data is not going in their direction. If it doesn’t keep their little pet theory on the table. Then clearly, there is fraud going on. Let’s get their emails. Let’s cherry-pick. Let’s blah blah.From his voice and expression, I could tell he was exhausted and haunted by the last few years.Some details may differ, but Stuart’s trajectory has played out with dozens, if not hundreds, of outspoken scientists during the pandemic. It doesn’t matter if they engaged in discussions about pandemic origins, masks, vaccines, or supposed alternative miracle cures like Ivermectin. Their clinging to evidence made them targets of mobs that believing in evidence-free narratives.In times of crisis and trauma, when myth, manipulation, and motivated reasoning are all too appealing, our ability to have informed discussions is diminished. Yet, following the facts and building a basis for shared reality, even with people we disagree with, seems like something worth preserving. For all our sake.Somehow, we seem to have lost that ability forever.§2022 and 2023 marked two important years in origin research but also brought up the ugly side of science denial and anti-science activism. The lab leak myth had become too powerful to ever let go. Having lost just about every battle on the evidence front and in the scientific literature, lab leak proponents were in dire need of new narratives to justify their beliefs and identity. Yet, instead of trying to integrate new knowledge into their shifting speculations, many switched tactics entirely. They now fully immersed themselves in discrediting science and scientists while gaming the referees of public opinion: journalists, influencers, and politicians. Focused on creating a plethora of new counter-narratives against a consolidating scientific consensus, many seasoned opportunists and clout chasers saw an opening to get their name on the map.As the dominos start to fall, there is a very real chance that the people we thought were heroes were actually villains. There is also a real chance that the researchers with the most-cited papers are guilty of the worst research conduct of the century [...] they pushed an overconfident narrative to the mass media, lying to the entire world and the scientific community to cover for Fauci.The computational biologist Dr. Washburne would post this on Twitter on September 6, 2022, in what I would personally describe as his usual delusions-of-grandeur fashion. I had been paying attention after his profile began to rise.When I first looked into his Twitter history, there was none discernible before 2022, which seemed odd to me for somebody with a sizable following. Despite that, the former postdoc had cultivated an influential network on Twitter. Somehow, he seemed to be connected with many of the contrarian academics, such as Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who had seen their number of followers explode during the pandemic. One for pushing “spike toxicity” anti-vaccine propaganda, the other two for advocating for the mass infection of citizens to supposedly get quickly to “herd immunity”, known under the pompous name the “Great Barrington Declaration”. Two dominant narratives on social media, unsupported by scientific evidence, that caused a lot of harm and confusion to public health.Dr. Washburne, in contrast, seemed more like a data guy, posting models of epidemic case developments, preprints, and similar information that was somewhat typical for scientific conversations on Twitter. During exchanges, he presented himself as a polite scientist, a “deaf guy who is great at listening.” He constantly posted inspirational quotes about science, portraying himself as somebody who enjoys learning from others and respecting their perspective.I appreciate folks’ diverse views and respect those who disagree with me. In my life, it’s the folk I disagreed with - but gave benefit of doubt & listened to - who’ve taught me the most. Happy Saturday, and I love you all!That charitable tone was not extended towards the zoonati, though.Looking into his Twitter history, it appears that on September 5th 2022, Dr. Washburne came across an idea that had been cooked up in the conspiratorial fever swamps of DRASTIC and related amateur sleuths that he could turn into something much bigger. For over a year, amateurs had discussed how the FCS could have been inserted or even how the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 could possibly have been assembled by using various combinations of restriction sides. This “discussion” had been inspired by the work of Dr. Ralph Baric, who had developed a protocol to synthesize a known bat coronavirus genome directly from a sequence. Unlike Shi Zhengli’s group, Ralph Baric’s team never isolated and cultured a live coronavirus from bat droppings, so his team needed a synthetic approach to construct a viral genome. The amateur sleuths believed that SARS-CoV-2 was created the same way. Because CoV genomes are large, such a synthesis approach required first creating a handful of smaller pieces that needed to be stitched together, sometimes with the help of restriction enzymes (molecular scissors) and ligases (glues). By the time Dr. Washburne came across the idea, its most fervent proponents, Dr. VanDongen, an associate professor in pharmacology, and Dr. Bruttel, a German cancer researcher at an obstetric institute, already had a rather elaborate speculation in place. Dr. Washburne likely saw an opportunity to bring them to the next level. In my opinion, rather than being scientifically astute, he was an expert in upselling—taking a piece of content, polishing it, and repackaging it to make it look very attractive. The trio would soon set events in motion that would cascade to the top of the attention economy.“At the time, I had no idea who any of these people were.” Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph told me. He was another computational biologist with a background in microbial genomics and would emerge as their sharpest online critic. Debunkers of scientific misinformation often come from the same field or community as the falsehood spreaders because they are usually best suited to follow the particular vocabulary and methodology used to mislead bystanders.As a computational microbiologist and sequencing guy, Alex had been around the origin discussions online from near the beginning, starting with the flawed “HIV inserts” preprint that went viral in late January 2020. “That was just a classic bioinformatics error,” he explained. “I wrote a comment on bioRxiv,” the preprint server where it was uploaded. He then commented on Twitter, explaining both the scientific methodology and why some results just did not withstand scientific scrutiny, even superficially. He had his debunking cut out for him. “Then there was this RaTG13 sample… Somebody said it was fake,” he explained, not remembering the details but already involving some known lab leak proponents. “Well, that is interesting,” he thought. “It is actually really hard to fake sequencing data correctly. There are tools to simulate it, but it never really looks like the real thing,” he elaborated. So, he had a look at the raw sequencing data and debunked the assertion. Whatever you might think of RaTG13 and Shi Zhengli, this was a real sample and not fabricated. “They were not happy with my responses,” he remembered.A major flaw with conspiracy theorists is that they never discard debunked ideas, constantly rewarming them if they fit the larger emotional story. Of course, Scarlett, the supposed bioweapon whistleblower, would later again claim that RaTG13 a fake because it suited her agenda. The next thing Alex recalled was a conspiracy theory that Jesse Bloom and Alina Chan promoted, related to the hype surrounding the Mojiang mine story and supposedly secret viruses named RaTG15 collected there, which they thought could have been SARS-CoV-2. A family tree including RaTG15 had been shown in a talk Zhengli gave, so of course, both Jesse and Alina, as well as most of DRASTIC, thought Zhengli was hiding pertinent sequences, with the latter strongly implicating there was evidence of a cover-up.Alex challenged them: “But there are totally normal reasons to share incomplete sequences in talks.” He tried to explain to them that their comments were irresponsible because “based on the tree/alignment, these sequences aren’t recent ancestors” of SARS-CoV-2 and “don’t indicate lab origins.” Unlike with journalists, it was harder for the motivated contrarians to b******t somebody like Alex who understood the flimsy arguments they were making.“And of course, later they [Zhengli] published RaTG15 work… obviously it was not SARS-CoV-2… and everybody just forgets,” Alex described the dynamic. No accountability for the contrarian falsehood spreaders. No revisiting of previous beliefs. Alex was mostly ignored. But that particular debunking and Alex’s consistent pushback had gotten him a bit more on the radar with a different set of scientists. The serious ones. Kristian Andersen once told me, “Alex has these amazing sleuthing skills.” He explained how they started working together sometime down the road, inviting him as an outsider to work on a critical review of the evidence for the origins of SARS-CoV-2 alongside almost two dozen other scientists. “It is interesting, and it is important as well; that’s how I kinda stuck with it,” Alex explained, describing his continued engagement in correcting the many falsehoods the various factions of lab leak believers would bring forth.This brings us back to Dr. Washburne and his collaborators.On October 20th, 2022, Dr. Washburne announced that he had uploaded a new preprint with some rather dramatic conclusions:We examined whether SARS-CoV-2 was synthesized in a lab.We studied a common method for synthesizing CoVs in the lab.This method was thought to not leave a fingerprint.We found the fingerprint.That fingerprint is in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.It was a clear, simple, repetitive message with eye-catching formatting. The accompanying material appeared substantiated enough for non-experts, with math and complicated-looking figures that tried their hardest to give the impression that thorough science had gone into it. Maybe it was the fact that some influential names seemed to immediately jump on the preprint, such as the contrarian virologist Dr. Francois Balloux, who endorsed it right out the gate as “an important piece of work” that “looks both solid methodologically and conceptually,” and, of course, Dr. Feigl Ding, who was never shy about amplifying preprints with sensationalist implications and seemed to have learned nothing about the “HIV insert” story. Then there was a set of COVID-19 contrarians and anti-vaccine influencers that also seemed to jump on the preprint right off the bat. Dr. Washburne’s posts and the Bruttel et. al. preprint went viral on Twitter quickly.“There are many kinds of ‘wrong’ in science, but this preprint is False,” Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph wrote at the time. Alex had seen the same half-baked theories about synthesis floating around for over a year, and he had explained to these same authors that these ideas are entirely contradicted by the fact that coronaviruses undergo recombination, and we had already found informative relatives in the wild.Yet the Bruttel et al. preprint, as it became known, was quite something else. Polished by Dr. Washburne with shiny statistical figures, it was flashy. It looked really good. It was also scientifically unsound on multiple levels. To many experts, including me, it appeared as if the authors had deliberately constructed it to reach a predetermined conclusion. It started by cherry-picking two restriction enzymes that produced a somewhat evenly spaced pattern among many possible options. Then they applied what many experts and I would consider multiple inappropriate and misleading statistical tests to claim that this pattern is so unusual that only a human engineer could have come up with it. They also deliberately excluded a bat virus named RpYN06, one which Alice Hughes had collected in Yunnan. That “oversight”, if it was one, however would prove that the loss of a particular restriction site happened through recombination and not through genetic engineering. Alex Crits-Cristoph had even told the authors about RpYN06 and how its existence contradicted their assertions months before they posted their preprint, which seemingly purposefully excluded the sample. So it would be hard to come to a different conclusion other than that the authors must have known this genome existed yet chose to ignore it because it contradicted their conclusions. In science, such exclusion acts could be seen not only as highly misleading, but might even constitute deliberate scientific fraud.Confronted with RpYN06 later, Dr. Bruttel falsely asserted that the virus was fake, that is why they excluded it. Supposedly all part of the cover-up. This behavior was not too surprising to me, given that Dr. Bruttel seems to have rarely encountered a viral genome that he did not believe to be engineered or faked in his mind. In my opinion, he seems to have fallen deep down the rabbit hole some time back. Over the years, he has for example falsely asserted that HIV, Ebola, and the Omicron variant were all man-made viruses, too. Not a trustworthy conduct for a scientist. Add to that cherry-picking, inappropriate methods and statistics, and the exclusion of contradictory evidence in the preprint, and what Dr. Bruttel, Dr. Vandongen and Dr. Washburne put to paper was not science but something else. In essence, it was exactly the same type of motivated reasoning covered in scientific language that intelligent design proponents use to discard the theory of evolution.Despite the – what I would personally characterize as - “statistical paint job” the preprint received from Dr. Washburne’s efforts to in my opinion obfuscate its pseudoscientific reality, many virologists quickly dismissed the preprint as the nonsense they saw it to be. Kristian Andersen would tweet:The study is a clear example of motivated reasoning with a heavy dose of technobabble to make it sound legitimate - but it’s nothing more than poppycock dressed up as science. In plain language - this is uninformed nonsense, and it’s simply not worth engaging with this b******t.Unfortunately, for the average bystander, the preprint and fanfare around it proved more persuasive than the harsh dismissal from experts. They bought into it in droves, to the surprise of scientists. “That one is always a head-scratcher,” Alex Crits-Christoph rubbed his chin, thinking about the preprint’s impact. “Anybody who is qualified to comment on it thinks it is a total waste of time, and so won't comment on it. They think it’s a total joke.”“Unfortunately, while that is true, it leaves open a space,” Alex rightly recognized. In the current information environment, if scientists do not immediately refute such b******t with hard data, which often takes an order of magnitude more work and effort than producing it (a phenomenon known as Brandolini’s law), the b******t can develop a life of its own. “It also then creates this weird dynamic where journalists think nobody is pushing back on that… especially ones that are just on Twitter, which is a terrible place to get information from,” Alex observed. “And this is a dynamic that happens a lot.”When Natasha Loder, a science reporter for The Economist and Kelsey Piper, a writer for Vox, saw the waves of engagement and bickering on Twitter, they likely believed there was a genuine controversy at hand around the preprint. On top of that, both seemingly got annoyed by Kristian Andersen’s harsh tone and dismissal. “I don't think this kind of snideness and contempt really serves public communications,” Kelsey Piper tweeted at him. “Ditto,” Natasha replied right under. They decided to take matters into their own hands. After all, if there’s so much smoke around the preprint, there must be some fire.Natasha was first out with her story. “Controversial new research suggests SARS-CoV-2 bears signs of genetic engineering,” the google headline read, much to the horror of scientists who had seen the pathetic work floated around on Twitter in various forms before. How could a serious news outlet take it up with such a declarative headline? The world reacted, thinking that the renowned British news outlet had gotten a scoop of momentous proportions. Natasha, who I consider a proper journalist, later explained the headline came out unintentionally wrong over google, and had it changed very quickly. Nevertheless, the preprint (that never made it through peer review even years later, unsurprisingly) and its coverage was hailed by many lab leak believers as all but finally proving that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab. But why was this pseudoscientific preprint so successful in the first place?“It really surprised anybody how much that junk blew up.” Alex rolled his eyes. I believe this might have had something to do with the well-connected Dr. Washburne, who was not an entirely unknown entity on Twitter. I later learned he had inhabited a different controversy bubble before he became engaged in the origin topic. Best I could find, he was part of a network aggregating around a shady think tank called the Brownstone Institute, funded by libertarian billionaire and reportedly pro-child labor advocate Jeffrey Tucker. It was created to oppose various measures against COVID-19, including lockdown measures, masking and vaccine mandates, as well as financing academic contrarians that were involved in the “Great Barrington Declaration,” a public health proposal advocating for lifting all restrictions and letting the virus rip unmitigated through society. Dr. Washburne is listed as author writing for the Brownstone Institute. He had also been sitting on panels with prominent anti-vaxxers and activists affiliated with the think tank, producing what I personally would describe as akin to “merchant of doubt” fan fiction, mixed with ideological talking points that aligned with the GDB authors.“He was in the middle of a Twitter network, where people would see his stuff,” Alex noticed as well. It seems to me personally that Dr. Washburne was somewhat influential with a certain anti-pandemic measures crowd because he appeared to be this polite, data driven guy that somehow always found a scientific-sounding argument to justify their beliefs. Looking deeper into his “scientific” work, I found that Dr. Washburne had created, as best I can tell, misleading statistics to justify the policy decisions of right-wing politicians in Florida and claiming that the pandemic had reached “natural endpoints” due to herd immunity in the summer of 2021. A bogus claim scientifically, yet possibly contributing to the overall popular libertarian narrative that the danger of the virus was starkly overblown. A fatal misconception for too many Americans in red states, who also simultaneous were manipulated by too many anti-vaccine activists into not taking vaccines, ultimately leading to a large disparity in deaths between Republicans and Democrats. In my opinion, between his scientifically unsound publications, Dr. Washburne was mostly occupied with shaping the public perception of his persona. It appears that he had deleted his Twitter account and posting history multiple times, removing old tweets that aged poorly, partisan predictions, junk science, and outbursts that exposed his persona, seemingly re-emerging with a new angle when he returned. “He kinda gamified the system a bit by posting all types of feel-good stuff that people then followed him” Alex gave his opinion. To me, it appears most followers were not realizing there might be more than meets the eye. With his engagement in COVID-19 origin speculations, the contrarian finally seemed to have found his niche.“It really caught people off guard and managed to break through in this really unfortunate way,” Alex recalled. While the “synthetic origin” preprint and The Economist news story about it were gaining steam, debunkers like Alex reacted. Within less than 24 hours, he put together a list of arguments and refutations, including code where he reproduced some of the alleged “statistical patterns” and showed how they are non-discriminative nonsense. Multiple others joined in as well. Even virologists at the University of Würzburg, Dr. Bruttel’s home institute, felt compelled to tear down the viral nonsense in a press release that must have stung Dr. Brutal and the institution with embarrassment. Yet the falsehood was out making its rounds.Much later, even Dr. Ralph Baric, the world-leading expert in using reverse genetic systems to build coronaviruses, the literal inspiration for the “synthetic origin” preprint that went viral, would describe Dr. Washburne and his coauthors’ preprint as “a pathetic piece of work” under oath. Why was he under oath? Because Dr. Baric was called in to give testimony at closed-door hearings by US lawmakers. That a US congressional committee had interrogated him about motivated junk science in the first place might, however, be the most damning tell on how our information ecosystem increasingly shapes reality perception. It certainly confirmed how viral nonsense cooked up by fringe figures can penetrate even the thickest walls of power.The same cannot be said about the corrections and debunkings by dozens of scientists. Their arguments against the flawed preprint were mostly never heard by the average citizen or policymakers. No newspaper made a story about how The Economist got played by activists not shying away from upselling pseudoscientific nonsense. Instead, all the virologists and debunkers got was more harassment from crowds that saw their belief that the virus had been created validated.As scientists, we participate in communication platforms that fail so utterly that millions have already seen this obviously flawed work and will never hear it’s wrong. More people have seen this straightforward lie and internalized it as true than maybe any paper you’ll write.Alex wrote about the experience. A reality of our modern information ecosystems where engaging fictions outcompete elaborate facts.There are, of course, many reasons why the “synthetic origin” story went viral; it wasn’t just the crafty acts of the media manipulators themselves. Luck played a role, as did timing. The “synthetic origin” preprint was a perfect fit for the mood of the moment. First, it was a narrative sequel to the big DEFUSE story as well as Jeffrey Sachs’s pointing the finger at Ralph Baric’s lab, which he had been promoting for weeks. Second, with the US midterm elections at stake, the right-wing myth-making machinery was ready to give this polarizing origin controversy another go. The politicians realized that they could present themselves as the party of accountability, ready to punish those scientists who demanded masks and lockdowns, who forced vaccines into freedom-loving Americans, and who had created the virus in the first place. The much-hated Dr. Fauci, who smirked and made their president look stupid, rapidly became the focal point of their ire in these overlapping conspiracy myths. All the politicians needed were crafty content creators like Dr. Washburne, who could provide some flimsy support for their vendetta.“It is often the stupider and simpler stories that really go big,” Alex Crits-Christoph noted dryly. Politicians are masters at recognizing their potential. You don’t persuade the hectic online masses to engage by advancing smart technical arguments, no matter if they are about science or policy. These often make people feel inadequate when judging a topic, and they discourage them from participating.What works for winning over online tribes are simple messages and slogans—an exciting new angle to a common story trope that makes the complicated seem intuitive. Something that channels our emotional engagement and justifies our biases, where we can signal our allegiance and put our own spin on it for endless repetition. Coincidentally or not, these are the ingredients that can dominate the news cycle, too.Unfortunately, as the scientific evidence accumulated entirely on the side of a natural origin hypothesis, more and more such motivated fictions completely detached from ordinary scientific inquiry started to gain momentum.Right after The Economist went viral with the restriction enzyme b******t bingo coverage, Katherine Eban had another, in my opinion, trope-laden story to sell to the flagship outlet ProPublica. Based on faulty translations of innocuous Chinese memos, Katherine built up a Republican Senate staffer into a codebreaking genius who could read between the lines of supposedly secret CCP party-speak. Together, the duo supposedly unearthed (or, more accurately, just fabricated) that a “grave and complex” biosafety emergency at WIV had taken place.If this sounds silly and improbable, that is because it was. Countless native Chinese speakers, including Jane Qiu, were outraged by the motivated translation errors and apparent maliciousness of Eban’s story. So were many non-Chinese experts—including translators, sinologists, and China-based foreign correspondents—some of whom are fierce critics of Chinese governments. Even worse, Eban’s fabrication was tied in and coordinated with a later Republican Senate report attacking China, which would also be pulse-giving for a similarly titled “A Complex and Grave Situation” origin report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office. In his political fanfiction, Rubio offered a “political chronology of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak” that blamed the Chinese communist party for creating the virus, again to increase tensions. That supposedly independent journalism outlets like ProPublica had been setting the stage for such blatant partisan PR stunts was a bit too on the nose for many journalists.They say journalism is what makes democracy work. We should all ask ourselves: Have we helped to make democracy work? Or have we helped perpetuate stereotypes and existing narratives, exacerbate mistrust and polarization, and make the world a more dangerous place?Jane Qiu, in response to the ProPublica story.Even worse for ProPublica, they had received a five million dollar “grant” from the cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried in early 2022 to do dedicated biosecurity reporting. Sam Bankman-Fried, as a leading light of the “effective altruism” movement, has dispensed a lot of money to investigative news outlets to do this type of coverage. The effective altruism movement had also been a community that fully bought into the lab leak idea as an existential risk and donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the anti-science attack group USRTK, according to their own statements. This of course invites scrutiny. Did any of that “existential risk” money play any role in ProPublica’s choice of coverage or focus? Did it commission or facilitate any aspect of Katherine Eban and Jeffrey Cao’s misleading article?I don’t know, but the amount of content that was created on the supposed existential risk of virus hunting from various outlets led to public pushback on virus discovery work and grants, resulting ultimately in the cancellation of pandemic prevention efforts such as DEEP-VZN, a program that was previously highly rated before online commentators got wind of it. It certainly seemed from my vantage point that putting large sums of money behind skilled storytellers was well-invested if one wanted to shape public discourse on the supposed existential risk of lab leaks. But is all of this existential risk fearmongering about virology in the field or the lab based on solid factual ground?Few had time to ponder. Yet another media frenzy was started by The Wall Street Journal end of February 2023, and it subsequently captured the news cycle for days. They reported that the US Department of Energy had internally revised their assessment of a lab leak to likely, albeit with low confidence. No evidence for that assessment was ever provided, and as best one can tell, it was political. CNN learned that the DoE did not, however, blame the WIV; rather, it blamed a lab from the Wuhan CDC that was closer to the Huanan market. What a sensation! Doesn’t that finally explain the Huanan market connection? Two days later, Fox News followed up with FBI director Christopher Wray, who told them that “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” Again, no evidence was offered, but it did not matter. Either way, it cascaded through society, with journalists dutifully reporting about pseudo news events that had little basis in reality.Some lab leak proponents were already holding victory speeches. On Twitter, Alina Chan claimed she felt “validated” with the intelligence community seemingly on her side now. And they must know, right? Well, a few months later, a dry report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees 11 US intelligence agencies, clarified that the whole of the US intelligence community had no special insights into the origin of the pandemic. They had no evidence of Shi Zhengli ever possessing a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor nor any evidence of WIV workers getting sick with COVID-19. In fact, most agencies agreed that the virus was not engineered, with four agencies assessing that a zoonotic origin was most likely and others not commenting. The FBI and DoE had been more of an outlier in their assessment, which seemed mostly based on their interpretation of Chinese obfuscation rather than any pertinent knowledge or insight. So much ado about nothing.The only thing to learn from all these episodes is that our ability to create content for a belief has been democratized to the point where anything, no matter how wrong, motivated, or flimsy, can reach the peak of the attention economy and shape the news cycle. Especially when there is some dubious money and political desire behind it. Instead of a battle of facts—or at least interpretations of facts—the origin controversy has become a battle of viral narratives, cascading from the bottom to the top of the attention economy.This bothers me enormously. Just as with the intricate biology of the furin cleavage site, I believe our incomplete understanding of what makes things go viral is, unfortunately, a problem that haunts us also in the technological realm.§We previously discussed how the arrival of the “winner takes all” attention economy has inadvertently changed the way information is valued in society. Instead of using information to inform and educate ourselves, we increasingly treat it as a product—something we consume or share for popularity, persuasion, profit, or power, like the influencers we have come to admire. When information is abundant, we pick and choose what we want to hear, not necessarily what we ought to hear. We have strong preferences to seek and amplify information that either confirms our preconceived notions, provides us with opportunities for social networking, or engages us emotionally. The accuracy, factuality, context, or topical relevance of the information we share is a secondary issue at best. As a result, certain information products (i.e., a funny meme, a tweet we like, an outrageous video, or a sensationalist article) have an easier time spreading through society than their competition.How fast and how far information spreads is called information velocity. We want some relevant information to have a high velocity; think about an immediate crisis like an earthquake or school shooter warnings, where quick engagement and spreading can save lives. However, information velocity is not related to the veracity of the content of information. Misleading, false, or harmful information about an issue can have a much higher velocity than competing good information on the same issue. A meme showing 2+2=5 might spread a thousand times faster than a meme showing 2+2=4 for a variety of reasons, including sarcasm, humor, and irony. Information velocity is also dependent on the environment. Something that might go viral on TikTok might not go viral on Facebook, given dramatically different audiences and formats.Perhaps most importantly, information velocity is a property that can be optimized externally without changing the underlying content. Two identical articles can have very different velocities depending on their headline. Two identical videos can have very different velocities by just changing the thumbnail. Two identical tweets can have very different velocities depending on the time they are first posted. Two identical memes can have very different velocities depending on who has written them. Messengers also play a role. If Taylor Swift writes “haha” in a tweet, it will be shared by millions. For most of us, the same tweet will go nowhere.Today, there are multiple industries trying to figure these dynamics out, most prominently marketing agencies, advertising companies, and political campaigns. They seek to constantly optimize their information products, or the ones of their clients, to have higher velocity on various online platforms. Search engine optimization, keyword rank monitoring, link building, and nurturing are all intended to game the algorithms that curate our feeds. However, the most impactful velocity strategies are the ones that hack our human psychology and get us to participate and share the content we are exposed to. There are more and less legitimate ways to do so, with a big gray area in between. For example, a pro-vaccination campaign might increase the information velocity of its content by making complex scientific information more accessible to laypeople through compelling visualization, simplification of messages, inclusive language, and community engagement. This can really help public health officials get their message about vaccines out. Most of the world is, however, neither that noble nor benign.A historical gray area is when headline writers use sensationalism or shock to get more people to click and share their articles. “If it bleeds, it leads” is an old adage attributed to William Randolph Hearst about this very phenomenon. With the rise of the attention economy, some of us have gotten very good at figuring out what the algorithms and our fellow humans want to see and amplify. We are a story-telling species, so narrative structures, including heroes and villains, work fantastically to package information products into bespoke worldviews with a unique selling proposition.No matter how flashy, sharing a shady preprint that supposedly shows how SARS-CoV-2 contains fingerprints of genetic engineering isn’t going to go viral without the proper story tropes, emotional context of a gain-of-function panic in place, and a network of amplifiers giving it the initial boost. I learned that Dr. Washburne had meticulously arranged for sympathetic influencers, such as Dr. Balloux, to have advanced knowledge of the preprint before he announced it and received his endorsement. He had also contacted multiple journalists, including Natasha Loder from the Economist, and provided them with and advanced copy and “expert commentary” from credentialed pro-lab leak academics, making it very easy for journalists to get supportive quotes for their coverage, if they choose to pick it up. All these efforts increased the velocity of the “synthetic origin” preprint, regardless of its pseudoscientific content, in the information sphere.Most influencers, grifters, snake oil salesmen, activists, politicians, and other media manipulators are brilliant at increasing the velocity of information products that work in their favor. There are hundreds of tricks that help game recommendation algorithms. The most impactful velocity hacks, however, are usually those that target our human vulnerabilities. The most unethical velocity hackers are using moralizing language to steer outrage, capitalizing on trigger words, jumping on hashtags, clout-chasing celebrities, and piggybacking on the news or traumatic events. Some examples include posting partisan talking points right after a school shooting or fabricating violent images with deepfakes to blame immigrants after a horrendous terror attack. Nothing is too toxic, too sacred, or too soon for velocity hackers chasing the next big hit. The velocity of their information product defines who wins, not the quality, accuracy, or truth of the content itself. It is an all-versus-all fight. From self-made influencers to mainstream media, from activist groups to marketing companies, from political campaigns to foreign influence operations, hacking the velocity of their information products has become the key business model for information merchants of all kinds. It is their ticket to popularity, persuasion, profit, or power in the information age. Those who get all the ingredients to velocity right—through luck, timing, and ruthless calculation—will catapult their content into virality.Unfortunately, velocity hacking is extremely harmful to society and the public good. Virality not only shapes public discourse and what information people get to see, it also has a pernicious side effect that few of us have yet had time to wrap our heads around: it rewires our social networks.Nobody understood this better than my now embattled acquaintance Renée DiResta, a disinformation researcher from the Stanford Internet Observatory who has recently become a target of a smear campaign. We were both trying to make sense of the craft of an overlapping cast of velocity hackers that Renée would end up naming “invisible rulers” in her book. She started innocently enough, trying to understand how propaganda and rumors spread online and shape public opinion. It wasn’t long before she became the target of a propaganda campaign herself.“One of the things that social media does is you feel like you can trust the things that you're seeing because they’re coming from your friends. Right?” Renée explained. When our network shares something, we are more likely to engage with it, comment on it, and amplify it further. We take their collective behavior as a cue and act in a predictable fashion. In a sense, whether we engage with a piece of content is not fully our own decision; it depends on how others in our environment act and what decisions they made before us. This phenomenon is not new to social media by any means but is well studied, for example, in behavioral economics, and known under the term “information cascade.” The Lehman Brothers Bank is a good example of an information cascade.In 2008, the US bank Lehman Brothers announced a massive asset write-down as a result of sub-prime mortgages. For Lehman’s management team and the majority of institutional investors (who understand how to value a company), this wasn’t a major problem. ... However, individual investors began to sell shares of Lehman stock as they feared their equity was in danger. Taking this behavior as a clue, more and more investors, seeing the stock price falling as a result of other investors unloading shares, decide to sell shares themselves based not on intrinsic valuation but on the general panic of the market. This eventually led to a massive drop in Lehman Brothers’ stock price over a very short period of time, eventually forcing the operationally-sound company to the point of insolvency and bankruptcy. The end result was the largest bankruptcy in US history and the further descent of the US economy into recession.From the Dutch Tulip mania to bank runs to sudden cryptocurrency implosions and other investment bubble bursts, information cascades are events when large amounts of individuals take the same decision in a sequential fashion based on the decisions of others before them rather than their own personal knowledge or assessment of the situation.On social media, we constantly mimic these cascading behaviors by making the binary decision to buy or reject information products in the form of engagement and sharing. When an influencer engages with a piece of content, their followers see this and might be nudged to make the same decision to engage. If a piece of content has been visibly engaged with by multiple people in our social circle, our decision to engage with it becomes more likely. After all, we want to participate in the conversation with our peers and signal our allegiance. At some point, after seeing almost everybody engaging with a specific information product, our supposedly private choice to engage becomes a near certainty. Our social network compels us to engage, and our decision to do so further influences others after us to engage as well. By being part of a specific social group and engaging with a specific information product the same way, we have become part of an information cascade amplifying the information, a stepping stone on its way into virality.However, information cascades on social media do more than make things go viral; they teach algorithms what content and associated social relationships influence our decisions to engage. And inversely, the algorithms learn which of our connections and friends are less relevant to create ever higher likelihoods of us participating in such social information cascades. This leads to a radical social sorting over time.Network studies showed that participation in “Tweet cascades increase the similarity between connected users, as users lose ties to more dissimilar users and add new ties to similar users” and that “Twitter users who follow and share more polarized news coverage tend to lose social ties to users of the opposite ideology.” It’s a dynamic system that nudges us towards a social amplification network while trimming our social ties that might interfere with viral amplification; you know, those low-velocity buzzkill people who ask questions, fact-check information, and caution others not to spread false rumors. Debunkers like Dr. Alex Crits-Christoph and other scientists who care about getting it right.Fact checks, diversity of opinion, nuanced discussion, and appeals to deliberation all create friction and slow down the amplification and spread of viral narratives. Platform and ranking algorithms have long figured out that the social engineering of our networks removes these frictions and compels us to become better hosts in viral amplification cascades. “Think about it as an ecology: The online ecosystem lends itself at a particular moment to a particular species, which thrives and in turn reshape their environment,” Renée explained.She hopes that “understanding how recommender systems sort people into networks can help us be more cognizant of polarizing factions” that inevitably arise through this social engineering process that makes new information cascades ever more likely. The consequences of such information cascades can be no less dramatic on social media than in finance. Instead of a bank run leading to a historic bankruptcy, we get pile-ons, mobs, and witch hunts. We might also see, let’s say, a vibe shift in media coverage and elite belief that causes a geopolitical escalation with a foreign superpower.According to Renée:Vibe shifts happen when you have a lot of people who are seeing the same thing. The narrative becomes very, very common in the community, and it becomes like... the tipping point. You just have that moment where you see it all around you, and it's much more about the sentiment than the facts.Talking to Renée, my mind rushed back to Nicholas Wade, whom we discussed in a previous chapter, putting the blame on his peers in the media. “Can you produce a vibe shift by targeting specific journalists and media tastemakers?” I proposed to her. “Yes, I think the answer is yes,” she jumped in halfway through my question. “You even see this in the Russia 2016 data.” Renée had studied Russian propaganda and election interference in the 2016 US election. “Who do they mention in their tweets? Right? They want to get retweeted by prominent people, and so they’re actively soliciting and replying to people who have the power to boost them.” Sometimes, foreign agents even directly pay influencers to boost certain narratives. They do this because they want to reach a critical mass, a tipping point in the discourse. Causing vibe shifts is their game; that’s how media manipulators try to shape social networks in their favor and exert influence that can become relevant on the geopolitical stage. Today, a sizable proportion of Americans buy into Kremlin propaganda that has been promoted by paid American influencers.All the false news stories about a supposed lab leak that went viral over the years flashed past my inner eye. The motivated and needy conspiracy theorists are tagging scientists, politicians, and journalists, trying to get them to comment and engage. All the carefully crafted pieces by gifted storytellers, multiple genuine disinformation campaigns, and the many plots, ploys, and players who aimed to sway tabloids and news outlets, politicians, mainstream journalists, and influencers to participate in lab leak speculations. How they all found there was something to gain by participating and co-creating these viral narratives surrounding a supposed unnatural origin of the pandemic. In turn, the ensuing virality in our information ecosystem socially aligned them more and more with each other until they became an unstoppable force to be reckoned with scientifically, politically, and socially. “Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel impactful, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, [and] realities,” Renée summarized aptly.It is a phenomenon bigger than ourselves and individual actors.Virality is the driving force that shapes the topology of our social networks. It gradually defines our relationships, drowning out acquaintances, friends, or even family that might think a bit differently about some topic. In return, it rewards the most efficient velocity hackers and elevates their network to become our new guiding stars. This leads us further away from reality because, while fiction can be optimized for maximum velocity, facts usually cannot. The best velocity hackers inevitably veer into self-serving falsehoods to win the battle for our attention. Over time, an asymmetry is created where the most efficient information cascades form around the most viral falsehoods supplied by content from the most successful velocity hackers. This is the world we have created today.Science cannot compete. By the time scientifically accurate information reaches the majority of us, we have already been sorted into polarized factions where we clash about identities and worldviews, often unable or unwilling to concede an inch even when the other side makes a good point. No wonder that Prof. Stuart Neil, “the zoonati they could talk to,” now laments how “gradually, that all got poisoned.”Renée DiResta has observed that:People initially come to participate in online crowds because of a mix of algorithmic nudging and personal interest. Being part of a political faction can be fulfilling—there is a cause and a mission. Fighting a common enemy creates camaraderie and a sense of belonging.However, once we are part of a tribe, we tend to defend our co-created narratives with all we’ve got and subsequently get trapped in a vicious circle. “Participation in factions may lead to entrenchment, more extreme beliefs, or stronger and more belligerent partisanship.” According to Renée, platforms need to be held accountable because their “design decisions now play a huge role in determining whether groups online are going to behave like civil communities or mobs.”In my opinion, the extreme polarization today is largely a result of “winner-take-all” engagement algorithms, mercenary velocity hackers, and viral information cascades that stoke our emotions and nudge us to participate in conflicting online tribes. Once our social networks have been restructured along the lowest common denominator lines, such as partisanship or conspiratorial worldview, building bridges and good-faith discussions between opposing camps becomes almost impossible. “You don’t consort with the other side while you’re at war! And in the gladiatorial arena of social media, there is always tension,” Renée observes.All platforms and their ranking algorithms show users emotional and engaging content to keep them hooked, but there are differences in how they are designed to optimize user participation and how they restructure networks. Platforms like Twitter highlight extreme members and representatives of other factions to provoke outrage in users about what despicable opinions others hold. Facebook creates closely knit interest groups that serve as echo chambers, driving people deeper into a niche worldview with ever more radicalizing content and very little contradictory information penetrating that bubble. “At its worst, Twitter made mobs, and Facebook grew cults,” Renée would summarize succinctly. Either way, restructuring social networks is dangerous for society.Neither mobs nor cults are known to be very amenable to scientific conversations or any type of rational discourse that is necessary to live together in a pluralistic democratic society. Yet because of their “asymmetry of passion” for a topic, these extremist crowds make for great activists and keyboard warriors, who are then favored by algorithmic amplification. They have a disproportionate impact on our public discourse; that is why velocity hacking influencers need to cater to them. These crowds are their ticket to hijack engagement algorithms that boost them to the top of the attention economy—the ultimate social velocity hack. Influencers, no matter if secular gurus, political pundits, heterodox podcasters, or snake oil salesmen, who have harnessed and directed the energy of these crowds have subsequently gathered the biggest platforms.It does not surprise me that the heterodox- and secular guru-sphere are all connected to Joe Rogan, who constantly circulates its guests among the same group of in-network podcasters. The algorithms brought them together because they all knew how to virally elevate emotionally salient culture war issues created by motivated partisans and conspiratorial crowds. The amplification dynamic in turn shaped public discourse and their own audience and contributors in the process. Increasingly, this builds up a bespoke information reality around us that feels real to us. As Renée puts forward in WIRED magazine:What I find most alarming is that people have the ability to just create reality by making something trend, to reinforce over and over and over again these conspiracy theories. You do have this increasingly divergent set of realities where there’s a deep conviction built up over many, many years of reinforcing the same tropes and stories. You can’t just correct that with a fact check.The consequences for public health were dramatic. “The most prominent influencers in the conversation managed to frame every conceivable aspect of a global pandemic not as a fight of humanity against a viral invader but as culture war battles about identity and values,” Renée writes in her book. “And institutions, unfortunately, were ill-equipped to participate.”During the pandemic, many scientists and institutions talked about the role of misinformation or disinformation in shaping public perception. The WHO spoke of an infodemic of false and misleading information. Everyone has tried to wrap their heads around why so many false rumors—about the pandemic, NPIs, vaccines, masks, and so on—have sabotaged public health responses in many societies worldwide. Public health communicators often sleepwalked into a fragmented minefield they did not know existed.The reality is that the deck had been stacked against them from the start. For years, online culture warriors and tribal gladiators have carved up society into factions with the help of algorithms and asymmetrically engaged crowds. Engagement algorithms made sure to remove the friction for information flow within these socially restructured amplification networks while building barriers to them for outsiders. Scientifically accurate information rarely reaches people unfiltered by influencers anymore. The socially engineered crowds, in turn, looked for influencers and conduits who could channel their feelings into viral narratives while their activists and true believers were working to sway, subvert, or discredit the traditional gatekeepers of information flow, such as institutions or media. A remarkable synergy for virality ensued. The ultimate efficiency hack to spread harmful falsehoods: a participatory anti-science ecosystem.Just like with the genetic trinity of loop extension, glycosylation, and pre-cleavage around the FCS efficiency hack we discussed earlier, the trinity of crowds, algorithms, and influencers achieved together what one part alone could not: creating cascading outbreaks, not of biological agents, but viral anti-science narratives that have developed their own lives and become self-sustaining in our information ecosystem. The bombardment of information cascades, in turn, altered our public discourse and society in ways we do not yet fully understand.Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have witness how viral information cascade after viral information cascade about an “unnatural” pandemic has washed over society. How these narratives were rearranging the topology of our social networks, infecting new immune-naive citizens, and re-infecting old bespoke communities alike with ever-new versions of the lab leak origin myth. Just off my memory, the various tales went something like this over the years:It was a pretense to stop pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong. It was released by the Chinese. Or the Americans. No, it was planned because a vaccine patent was about to expire. Alarm! The virus had HIV inserts. No, it was a bioweapon built around bat viruses ZC45 and ZXC21 collected by a military academy. Or maybe they isolated it from the Mojiang mine, where people died of a mysterious disease we believe was COVID? They must have collected the virus in secret and cultured it. They had poor biosafety. Three WIV workers got sick. Actually, the virus wasn’t collected but a chimera, constructed in a reckless gain-of-function experiment gone awry. Project DEFUSE was the blueprint. Maybe they tried to mimic EnAC’s furin cleavage site since the virus was likely constructed in Ralph Baric’s lab in North Carolina. Actually, a preprint just came out explaining how the whole virus was stitched together in a computer and synthetically assembled with restriction sites. So many possibilities! No matter what, these memos in secret Chinese party-speak tell us that there was a grave biosecurity situation at WIV. Did you know the Chinese military was deeply involved with Zhengli’s lab? Maybe they did bioweapon research after all. Breaking news! The Department of Energy now thinks a lab leak is most likely. But actually, they do not believe it was WIV, but rather a different Wuhan laboratory closer to the Huanan market. Oops. Seems like gain-of-function is off the table. But the Wuhan CDC had moved there in December 2019; maybe something went wrong during the move? Wait, the FBI director claims the agency is moderately confident in an engineered virus leak since 2020, so it’s back to the WIV! What about all those intelligence agencies who have classified information? Did DARPA not fund EcoHealth? When the US military is involved; it goes to the highest levels of the US government. Daszak is likely a CIA spy; that’s why they protect him. They funded EcoHealth to keep tabs on Chinese bioweapon development. But the ODNI report says they have no special knowledge; does that mean the intelligence community is covering up the truth as well?Nobody bought into all the stories; many are contradictory and deeply steeped in conspiratorial ideation. We are not so irrational. But few of us were able to resist every single one of those compelling narratives. Especially when “the power to create pseudo-events has been democratized,” as Renée would put it. We would always find something in the news that was persuasive to us. The information sphere always delivers, and that includes our own desires. News cycles can be fabricated from thin air to the point where influencers can find apparent media amplification for any remote beliefs, no matter how flimsy, fraudulent, or far-fetched the evidence. Like an economics professor talking about “molecular mimicry,” shady contrarians supposedly discovering “synthetic fingerprints” in SARS-CoV-2’s genome that all the virologists did not see, or Republican staffers being supposedly able to decode secret Chinese party-speak that evaded over a billion native speakers. I guess virality online is no less dynamic and context-dependent than in biology.As we have seen during the pandemic, those virus variants that spread faster than the competition are the ones that would sweep the world, overwhelm our innate and acquired defenses, and make people sick. Viral narratives are not that different; they just make people sick with false perceptions and beliefs. As a consequence, just like real viruses, viral narratives have the potential to harm our societies severely. Depending on what communities we were part of and what motivated us to participate, our beliefs were gradually shaped as the consensus of our social network was taken over by them.We started to shift away from rooting our understanding of the world in scientific evidence toward what we wanted to believe. We took our cues from high-status individuals we trusted and believed, whether they were popular gurus, relatable influencers, aligned politicians, or smart-sounding journalists. In that environment, I am afraid, science and institutions can no longer even compete for our hearts and minds.Without well-connected and influential spreaders who can amplify narratives and make them go viral, without activist crowds creating pseudo-events, and without social media algorithms constantly pushing new, unwitting citizens towards them, science seems at a loss in the attention economy. Even the most worthy and relevant scientific information will have a hard time winning against competition for our attention. Going forward, how would citizens ever learn about real scientific progress? How can they get the context of new discoveries being made? And even if scientists ever had a scientific breakthrough that went viral and reached the masses by lucky coincidence, who would be able to accept new evidence given the hardened and polarized fronts of our fragmented realities?In March 2023, we were all about to find out.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.Continue reading chapter 11 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.“Disgusting,” he said, ripping me out of my thoughts. He showed me a meme where Zhengli’s head had been photoshopped onto a bat, her face distorted with an open mouth to reveal vampire's teeth, and the whole frame colored in blood red. I shuddered involuntarily. The dehumanization was not subtle. “I really hate what they did with her ears here; it makes her look evil,” Peter Daszak continued with another meme. The haunted British-born zoologist and I sat on a couch in a remote house near Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, towards the end of 2022. He had pulled up his laptop to show me some of the circulating memes about the “Batwoman” and himself. Indeed, in that cartoonish pop-art picture, the warm Chinese researcher looked like a supervillain, with pointy ears covered by tape, holding bats and releasing a poison virus into the world.Both Peter and Zhengli have found themselves in the middle of a global media firestorm for over two years now; their decades-long work on coronaviruses has become a vital focus of global attention. Speculations and conspiracy myths about their lives and personas had become a cultural phenomenon, and online memes about them were widespread. These visual statements were sometimes artful, sometimes funny, often tasteless, and always closer to propaganda than reality. Peter had saved hundreds of them on his laptop. He pulled up one of the earlier ones, showing him sitting in a chair with Chinese President Xi Jinping in his lap, who was dressed like a stripper and wearing a tinfoil hat. “You can´t help but laugh at some of these, even when you were the one being made a fool of.” Amongst the countless unflattering, libelous, and grotesque depictions, what seemed to bother him the most were the ones fat-shaming him. “That is just tasteless.” He got annoyed. His face had gotten some color back, at least; he had been pale the previous two days. I was still getting to know the zoologist on that trip to Thailand, trying to understand who he was.Until the middle of 2022, Peter Daszak was just a random name for me that I would not have been able to put a face to. I came into the origin discourse in the summer of 2021 after Nicholas Wade’s article rubbed me the wrong way. My science-communication colleague Sam Gregson, a former CERN particle physicist from the UK, wanted to do a podcast about the lab leak hypothesis that we both believed credible and underexplored at the time, as our media ecosystem had told us. We invited DRASTIC member and conspiratorial blogger Yuri Deigin, who already had some internet fame on the topic, to have a friendly chat about the scientific evidence for a lab leak. In parallel, I was writing an article for my blog, trying to make sense of the arguments brought forward in the Nicholas Wade piece, and ending up learning much more about the topic.My writing process includes a lot of reading, and after getting some overview articles on the topic, I usually look into the scientific literature to see what the underlying data for these claims are. I guess this is where my concerns began. I could not find any evidence in the scientific literature that would substantiate any aspect of the various arguments I had read on the supposed “engineered” nature of SARS-CoV-2. On the contrary, many of the oddities that Nicholas Wade or Yuri raised were, in fact, perfectly explainable by available knowledge and scientific papers on the topic. On top of that, I had been working in experimental labs for over 10 years. From CRISPR to Gateway cloning to Gibson assembly, I had hands-on experience with all of these different genetic engineering techniques, partly to construct viral vectors that we used as a delivery method for genetic cargo. So, while not a virologist, I certainly understood the genetic engineering arguments brought forward by lab leak proponents were just plainly naive to outright false. As a science communicator, I thought, “Why not clear up some of these popular misconceptions?” After a few weeks of researching and writing, my blog article was titled “Explained: The hard evidence why SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered,” specifically addressing the RBD and the furin cleavage site, that unusual llama in the supposed flock of viral sheep.That article came out a day before our scheduled podcast with Yuri Deigin, which put me in a position to push back against some of the naive assertions our guest brought forward. Maybe it was this combination of events, or some vocal messages on Twitter being more assertive about SARS-CoV-2 not being engineered, that somehow put me in the crosshairs of the often-faceless lab leak community on Twitter. By this point, I had written dozens of science communication blogs for over five years, but not once had I gotten a hateful comment for it. Now my timeline was overflowing with insults, from the idea that I was a gullible loser, a “sheeple for the official narrative,” all the way to being a shill for EcoHealth Alliance, big pharma, or even China. Certainly not a pleasant experience.I guess instinctively, people deal in different ways when having their honesty and character questioned in public. Some might ignore or disengage; others might feel the desire to correct the public record. I learned about myself that I tended to fall into the latter camp, getting more vocal about what I believed to be the reality of the situation. So, I argued more, wrote more, and investigated the topic more. Sam and I soon interviewed King’s College professor Stuart Neil, a virologist and actual expert who seemed to have some healthy and nuanced takes on the origin controversy—what was known and what was uncertain. Thinking Sam and I might clarify the misunderstandings with more evidence, other in-depth expert conversations would follow. Angela Rasmussen, Kristian Andersen, Michael Worobey, Alice Hughes, Eddie Holmes, and others. With every new piece of content we put out, the scientific picture became clearer, yet the animosity against us only increased.Soon, I noticed—with a mixture of fascination, curiosity, and horror—how we were not alone. There was a pattern. Anytime a new voice would speak up publicly in favor of a natural origin explanation or just for evidence-based assessment of the science, a dedicated group of lab leak influencers and activists would get involved, trying to shut them down or convert them to their cause. If they failed to do so, the lab leak community leaders would start to maliciously quote-tweet—a Twitter-specific way of highlighting someone else’s tweet—with a misleading, discrediting, or ridiculing comment. These quote-tweets, often marked with specific hashtags such as #lableak or #originsofcovid, served as a beacon for their followers to join in the “conversation” with the new voice. They would reinforce the disparaging comment by adding their own insult, thus amplifying it again, over and over. Often, these behaviors would result in so-called “dogpiles” or ”pile-ons”, an argument or attack by a large group of people against one person. Being on the receiving end of such a pile-on can be a disorienting experience because, all of a sudden, a bunch of random people want to fight you like an enemy based solely on an out-of-context tweet or a flippant comment, as well as the less-than-charitable interpretation from the lab leak influencer who highlighted it.Most friends and ordinary people of the target would miss these pile-ons because these did not play out in the feed of the scientists they might follow but in the feed and community of the quote-tweeter, i.e., the lab leak influencer. Only the scientists targeted saw the full spectrum of abuse, while most of the public, not sharing this particular niche ecosystem, would be none the wiser to what had occurred. Scientists and journalists, especially those with only a few hundred followers, would be mostly helpless against the malicious narratives created about them in the lab leak community. They had nobody to speak up or defend their character because nobody even saw what was happening to them. They had no course of action because speaking up for themselves just created more activity, more harassment, and more abuse in the opposing community. Many contemporary scientists went through this “treatment” a few times before deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, leaving the social media platform entirely. Eddie Holmes and Kristian Andersen deleted their accounts. Others became very selective and self-censored, not speaking out publicly about this toxic topic anymore. The exodus of reasonable voices on the topic, in turn, ceded even more discourse space to the activists. On top of that, the shrinking rational voices remaining in the conversation just became bigger targets for activist communities that seemed to relish in the act of verbally abusing their “enemies” together on a daily basis. A little community ritual, often unprompted by any specific action or offense. Every single day, they just looked for somebody to fight and hate for hours on end. Because of these asymmetric bullying dynamics, even a relatively small science blogger—too stubborn or maybe even too truculent to be silenced by these mob tactics—would suddenly gain a much larger role in the minds of conspiracy theorists. I’ve lost count of the number of pile-ons my words have caused over the years.Peter Daszak pulled up the next meme, this time showing both him and me together, arranged in a weird, convoluted homage to “The Godfather” movie. It portrayed Dr. Anthony Fauci as the “godfather of gain-of-function research,” Shi Zhengli as the “cook,” and some prominent scientists like Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen, Angela Rasmussen, and Stuart Neil as the “lieutenants” of the alleged “research crime cartel.” At the bottom, there were outspoken science writers, like the brilliant Jon Cohen from Science, and myself, the stubborn blogger. We were depicted as low-level foot soldiers and “propagandists” for the virological crime family. In many heads, we were not independent people with our own motivations and agency, looking at evidence and reaching our conclusions, no, we were all part of the same cabal trying to cover-up the true origins. The enemies to beat.It was not just the random Twitter accounts who believed and engaged with that. Even established professors such as Rutgers University’s Richard Ebright would participate in and often cause pile-ons, these online harassment rituals, falsely claiming for years on an absurd number of occasions that I was an unemployed moron, failed academic, and an idiotic PR shill who was paid off for my words by various entities like EcoHealth Alliance. Richard Ebright has posted his catchphrase, “Stooges will be stooges,” and variations of it about a hundred times to discredit me. Dozens of other highly engaged lab leak believers would take their cues from him to harass me, some even made dedicated parody accounts of me. Once their emotional energy and obsession with me even culminated in a New York Times columnist taking up a narrative they fabricated about me. This apparently prompted NYT reporters to demand statements from Peter Daszak, trying to supposedly uncover how I am a “paid influencer” for the origin cover-up team or something. Because why else would I be speaking up for science and evidence?The less exciting reality was that I did not know any virologists and public health scientists before I got lumped in with them by the imagination of conspiracy theorists. The idea that we were all somehow part of a secretive plot or society covering up the origins of COVID-19 was bizarre. Yet ever since I started writing about this topic, I have increasingly become a target for multiple lab leak influencers and the faceless online hate mob behind them, harassing me, trying to discredit me, attempting to get me fired, and sometimes even threatening me. I was not too worried about my physical safety, given that I lived in Switzerland, not the US and nobody could go up to my workplace or university and shoot me. A safety privilege few US scientists possess, and one that made it much easier for me to remain vocal online compared to others. But make no mistake: everybody who spoke up for a likely natural origin, for an evidence-based worldview, no matter if scientists, journalists, or mere bystanders, found themselves facing similar issues online, and not only on Twitter. Many receive death threats or find themselves on dubious “kill lists.” The emotional energy against the fictional “zoonati”—a portmanteau between “zoonosis proponents” and Illuminati—was palpable and omnipresent. Where did the hate come from? Would it ever stop?Our shared experience with these activist conspiratorial communities was a weird thing to bond over on that couch in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Yet it allowed me to put myself in Peter’s shoes, at least a little bit. He was their arch enemy, a scientist working with WIV and WHO, someone who had been too outspoken for natural origins from the early beginning, who was connected to too many possible villains, who called their beliefs a conspiracy theory, and who refused to be bullied out of the conversation, at least not for a very long time. Conspiratorial activists hold grievances. If one cannot shut up a scientist with intimidation and bullying, one can still make the world believe he is a liar. This is where a lot of their emotional energy went, spamming every comment section with stories and silly memes painting Peter as dishonest, a shill, and a criminal. They created elaborate story arches, making him the main character in their lab leak fan fiction universe. These relentless hate rituals eventually bore fruit.Renée DiResta from the Stanford Internet Observatory calls it the “asymmetry of passion” that leads to activists shaping perceptions of bystanders on social media. Only about 1% of users on social media create 90% of the content. Emotionally activated conspiratorial communities create a lot of noise, engagement, and one-sided content that citizens unwittingly consume. Algorithms boost such active engagement behavior to the top. This distorts the public discourse and shapes opinions. Most of the media has since followed conspiracy theorists in their accusations against Peter, and politicians have started to threaten, investigate, and sabotage EcoHealth Alliance’s work and Peter personally. When I first met Peter at the end of 2022, he was already radioactive; seemingly nobody would believe his words anymore. He was blamed, on a daily basis, for causing the pandemic one way or another. Would a person like that not lie about everything to escape culpability? Even I, having experienced these pile-on dynamics myself, was unsure what to make of him and whether anything he said could be trusted. The sheer volume of lies, tales, and allegations thrown at him will involuntarily make some suspicions stick in bystanders. We can’t help it. That is how effective this type of online activism was.Who or what made Peter the main character in the mythological lab leak cover-up universe? What caused the intense global spotlight on him?On September 20, 2021, shortly after The Intercept’s reporting and document leaks had caused feverish discussions about supposedly reckless gain-of-function grants to EcoHealth Alliance, the conspiratorial ideation-prone amateur sleuths from the DRASTIC collective released an alleged bombshell. They would title their sensational analysis, “Exposed: How EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology Collaborated on a Dangerous Bat Coronavirus Project.” Their exposé was based on a leaked research proposal provided by an anonymous whistleblower, and it showed a project that Peter Daszak had submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency or DARPA.In 2018, after Ebola, Lassa fever, and Zika outbreaks, the agency under the Department of Defense announced a new program aimed at preventing emerging pathogenic threats, PREEMPT for short. The program aimed to advance understanding of viruses and their interaction with animals, insects, and humans, as well as deliver new, proactive interventions to reduce the risk of emerging and reemerging pathogens. Stopping spillovers would ultimately benefit Americans and the world. Building on their decade-long work, Peter Daszak and his collaborators thought they could contribute to the PREEMPT effort by proposing an ambitious project named “Project DEFUSE: Defusing the threat of bat-borne viruses.” Their idea was to predict pathogens poised for emergence through bat surveillance, human serology studies, and laboratory experiments on SARS-related viruses, much in line with their previous expertise. They also proposed developing a small-scale proof-of-concept intervention strategy, trying to vaccinate bats against viruses they identified as high risk for emergence through an aerosolized delivery method previously developed by US researchers for combating white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungus for bats.While two out of three evaluators at DARPA found the grant selectable, the competitive nature of such endeavors always entails a high rejection rate. Peter and his collaborator’s expertise and proposed viral work were lauded, but weaknesses included some of the proposed modeling efforts as well as a lack of details with the intervention strategy and whether a simple epitope selection can ever be broad enough to inoculate wild bats against the “diverse and evolving quasispecies of coronaviruses found in bat caves.” Viral biodiversity might just be too broad. For these reasons, DARPA scientists “would not recommend funding at this point,” although “some work outlined might indeed be fundable if new resources became available,” the rejection letter stated. The proposal was turned down.While disappointing for Peter and his collaborators, that was not unusual. In general, the vast majority of grant proposals scientists write get rejected, with acceptance rates of 16–18% on average for new proposals and around 40% for renewals of existing ones. Depending on the agency, it can even be much more competitive. “People always just hear about the ten million in grant proposals that EcoHealth has been awarded,” Peter told me, “when in reality, we lost a hundred million in equally important research projects that never got funded in the first place.” Resources are limited, especially for work that mainly benefits the public, not some corporation or government. Since the DEFUSE proposal was one of the many ideas not funded, the proposed work was not conducted, and the researchers involved, like Peter, Zhengli, and US virologist Ralph Baric, moved on with different proposals and work.Yet, for the amateur sleuths at DRASTIC, who were long convinced the virus was created through some nefarious means and high-level government involvement, the rejected proposal provided a treasure trove of new material to inspire new narratives. This proposal, the sleuths alleged, offered insights into a “staggering level of deep involvement of EHA with the WIV, on matters of national interest” and that it contained “unpublished strains that could have directly produced SARS-CoV-2.” On social media, they would alternate between calling it “a smoking gun” and “a blueprint” for the creation of SARS-CoV-2.“This proposal to DARPA [...] was like the EcoHealth-WIV NIH proposal but on steroids,” Alina Chan would write, referencing The Intercept’s story on alleged gain-of-function research and greenlighting mainstream tastemakers to go in on it. Too many journalists would uncritically jump on the opportunity. The appeal of leaked government documents was almost irresistible to certain journalists, including again The Intercept, which ran its own story about DEFUSE a few days later. Others soon followed. From propaganda outlets like The Epoch Times to tabloids like the Daily Mail and The Times in the UK all the way to the left-leaning The Atlantic, many news outlets ran a story about the old grant proposal that was never funded. There was a large audience demand, given the polarized media landscape and gain-of-function moral panic, which was also commercially irresistible for many ailing newspapers. Lastly, and maybe more practically, coverage of the supposed exposé did not require journalists to do any real work. Too many journalists and amplifiers took reactions from Twitter and quotes from DRASTIC’s analysis to push out their stories. Because DRASTIC had spent weeks browsing through every sentence of the proposal in hopes of finding a hidden meaning or interpretation that would support their emotions, by the time they released their Project DEFUSE interpretation, they had a website running with easy-to-access content. Journalists were offered a thorough, predigested version of the planned experiments. Very convenient for writers who need to churn out highly clickable articles en masse in a drowning industry to stay afloat.The DRASTIC amateurs highlighted no less than 27 highly salient “findings,” all of which were little narrative angles for news articles and based mostly on negative framing, decontextualization, and misrepresentation of the science within the proposal. Among their “findings” were trivial things the grant actually stated, such as funding allocation and planned experimental work. “They would use taxpayer dollars to pay Peng Zhou and Shi Zhengli,” one of their breathless findings read. Duh. Compensation of researchers for their work is a normal part of most grants, of course, and all federal grants are “taxpayer dollars” in some sense. But given the success the White Coat Waste Project had in 2020—culminating in the live cancellation of EcoHealth Alliance’s grant by President Trump—with exactly this “taxpayer dollar going to the Chinese” framing, DRASTIC probably hoped to raise similar attention. Other DRASTIC “findings” suggested that EcoHealth Alliance was proposing gain-of-function research while “trying to bypass” gain-of-function regulation, misrepresenting that bat viruses were exempt from such regulations. Given what The Intercept had just pushed onto the world stage about Peter’s NIH grant with Shi Zhengli, it was great timing. Conspiracy theorists are very tuned into the news cycle. They had been very excited about these new documents and would not miss their chance to gain prominence and shape the narratives in their favor.Another “finding” falsely claimed researchers wanted to “mislead DARPA about the risks to the general public” because the DRASTIC amateurs personally disagreed with researchers’ assessment that their work posed “minimal risks,” which was entirely accurate for the experiments suggested. Then came the technical cherry-picking, the taking of individual statements out of context to make them sound nefarious, such as the researchers “planned to identify ‘key minor deletions’ in the receptor binding domain to alter human pathogenicity,” implying that maybe SARS-CoV-2’s human-binding RBD was the result of those suggested studies somehow. A little reminder here that virology is not magic. SARS-CoV-1-related viruses cannot magically produce SARS-CoV-2, nor do these viruses use similar hACE2 binding mechanisms. There is zero doubt that nature was the only force capable of coming up with the observed RBD in SARS-CoV-2, and this genetic element was discovered in SARS-CoV-2-related viruses circulating in bats in Laos.Perhaps the most dramatic decontextualization from DRASTIC was regarding the furin-cleavage site (FCS), or, as we previously called it, the odd-looking llama in the supposed flock of viral sheep. DRASTIC suggested that the scientists “planned to introduce naturally occurring proteolytic cleavage sites to create novel coronaviruses,” based on a flimsy understanding and a convoluted mixing of different experiments the researchers actually proposed. It was maybe their most publicly effective “finding” when it came to mobilizing against virologists and “gain-of-function” research.Since the early days, the mystery of the furin cleavage site has served as a beacon, almost a token of faith, around which to rally the lab leak community. Since the outbreak, scientific studies have shown that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 is aiding respiratory transmission, and no bat sarbecovirus with such an FCS has been found among the close cousins of SARS-CoV-2. Just a few months earlier, Nicholas Wade, citing Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, had already declared its mere existence in SARS-CoV-2 as a “smoking gun for engineering.” Baltimore later recanted his statement. Suspicions about this short genetic element were certainly widespread. DRASTIC, now unearthing an old proposal—rejected or not—from EcoHealth Alliance just mentioning polybasic cleavage sites, seemingly proposing to introduce them for studying them, was the final nail in the coffin of sealed beliefs. They must be guilty. “Greed. Stupidity. Sociopathy. In equal parts,” Richard Ebright would comment on questions about why EcoHealth Alliance would ever even consider studying these elements.In more mundane reality, such cleavage motifs have been studied by many virologists for over 15 years in various contexts, including adding them to SARS-CoV-1. It was an obvious line of investigation to pursue and not dangerous given these research setups. But nobody in the media cared about this context. For most of them, if not the murder weapon itself, at least the instructions and intent to build it had been uncovered in the suspect’s closet. Some from DRASTIC would later argue using this metaphor for the research proposed in DEFUSE. To them, the instructions to build the murder weapon had finally been unearthed.To the trained eye, none of these assertions held any water. However, complex technical documents interpreted by motivated amateurs on the hunt for suspicious words, sentences, and patterns would not allow audiences to get the full picture. The hungry media did the rest. The Intercept would write, “Peter Daszak did not dispute the authenticity of the documents,” as if their existence, rather than their science, determined guilt or innocence. With such dishonest framing, “guilty as charged” was a quick and satisfying conclusion for most of the public.“It’s absurd; we have been warning about this for over a decade,” Peter lamented. “Now they turn it around and say because our research predicted it, we must have caused it.” He had been jumping between agitation and frustration all day. Indeed, much of his previous research had shown quite convincingly how much danger bat coronaviruses pose to society. Perhaps too convincing for many. “People are especially prone to attributing agency to others for negative outcomes,” a meta-study found when explaining why we humans tend to shoot the messenger. Especially for traumatic events, we “attribute agency to those proximal to the event,” regardless of whether they had anything to do with it.That unfortunate tendency would put Peter and his people under immense pressure from the early days of the pandemic. His face was sunken in, a haunted look imprinted on it. It had been bad for a long time, but ever since “Project DEFUSE” was mischaracterized a year ago, he has not had a peaceful minute. The conspiracy theorists, from Twitter all the way to the halls of Congress, would make sure of it. He was attacked on every level, channel, or forum. Harassment became unbearable. Now, various memes about him being an obese man in a Batman suit, hanging from a tree like a bat, urinating in his own face, or colluding with Dr. Anthony Fauci flashed on his screen. Since mid-2021, vaccine disinformation campaigns and anti-vaxxers have driven even more hate towards public health scientists and officials. Their narratives merged: SARS-CoV-2 was created to force people to take a vaccine. Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak were behind it all. The two of them were now portrayed as criminals in cahoots with each other; their heads photoshopped in mug shots into a police line-up, an homage to the 1995 crime thriller The Usual Suspects. Culturally powerful memes.“Why would people waste time doing this?” he asked me again. Hours and hours just to make nasty artwork about him, to forge stories, to write fan fiction, and push them into the world. Nasty memes and simple narratives about him and genetic engineering somehow seemed to have taken over the world. The emotional force of those stories, in turn, energizes the faceless mob that torments him, promises to kill him and his family, sends him white powder letters, disrupts his sleep at night, and calls a SWAT team to storm his house. “The FBI guy has never seen anything like it,” Peter said about the agent who contacted him about credible threats to his life from known domestic terror groups. Private security has followed him ever since. Who are the people that terrorize him like that? What motivates them?“On the individual level, people are attracted to these conspiracy theories when they have a psychological need that is not met,” Karen Douglas explained to me. The research professor from the University of Kent in the UK has studied conspiracy theories and their believers for decades, even back when it was still considered a niche topic. Conspiracy theories have a group and societal layer to them, but when talking about individuals, she has found that believers are mainly driven by epistemic, existential, or social motivations: the need to make sense of our world and circumstances, the fear for their lives or livelihoods, or the feeling of social ostracism and disconnect. In my observational experience, many of those needs certainly drive the individuals who are part of the DRASTIC collective.Preferring to remain anonymous unlike Yuri Deigin, the other co-founder of DRASTIC went by the pseudonym Billy Bostickson and used a cartoon monkey as an avatar picture. He explained his motivations:Well, now, since you asked, it is to uncover the truth about COVID-19, to challenge scientific authority and expose corruption and cover-ups in China and elsewhere, to promote citizen monitoring of virology and high level BSL labs, expose the history of State biowarfare, and finally without wishing to sound pretentious, to promote my anarchist philosophy.I wanted to learn what his worldview was. He was a strong supporter of anarcho-syndicalism. “Not the modern nonsense, but the struggle for freedom over 200 years against tyranny by countless dedicated anarchists who sacrificed their lives for freedom against the State in all its forms,” he clarified. “Hence, the words in the DRASTIC acronym, Decentralised, Radical, Autonomous,” he typed with a smiley face. The full DRASTIC acronym read: Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19. Antagonistic towards any type of government, the pandemic spurred a panic in Billy about the state using biowarfare as a means to control society and kill off dissenters like him.What worries me, Philipp, is the way the State uses individual scientists when the s**t hits the fan in terms of biological research [...] individual scientists may not have known exactly what the outcomes were, i.e., toxins both biological and chemical to murder the enemies of the State.I argued that scientists, in general, tend to be idealistic, working for the public good and challenging power rather than being in service of it. That is certainly true of scientists who work at customary academic institutions and in areas such as public health, who unfortunately have faced the brunt of their attacks. “Many people [are] working for good, but our institutions crush our hopes,” he elaborated after some back and forth. “That’s the way I see it, and sorry for any insults, all part of the fight going on, but not personal, I hope you understand,” Billy wrote almost amicably after our exchange.Billy, a self-described radical ideologue, was by no means an outlier within the DRASTIC collective. After interacting with and observing many DRASTIC associates over the years, I believe one can safely assume that there is not a single one of its dozens of members who is not driven by some rather profoundly unfulfilled need for safety, status, understanding, purpose, or belonging. Many feel existential dread about bioweapons or biotechnology; some are paranoid about the state or other shadowy entities going to get them; others feel neglected and ostracized, being dealt a bad hand in life. Almost all exhibit a sense of grievance about various issues and circumstances beyond their control. The pandemic origin controversy just seemed like a fitting outlet—a mission or mystery large enough to match the intensity of their emotional needs with their desire to control their own circumstances. To serve those ends, almost anything justified the means.Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, another cognitive psychologist who has studied conspiracy theories for a long time, stressed that while there are certain individual predispositions for conspiratorial belief, such as narcissism, lack of analytical thinking, hypersensitive agency- and pattern detection, even paranoia, these might not tell the whole story or nor are these traits determinative. While DRASTIC activists express their beliefs and act on them more dramatically than most, we are all susceptible to conspiratorial ideation somewhere on that spectrum. “You could be pushed into this direction by experiment,” he explained. His research has found environmental and societal factors can trigger people into falling down the rabbit hole, meaning they immerse themselves in this often parasitic worldview that is hard to escape. No matter if objectively true or just subjectively perceived, how we saw the world and our role in it was critical. Political or economic disenfranchisement, uncertain or confusing information environments, the loss of a loved one or social status, threats to our identity, tribe, lives, or livelihoods are all factors that can trigger conspiratorial ideation. “If you are scared, disgruntled, feel left behind, resentment… it’s this whole cluster of negative feelings and attitudes and fears that gets people into a space where conspiracy theories seemingly offer a solution,” he elaborated. These theories serve as an emotional band-aid or coping mechanism.“With the pandemic, obviously, that was just the perfect storm for conspiracy theories. All the conditions were there,” Prof. Douglas elaborated. Contrary to common perception, ordinary believers in conspiracy theories are not necessarily gullible, unintelligent, or cruel. Their only error or misfortune was putting their trust in the wrong leaders or voices during a time of personal or societal crisis. “People were uncertain, anxious, locked into their houses, isolated; it is an event with a lot of information going around and people not knowing what to believe.” In these situations, people tend to seek advice from trusted members of their community, tribe, or environment. “And for a lot of people, that is not going to be scientists and experts.”Well, certainly not in today’s influencer economy, I offered for consideration, where compelling charlatans, grifters, and entertainers have replaced expert voices and filtered reality for us. Nobody can be too sure anymore if they have the full story, all the pertinent facts, or the right context to understand contested topics. I asked Prof. Douglas her thoughts on where the virus came from. “God, I’ve got no idea,” she laughed. The lab leak proponents show all these signs of conspiratorial hallmarks, she noticed, “but then, I also read these news stories from trustworthy sources seriously talking about it… and I was like, hmm, probably not, but I’m not sure,” she contemplated for a second. “But I guess people just wanted a cleaner answer to where this virus came from. People wanted somebody to blame a bit more,” she offered her thoughts on why a scientific explanation of zoonotic spillover, even if true, felt less satisfying.The purpose of conspiracy theories is to provide an explanation for a traumatic event or dire circumstances that is emotionally satisfying. To fulfill an unmet need. That these explanations are inherently adversarial to an outgroup is no coincidence either. Believing and meeting other believers can offer a sense of community, forming real social bonds and identities; they are united against a common and often nebulous enemy. The deep state, the scientific establishment, big pharma, the liberal media, the bank cartels, or the Jews would be common tropes for those enemies. None of that is exactly new, but rather much more ancient. Blaming nebulous agents, foreign forces, invisible spirits, ghosts, or gods for our blight is just how we humans have always reacted when we feel powerless to control our own circumstances. All previous pandemics triggered conspiracy myths about their origins and who is supposedly responsible for causing them. Why would this pandemic be any different?“You cannot just blame this controversy on conspiracy theorists,” Jane Qiu would contest, adding that “not everybody who leans towards lab leak is a conspiracy theorist.” We were disrupted when the film crew brought back the award-winning science journalist, who was also invited to interrogate Peter on our trip. The two had a heated argument about chimeric viruses, gain-of-function research definitions, and his supposed conflicts of interest in the COVID-19 origins debate, which had led to Jane storming off. This had instigated our impromptu pause on the couch, looking through memes and talking about Peter’s conspiratorial tormentors. Jane Qiu was a remarkable writer with unique access to many Chinese sources; she was the only journalist who had access to Shi Zhengli and her lab for multiple weeks. The crisis of public trust in science, she alleged, had a lot to do with mistakes Peter and public- facing scientific institutions in general like China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, the US CDC and WHO made in their communications, their transparency, and their conduct. Jane made it very clear that this trip was just another opportunity for her to investigate the origins. She sure as hell was not here to write a puff piece about poor Peter (neither was I or the documentary team) nor downplay any of the missteps she alleged he and other scientists have made during the crafting of the Lancet letter or any other public occasions. Peter, in turn, claimed that most of the animus against him was driven by right-wing politicians and the conspiracy theorists and journalists who bought into their narratives. Jane was not having it, arguing that there were credentialed, left-leaning experts and journalists on the other side of this issue, and calling any criticism a right-wing conspiracy theory is a self-serving cop-out and damaging to public trust in science.She had followed the topic closely for years; she had been the one visiting Zhengli’s lab to interview her people, and she had been in Wuhan when the WHO mission came to work with their Chinese counterparts to investigate the origins. She was tenacious in her search for information, sources, and the truth. Jane had even attempted to sneak in with a bottle of wine to get direct access to the WHO mission scientists in Wuhan but was caught by Chinese security, much to Peter’s amusement. In Thailand, their interactions swung between shared laments over neglected risks of zoonotic diseases and heated debates about the root cause of the lab leak controversy, interspersed with rare moments of mutual appreciation in their own unique ways. Peter really got pissed when she suggested his missteps were partly to blame for fueling the distrust of him and his organization. That’s understandable because the distrust was, in my view, partly responsible for the unwarranted death threats to him and his family as well as the attacks on his organization and his character. Jane could be confrontational like that, as I would come to learn.In my opinion, Jane was immensely critical, bordering on outright distrustful. She would never take anybody’s word at face value, seemingly requiring absolute precision in statements of others as much as of her own. Every sentence she writes in her articles, is mulled over, well-sourced, fact-checked, and verified. At least that is her aspiration. Her skepticism of sources is potentially well-earned. It is difficult to cover a controversial topic with polarized sides and geopolitical implications anywhere, but especially in China, where people are often not allowed to be completely open, honest, or upfront about what they know.On top of that, there is our messy human nature; we all have our biases and make errors, including scientists who sometimes cut corners or give informed opinions instead of disinterested facts. Especially “big thinkers”-types like Peter Daszak, whose visions tend to win the big grant money but often have a tendency to get some of the minor details wrong. As an experienced reporter, Jane is very mindful of these biases, and her tenaciousness to get to the facts lives within her writing; maybe that is what makes her articles so good. But she can also be opinionated. Peter has been, as she puts it, “fast and loose with facts”, yielding inconsistencies that fuel suspicion, and has on occasion, according to her, demonstrated serious lack of judgement. Why did he portray himself as fully informed about everything happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when it was clear he wasn’t? What was the real reason behind the delayed filing of the NIH report—an incident even some of his colleagues have called a major “f**k-up”? And how could he so blatantly deny having a conflict of interest in the COVID-19 origins debate when it is evident that he does?Jane considers that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin, but claims to understand why people don’t trust Peter and why they would lean towards lab leak. She thinks that the controversy is not just about facts but an expression of what’s wrong with science: its agenda failing to reflect societal concerns and anxieties, lacking transparency and broad societal dialogues in decision making, and intolerance for dissenting voices. “Some self-reflection is certainly in order,” she says. In my opinion, she demanded an almost superhuman perfection of scientists, which are imperfect humans like the rest of us, while bracketing out the concerted efforts by motivated actors to discredit them and sow doubt about science in the general public. Neither perfect communication nor conduct on the part of scientists would move the needle on public distrust created by these merchants of doubt, best I can tell. The three of us have been fighting about this topic and its derailment from facts for days. Peter mostly blaming right-wing politicians, Jane seeing fault in scientists and institutions making errors, and me condemning our modern asymmetric information ecosystems for eroding trust, spreading conspiracy theories, and causing public confusion.Despite primarily focusing her criticism on Peter, Jane was equally critical, if not more, of me and my approach. At the time, she considered me a science blogger with—according to her—no domain expertise, who attributes everything to social media algorithms and attention-seeking grifters eager to boost their profiles or sell a book. An outsider lacking journalism credential, supposedly cherry-picking facts to fit his narrative. An uncritical “cheerleader” for science and scientists, unable to see the forest for the trees. Her lashing out at me had stung a bit because I truly admired her reporting on Zhengli. She was the first, and perhaps only, journalist who managed to humanize Shi Zhengli while reporting eloquently and accurately about her scientific work and the controversy. Writing like that is much more an art than a craft. Honestly, deep down, I wished that her meticulously chosen words would suffice to inform citizens. Yet for all her award-winning reporting, the needle of public sentiment has been steadily moving against what she and virologists, to the best of their knowledge, considered most likely true: that SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population not via a laboratory but via zoonotic spillover. So why were facts and science not good enough?Maybe helping to understand this growing rift between science and society that emerged with our information age is where I felt I truly had something to contribute. But for that, I had to disconnect from the emotional haze of our current struggles and conflicts. The world is so much bigger than our pet peeves, ideological positions, and even the hectic, multifaceted tug-of-war between geopolitical superpowers. Assumptions of why others act and believe the way they do are always bound to be incomplete. The pandemic was a traumatic event that impacted every community on the planet in varied ways. The best we can do is not get lost in our differences but seek connection in our shared human condition.§Covered by lush green forests below cloudy skies, the secluded mountains within the picturesque Thai and Myanmar border regions are home to various ethnic groups such as the Lahu, Karen, Ahka, Khamu, Lisu, and Lua. These ethnic mountain peoples in Thailand, commonly categorized as hill tribes, were traditionally migratory and have settled everywhere in the Karst region, ranging from the southern Tibetan highlands and Myanmar to Yunnan in China, Vietnam, Laos, and Northern Thailand. Living mostly isolated for centuries, the modern world has made them outsiders, infringing on lands that had become property with the emergence of nation-states. War and border disputes in the region have seen many forceful migrations, with Thailand being among the safer havens for hundreds of thousands of refugees. Yet the animalist and spiritualist tribal peoples still face many challenges, disadvantages, and discrimination among the Buddhist-Thai majority. “Nearly a million hill peoples and forest dwellers are still treated as outsiders—criminals even, since most live in protected forests. Viewed as national security threats, hundreds of thousands… are refused citizenship although many are natives to the land,” a compassionate article in The Bangkok Times would write about their current struggles. Economic development and wealthy travelers entering the magnificent Karst landscape to harvest its bounty or explore the many mesmerizing caves have seen the Thai government build out road infrastructure, which also connected traditionally isolated hill tribes to a new source of income: village tourism.When I stepped out of the van in Ban Jabo, the first thing I noticed were Chinese tourists taking selfies over an ocean of fog. The remote mountain village of the Lahu Na, or Black Lahu—a subgroup of Lahu based on the color of their traditional clothes—was just a few kilometers away from the Myanmar border. An armed military outpost was stationed not far from the village. Ban Jabo has recently grown because of tourism; the wooden houses on stilts were contrasted by modern green tents of adventurers. As I strolled along the village on the ridge of the hill, free-roaming chickens were crossing the street while the smell of garlic and lemongrass began to fill the air. Traditional Lahu food has been on the list of cooking influencers eager to increase their YouTube and Instagram followers; the colorful wok dishes would contain local forest ingredients such as mountain rice, pak choi, bamboo shoots, and indigenous banana varieties. These developments seemed to benefit the local communities, who could not only send their kids to school but also increase their income and escape poverty. But such improvements can be fickle. During the pandemic, tourism crashed globally, and schools, governmental, and developmental programs stopped. The hill tribes were once again left to their own devices, traditions, and leaders to deal with crises and threats to the community.“These guys still remember the stories of smallpox,” our local translator pointed out. This morning, we had the opportunity to meet with two spirit doctors from the Karen Hill tribe. They had locked down their village for over a year, preventing foreigners from entering, and erected an array of spirit guards to prevent the disease from entering. Wooden spears pointed to the outside; a magical spirit deflector in the shape of a six-sided star was attached to the electricity cables; a scarecrow-like figure with a huge phallus stood imposingly; and something thorny was stuck into the ground. These and a few other seemingly purposeful decorations reinforced the spirit barrier. The idea was that no matter how the disease moved, be it through the road, ground, water, air, electricity, or sexually (thus the phallus guard), the barrier would prevent it from entering the village grounds. Spiritual defense was clearly very important to the tribe. “The Karen have like 37 personal spirits or souls,” our translator explained. All the hill tribes practice their own animistic and spiritual religions, and within the Sino-Tibetan roots of the Karen, traditional culture and rituals are related to ancestral spirits, house spirits, forest spirits, farm spirits, land spirits, and others. They believed that people get sick when they lose these, or they are stolen, and one has to recover them. Various rituals, prayers, and offerings would be conducted by the spirit healers or shamans to communicate with that magical realm to treat the sick. If the sick person improves or even recovers their health, as is often the case after a peak of symptoms prompted actions by the shamans, the rituals were deemed to be responsible for the cure. Without controlled clinical trials, regressions to the mean of symptoms, placebo, subjective reporting, or normal recovery would nevertheless create the appearance of efficacy for their rituals.Whether effective or not medically, I think these ritualistic acts are foundational to the human condition to show that we care. In times of hardship and suffering, we all feel better when being cared for, and any action on our behalf seems more appealing than doing nothing at all. It lifts our spirits, for lack of a better term. However, this is not to say that knowledge of the traditional shamans and spirit doctors is always rooted in medical misconceptions about correlation and causation. For the treatment of sickness, the hill tribes depend on a large body of traditional knowledge about medicinal plants, especially herbs, for the treatment of stomach aches, diarrhea, coughs, fevers, and infectious diseases, as well as plants for tonics and refreshment. The Karen are specifically known to cultivate useful plants in their house gardens. Some modern medicines, such as antimalarial drugs, were discovered and are based on the traditional medicinal plant knowledge of ethnic peoples. Science is not dismissive of that; quite the contrary, science tries to integrate useful knowledge no matter where it comes from. Especially in one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots, like the Karst region, ethnobotanists have warned that the rapid erosion of traditional knowledge is of global concern. Many scientists express an urge to document and conserve this valuable knowledge before it is completely lost. What science struggles with is when magical explanations claim supremacy over material phenomena.Hidden behind their spirit barrier, the spirit doctors proudly announced how they thwarted the pandemic. “When they closed the village, nobody got COVID for a year,” our translator would describe the success of their approach, which probably had more to do with community isolation than the wooden barrier in front of us. Sometimes traditional actions, rituals, and community guidelines might be beneficial for purely practical rather than spiritual reasons. Conflict arises when science is discarded rather than integrated into community worldviews. This is, however, not inevitable. While fervent religious beliefs can often be a barrier to adopting scientific measures, Karen spirituality did not interfere with modern practical solutions like vaccination to protect themselves. “Now that you survived the first wave, did you get vaccinated?” Peter asked. “Everybody,” they replied proudly. I guess for a tribe that puts up multiple different barriers and layers of protection against an unknown disease, adding one more just seemed natural to them.But what comes naturally to one community might be a deadly sin for another. Distrust in vaccines has been a morbid and cultivated luxury of the West in recent years, and with the arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine mandates, dedicated anti-vaccine groups and contrarian influencers saw an opportunity to harness fears and uncertainty into windfall profits. Especially online, citizens found themselves emotionally manipulated by rhetorically gifted snake oil salesmen and grifters who promised them that they could do without vaccines, all while selling useless supplements, false miracle cures, and fake science to the masses. While I have tried to avoid this topic—one could write multiple volumes about its complexity and still not do it justice—in this specific case, I cannot avoid it: the anti-vaccine movement has everything to do with the leak of the DEFUSE proposal, the amplification of the gain-of-function panic, and the crusade against Peter Daszak.In the summer of 2021, the heterodox podcaster Dr. Bret Weinstein, who previously pushed Yuri Deigin’s conspiracy theories to the world, has found his footing as one of the biggest anti-vaccine influencers online. He hosted a cadre of fringe doctors and activists to push the antiparasitic drug Ivermectin as a 100% prophylactic that could “save the world in three weeks,” while fearmongering about the COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines are very dangerous to young men, he would claim, knowing his audience mostly consisted of them. The spike protein that would be encoded by the mRNA vaccine, even without the dangerous virus, was cytotoxic in itself. Worst of all, he claimed, was that the vaccines would make it more dangerous to get COVID-19 through an obscure mechanism called antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) that may actually increase the ability of a virus to enter cells and cause a worsening of the disease. All these assertions are contradicted by the available evidence and scientific consensus. Yet within one month of his pivot towards attacking vaccines, his paying Patreon subscribers doubled from around 1,800 to almost four thousand; his YouTube videos received ten times more views than his previous videos, suddenly reaching millions; and his Twitter followers steeply increased by the hundreds of thousands as well. In this cultural moment, pseudoscientific rationalizations against vaccines were lucrative, and fretful audiences were seemingly willing to reward them handsomely, either with their hard-earned money, precious time, or emotional engagement.An Australian psychologist and professor, Dr. Matt Browne has been researching anti-vaccine psychology long before COVID-19. “At the time, it seemed like a relatively niche topic,” he explained, echoing what Karen Douglas had told me about conspiracy theories. COVID has caused a wider section of the population to come together into strong online activist communities. “Vaccines, more than any other health technology, seem to spark a certain type of psychological resistance in people,” the laid-back professor with curly gray hair and a constant tone of amusement elaborated. “There are multiple reasons for this. Fear of needles. Nobody likes needles. Needles involve a bit of trauma; you are having your bodily integrity violated,” he explained. “You also understand that some type of foreign contaminant has been injected into you, and humans have an instinctive abhorrence of contamination; these are somewhat general reactions.” Furthermore, the prophylactic aspect is problematic for us. “The fact that you have a procedure done to you for a disease you don’t have” does not go well with our gut intuition. He explained:People generally accept procedures when there is a problem. If your tooth hurts, you go to the dentist to pull it out. Though the experience is unpleasant, you know there is a problem, and there is relief from getting it fixed. For vaccination, it is different; you are feeling healthy, and only afterwards that you might be a bit sick or hurting. So the subjective, intuitive gut feeling of the whole thing is negative.We humans tend to go with our lived experience much more than abstract theoretical knowledge. “It takes an intellectual leap that getting a vaccination is actually a good idea. And you have to trust. Trusting what you’ve learned and what you’ve been told.”” Dr. Browne concluded.The Australian psychologist has recently teamed up with cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist Professor Christopher “Chris” Kavanagh at Rikkyo University in Japan to study the “secular guru sphere,” a new online phenomenon where persuasive influencers create sealed realities for their followers, not all that dissimilar to cults. In their podcast “Decoding the Gurus,” they analyze a specific blend of anti-establishment, heterodox, and anti-science influencers that claim to bring guidance to secular issues of science. The professors explained:Jordan Peterson, Bret and Eric Weinstein, James Linsay, Robert Malone, etc. We were all trying to conceptualize who these people were because they were not like your Tucker Carlsons or your typical political pundit. They presented themselves as academic, heterodox, free-thinking types who were doing public communication of science, and yet they seemed to be doing something different.All of these academically credentialed contrarians held a “great antagonism against the institutions” while relying on them for their credibility. They apparently also believed themselves to be so incredibly smart and unjustly scorned by “mainstream” science; both Weinstein brothers, for example, claimed to believe they had been cheated out of their rightful Nobel Prizes in Biology and Physics for revolutionizing nothing less than evolutionary theory and the standard model of physics, the grand paradigms of the time, all without having published any papers in more than two decades. Dr. Robert Malone claimed to have been the inventor of the mRNA vaccines because, as far as I can tell, he was involved in some lipofection assays with mRNA back in the nineties that any graduate student could perform. Much later, one of these papers would become one of many steps in the long and arduous way of delivering the lipid nanoparticles of the mRNA vaccines. That one little contribution did not stop him from claiming he was the “father of the mRNA technology” in his Twitter bio and using his supposed authority to discredit the vaccines with their alleged spike protein toxicity and so on. Narcissism and grandiose claims about a secret understanding of the world do not run short among the “secular gurus.” In fact, it is one of their defining features. Pushing vaccine disinformation, fake miracle cures, useless supplements, and pseudoscientific hot takes about such as theories of “mass formation psychosis,” “woke mind virus,” and “mRNA gene therapy,” they have found a way to commercialize contemporaneous anxieties and elevate themselves beyond the masses.“They all have their pet issues, but what really gives them the boost is when there is a great anxiety in the popular zeitgeist,” Chris Kavanagh explained. These modern influencers build online communities around them because they pretend to have all the answers and give authoritative-sounding guidance on complicated scientific issues. Chris Kavanagh explained about our human predilection:An old-fashion guru tells you they are in touch with the secret forces. They understand things that you don’t. They are a conduit between the mysterious world out there and you. And they’re going to tell you what is going to happen in the future and how to prepare for it.Secular gurus, in his opinion, fulfill a very similar role. Their narratives make the complicated world simple; they eloquently and persuasively explain where science has gone wrong and who is to blame. They define what we should do, often in bombastic language and with far-reaching moral implications. “People are basically being swayed by language which sounds grandiose and technical,” Matt Browne added. We tend to assume with such language that “there is a profundity to it. It signals wisdom and great knowledge. The actual depth of the speech is often, you know, relatively irrelevant.” We are attracted to gifted orators who exude authority in their tone and demeanor. Throughout history, gurus have always been in our midst and garnered the admiration of willing followers. “My speculation is that our evolved psychology is trying to identify high-status individuals,” Chris offered in response to my probing into why he believes secular gurus garnered so many acolytes. We are social animals; we try to orient ourselves in society, and our relationship with high-status individuals matters. We either seek their protection or just try not to get on the wrong side of somebody who is powerful because they have influential social coalition partners. Some might follow gurus to become like them or “copy various heuristics that would make sense just for social learning.” In one way or another, these evolved social dynamics inspire acolytes into collective action, and I believe that this mobilizing influence of gurus has become an underestimated force to be reckoned with.In the summer of 2021, Major Joseph Murphy from the US Marine Program Liaison logged into the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), a secure intranet system utilized by the United States Department of Defense. He was looking for something, best I could tell reconstructing a timeline from reporting about his actions. Like many in the armed forces, Maj. Murphy appears to be right-leaning and consuming content from the corresponding media ecosystem. An avid listener to Bret Weinstein and his ilk of anti-vaccine influencers, Maj. Murphy seemed to have been taken in by their anti-vaxx narratives. He believed them and seemed subsequently scared about the impending vaccine mandates for the US military. Possibly motivated to find a way around being vaccinated, he went looking for any information the government might have about this topic. In DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) directory, part of the JWICS intranet, he likely browsed through the compartmentalized information folder that contained information about various projects, including PREEMPT, the DARPA program that aimed to identify emerging disease threats. According to him, the folder had been empty for a year, but sometime in the summer of 2021, documents began to fill it. There were files related to a rejected research proposal from EcoHealth Alliance and WIV. Could these be the “something” he was looking for?Why these files suddenly were put into this folder is unclear from previous reporting, but it did not seem like much of a mystery to me. The Biden White House had given the intelligence community 90 days to investigate the origins of COVID, and someone had probably stumbled upon these old DEFUSE grant application files and decided to put them into the BTO folder. Since these files were irrelevant to the origins probe, the intelligence community probably did not bother to seek further action, nor did it bother to classify them. However, when Maj. Murphy stumbled upon them, the non-scientist likely believed he had found a smoking gun against vaccines. What seems to me inspired by pseudoscientific concepts from his favorite podcasters and driven by fear of mandatory vaccination, he performed his own magical interpretation and analysis of the DEFUSE proposal, and his conclusions are quite telling.He believed that:SARS-CoV-2, hereafter referred to as SARSr-CoV-WIV, is a synthetic spike protein chimera engineered to attach to human AcE2 receptors and inserted into a recombinant bat SARSr-CoV backbone. It is likely a live vaccine not yet engineered to a more attenuated state that the program sought to create with its final version. The reason the disease is so confusing is because it is less a virus than it is engineered spike proteins hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm.Because of the inherently “synthetic” nature of the spike protein, he believed that mRNA vaccines based on the same “synthetic” spike protein are inherently dangerous. Even worse, the mRNA vaccine:…instructs the cells to produce synthetic copies of the SARSr-CoV-WIV synthetic spike protein directly into the bloodstream, wherein they spread and produce the same ACE2 immune storm that the recombinant vaccine does. The vaccine recipient has no defense against the bloodstream entry, but their nose protects them from the recombinant spike protein quasispecies during “natural infection.”If you were confused about the concepts here, don’t worry. It is scientifically nonsensical gobbledygook mixing different buzzwords Maj. Murphy probably heard from his favorite anti-vaccine gurus online and tried to assemble in his own head. Just for some clarity: SARS-CoV-2 is not a “live attenuated vaccine,” as these would look very different; spike proteins are not “hitch-hiking a ride on a SARSr-CoV quasispecies swarm,” whatever that was supposed to mean; and spike proteins do not cause an “ACE2 immune storm,” which does not exist. What does exist is an immune reaction called a “cytokine storm,” which is basically when our immune system goes all out and destroys our own cells to defeat an invader. The mRNA vaccines do not cause this. But a severe COVID-19 infection, like any life-threatening infection, might. Also, the idea that a “natural infection” does not cause spike proteins to “circulate through the bloodstream” because the nose magically protects us from that outcome is absurd. In reality, natural infections can produce multiple orders of magnitude more “spike protein to circulate in the bloodstream” than inoculation with the mRNA vaccine. And on top of that, the viral spike proteins from “natural infection” come loaded with a deadly virus cargo. That is just a basic fact.But for anybody utterly captured by an anti-vaccine community, reason has little chance against emotion. On and on Maj. Murphy’s telling analysis goes, arguing that the impending “mass vaccination campaign actually performs an accelerated gain-of-function” on the virus, making it more dangerous. Again, this was totally confused nonsense. For Maj. Murphy, the vaccine somehow mimics the disease, but that mimicry makes it worse than the disease. The vaccine also somehow makes getting the disease worse than it would be for oneself and others, and the vaccine is ineffective anyway since the disease itself gets mostly deflected by your nose. Sorry if my eyes rolled backward a bit here.When the Department of Defense announced mandatory vaccination for the armed services on August 23, 2021, Maj. Murphy was seemingly driven to more dramatic action. He sent this analysis, from which I quoted verbatim above, to the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) with a short letter and a very clear recommendation: “DoD now mandates vaccines that copy the spike protein previously deemed too dangerous. To me, and to those who informed my analysis, this situation meets no-go or abort criteria with regards to the vaccines.” Like his favorite heterodox influencers, he advocated for using Ivermectin instead, an anti-helminthic drug that works on invertebrate worms but not COVID-19. As one might expect, his letter and “analysis” were politely ignored as ramble by the OIG. Possibly frustrated by the lack of official response, Maj. Murphy then contacted his military friend and DRASTIC member Charles Rixey and leaked the DEFUSE proposal files to him to give to DRASTIC. That is how the rejected proposal that would haunt Peter Daszak came into the hands of people who considered him their archenemy. The motivated amateur sleuths, of course, would perform their own “analysis” of the leaked technical documents that was completely contradictory with what Maj. Murphy had cobbled together. While they had much greater success with it on the world stage, their scientific interpretations were no less self-serving and at odds with reality than the ramblings of a confused and scared anti-vaxxer.For me, it seems pretty apparent that the DEFUSE proposal was never secret nor classified, nor that interesting to society. The scientists involved and the intelligence community knew about it but deemed it irrelevant to the origins of the pandemic. Independent virologists agree. It was entirely irrelevant to the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The only reason why society seemingly had to wrestle with it was because a dangerous misrepresentation was pushed onto the peak of the attention economy by motivated activists. As we observed before, the information sphere tends to deliver for the powerful and popular sentiment alike. The man-made myth came in various shapes and forms over the years; it morphed from supposed HIV chimeras to bioweapons, from alleged RaTG13 offshoots to chimeric virus assembly or vaccine trials gone wrong. Our desire for a more satisfying explanation to this pandemic is equally responsible for bringing this misrepresentation about, as are the actions of activists who deliver for our emotional needs. Without DEFUSE, I am sure something else would have taken its place.In fact, time and time again, other versions and origin myths have surfaced. For example, one such myth implicates not WIV but rather a laboratory of the Wuhan CDC that happened to open not too far away from the Huanan market. Yet the most powerful myth, the one that tells the most emotionally compelling story and offers us somebody concrete to blame, tends to win. Political elites and lab leak influencers soon moved away from Wuhan CDC speculations and back to Project DEFUSE and WIV as their favorite narrative. This would be the unfortunate nail in the coffin for Peter Daszak and his organization.On the plane, I sat next to Peter. He was hovering over his laptop again. He was redacting personal information from thousands of documents requested by Republican politicians in the US Congress, as well as the Office of the Inspector-General of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS-OIG). For months now, the DHHS-OIG has been auditing EcoHealth Alliance and NIH, investigating whether they were in compliance with federal grant requirements, turning over every stone, and checking every receipt about the research conducted at his organization. No matter if conspiracy theorists, media outlets, or political elites—all assumed the answers to the origins of COVID-19 could be found in EcoHealth records and past research. By the end of 2022, the idea that SARS-CoV-2 could have come about by natural mechanisms had turned into a faraway memory in their heads. Zoonotic origin science and scientists, like Kristian Andersen and Michael Worobey, had been successfully discredited in the public’s eye. That is the asymmetric power the attention economy wields over society; it distracts us from the boring and nuanced evidence while keeping us on our toes for the newest shiny nugget that fuels our intuition, outrage, or desire.Yet our needs for emotionally satisfying explanations of our world and our role in it constitute our biggest vulnerability. During a traumatic and isolating pandemic, the idea that some nefarious agents created the viral blight was just too much of an intuitive, engaging, emotional, and powerful narrative not to do well in our popular discourse, evidence be damned. It plays into our tendencies to blame diseases on others, to assume agency behind catastrophe, and to fear what we don’t understand. It also offers the sweet illusion of control: if we can only stop those evil virologists, we can prevent the next pandemic. Emotionally compelling. Compare this with the alternative: a zoonotic spillover that could have happened anytime, anywhere, and to anybody. A process we don’t fully understand, but that involves intricate host biology, genetics, evolution, the vast and unknown viral diversity in nature, our ravaging of ecosystems, evolving transport hubs, unsustainable economic incentives, and our human collective decisions in between. Truly believing in a zoonotic origin leaves the uneasy feeling that we are all somewhat to blame for the escalation of the pandemic, that we are partially responsible for our misery and yet not in control of our circumstances. That the next pandemic virus might emerge at any moment, and we might be unable to stop it again. It is outright distressing to think about these scientific realities, and our fears and anxieties, in turn, drive us into the arms of those who know how to soothe them confidently.Shamans, sages, gurus, and other prophets have existed throughout all of human history and cultures to channel our moral, spiritual, and practical anxieties into actions. Prof. Chris Kavanagh offered his perspective:When you live in a world where things are unpredictable, there is a psychological but also practical desire to control our lives. When people try to infer causes, such as a disease, it makes sense to pose invisible agents. That’s how social primate brains would work about these things.“The lab leak is a good example,” Prof. Matt Browne agreed. We have a deep-rooted tendency to assume agency when we see something dramatic impacting the world. “It is not that there is a flaw in our cognition or reason. We’re social creatures. When we see strong consequences, we look for an agent,” he elaborated, adding, “I sort of love the fact that it is not an error but just intrinsic to an agent in the world.” That is how evolution has wired our biology. Civilization is however partially the result of negotiating and reigning in our most primal instincts to give air to our analytical thinking and not always follow our intuitions wherever they might take us. Otherwise, we are easily fooled by our desires. Anthropologist Prof. Chris Kavanagh explained:There is a tendency to look down on, let’s say, Burmese supernaturalism or Azande witchcraft, where people are seeing misfortunes and illnesses as being caused by witches and invisible spirits that are doing harm. [We like] to flatter ourselves in modern environments, that all pre-modern people are not rational like we are now. But with the lab leak, I think it’s the exact same incentives.All humans want to have the feeling of control over our lives and circumstances; that is why we invent agents to substitute for nature, randomness, or bad luck. “We want an agent that did it. So we can negotiate. We can either punish that agent, or if it’s a god, we can at least negotiate… do something to appease it. So it’s not gonna do it again.”For us social creatures, agent-based explanations will always feel satisfying and compelling after tragedy, often leading us to worship or witch burnings. That is as true throughout our history as it is today.“Here are the bad guys! We hate them! Whatever,” Prof. Matt Browne play-acted a little bit of what we find emotionally compelling in times of crises and disease. “But nobody wants to admit to that, like with Daily Mail stories. Nobody wants to think of themselves as an idiot. Everyone likes to think of themselves as someone who’s considered, who’s logical, who’s well educated… a critical thinker, right?” he argued. “What we want is a nice, logical, scientific-sounding thing that elevates that intuitive explanation. And I think that’s what the secular gurus provide.”Both Matt and Chris believe that the secular gurus they analyze became powerful in popular discourse because they served up pseudoscientific rationalizations for emotional judgments we intuitively hold to be true.The thing that you see from their audience is that their frustrations and intuitions have been given a voice, but an intellectual voice. They respond to the fact that this person has said the thing that I’m feeling in a better way than I ever could.People flock to and feel a parasocial connection with those high-status figures who validate their beliefs with eloquence and good-sounding arguments. Especially when in a position of social ostracization and isolation, existential fear, or epistemic confusion; in times of upheaval, trauma, and death, their allure can become irresistible. We need a grand narrative to explain our grand misery and deal better with it. “The secular gurus often suffer from the same psychological maladies as their audience does. That is a good thing from their point of view,” Matt Browne concluded. With their authenticity, intuition, and shared anxiety, secular gurus co-create these pseudo- and anti-scientific narratives with their audiences, making them more than just their opinion but rather a basis for community, a form of therapy, and even a shared identity.“Trauma narratives offer meaning and coherence to feelings of pain, suffering, and confusion. These narratives tell a story of what happened to ‘us,’ who is culpable, and what should be done to repair ‘our’ collectivity,” Professor Petter Törnborg, a computational social scientist who studies the formation of online extremist communities, writes in his academic book.“Narrative construction is an evolving and emergent process, an interpretive action, that comes into being when persons, along with others, attempt to make sense of the world.”Humans are a story-telling species. According to Törnberg, our shared narrative-forming processes go back to tribal times when we sat together around the campfire. These acts are fundamental for socialization with our tribe. “By participating in the process of co-creating these narratives, we simultaneously become part of the community. In this way, the formation of narratives is intertwined with identity construction.”Petter Törnberg argues that social media platforms have made social participation in narrative construction possible like never before, thereby becoming machines for identity formation around countless new digital campfires. His work studying the language in extremist communities with computational methods identified that with our increased digitization, human social dynamics and belonging rituals have not ceased to exist but have taken on a more verbal character as well. We now seem to experiment online with discursive elements to show our social allegiance, to use it as a status symbol, to indicate our belonging and who we are in relation to others.“Stooges will be stooges,” the Rutgers professor and conspiracy theorist Richard Ebright would tweet out obsessively over the years regarding about two dozen other scientists outspoken for a zoonotic origin given the available evidence. Over time, he has evolved this catchphrase as well as variations of it, such as “Sociopaths will be sociopaths” and “Imbeciles will be imbeciles,” at truly an astonishing rate to attack virologists. For him, commenting on his enemies—the zoonosis proponents—like that became almost ritualistic. When I did a cursory count of his use of this discursive element, it went into the thousands of replies to dozens of scientists, often in bursts of ten to fifty tweets with that catchphrase within a short span of time. For Ebright, this discursive style was impactful, gaining a large following of over seventy thousand, mostly conspiratorial ideation-prone citizens who feel he speaks authentically to their feelings. His verbal signaling has, however, not only attracted similarly minded people, but it has also elevated the status of the accuser and increasingly radicalized him and his followers. “When you take figures like Matt Ridley, Alina Chan, Richard Ebright… whenever they were commenting on things in the early days, they were stated [to be] more reasonable,” Chris Kavanagh again observed. Nowadays, Alina Chan posts poll questions on Twitter asking her followers, “If #OriginofCovid was a lab leak, who do you consider most responsible?” before listing options for her audience to choose who they would rather see hung by the court of public opinion. Co-creating narratives indeed.Influencers shape audiences, but because they are emotional conduits, they are also shaped by their audiences. Desires mingle, worldviews align, and a radicalization spiral starts.But specifically for Ebright, the thing that I was noticing as somebody from the outside was that he has been quoted immensely. Every time I came across an article favorable to the lab leak, it was him. So I messaged Matt and others at the time and put a pin down that he would become a leading conspiracy theorist.Chris Kavanagh would be proven correct. Richard Ebright, a formerly respected microbiologist and media darling for years, has since fallen from grace. National news stories and formal complaints to Rutgers University have been written in response to his increasingly extreme verbal outbursts poisoning the discourse. Despite this, he continued unabated under the applause of his conspiratorial followers. For example, he claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci “is likely a murderer and provable felon” and repeatedly compared various public health scientists with Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator responsible for a genocide that would kill 70% of his own people in one of the bloodiest tragedies of history. “With Pol Pot gone from the scene, where else, apart from an EcoHealth gala, can one meet persons whose actions likely caused millions of deaths?” His verbal outbursts were often followed by pile-ons and death threats from the lab leak community directed toward his targets. When a credentialed Rutgers professor at an elite university legitimizes such destructive behavior, community radicalization is given free rein. Evidence doesn’t matter. Morality does not matter. Belonging matters.“Digital spaces are innovative spaces for discursive experimentation, providing fertile soil for the growth of fringe worldviews and conspiracy theories,” Petter Törnberg would write. The stories we co-create online build the basis for community and identity, yet the shared stories might not align well with evidence and reality. This is because new or contradictory information is processed based on whether it supports community values and goals, and the community leaders of our fragmented online tribes often play a role in vouchsafing it.This is also something Prof. Matt Browne and Christopher Kavanagh have noticed playing out with the secular gurus. Despite supposedly being all about science and facts, secular gurus know and talk remarkably little about any technical details. They constantly flatter their audiences with certain discursive rituals, such as calling them “free thinkers” who “deserve the full story” or how they are special compared to others. “A lot of people won’t be able to look at this. But you know I’m gonna present it because I know that the people here have the bravery to look at this issue and not judge it,” a secular guru would say, according to Matt Browne. It does not stop there, of course, and “this is perhaps more nefarious,” he explained: the secular gurus also punish people who disagree with them and threaten to ostracize them from the group if they “believe what the mainstream” tells them. They create a community environment that evidence and reason cannot penetrate. “Every [contradictory] technical detail becomes recast as a kind of Shakespearean play,” Chris added. If you question the guru too much, “then you know there’s no hope for you, or if you think that those people are making good critiques of me, I don’t want you in my community anyways,” the cognitive psychologist and guru decoder played through the discursive dynamics in some of these influencer communities. Dissenters and moderate voices are converted or cast out. The remaining community becomes more radical and cult-like.The reason influencers use these almost ritualistic discursive formulations and social manipulations is because they are powerful at driving user engagement. Shared narrative formation, community rituals, and “fighting” against a common enemy create emotional energy that is experienced as a hit of dopamine. It is addictive for participants.“Large social media platforms seek to support and supercharge the social processes leading to emotional energy,” Petter Törnberg observed. That is why social media became “organized around identity-oriented content, emphasizing processes of group belonging.” Liking, commenting, sharing, cross-posting, notifications, even doxxing, insults, pile-ons, and hate campaigns are all little and large rituals we engage in to show who we are and where our allegiances lie. This creates a tribal identity for us, and because information is our medium and currency online, the difference between information that is “good” for our side and information that is “true” becomes nearly impossible to distinguish. Members must believe something is true to keep their connection with the community. Accepting information that goes against community belief and that is not vouchsafed by community leaders comes at the predictable risk of ostracization and exclusion. This tribal epistemology is, however, dangerously limited, Petter Törnberg concludes. “Our very ways of knowing become defined by identity and belonging; and what we know is reduced to just another expression of who we are.”Is it any surprise that the secular gurus, these verbally gifted emotional conduits for our deep-seated anxieties about science, became anti-science conspiracy myth superspreaders? That they would be shaping the discourse of hundreds of millions with regular appearances on the biggest platforms the world has to offer, such as “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast?“People always believe that others are more swayed by these conspiracy theories… But what they really don’t know is that those conspiracy theories are influencing them as well. They are just not aware of it,” Prof. Karen Douglas had told me towards the end of our conversation. Narratives got more powerful in the information age, and those who get to shape them often influence reality perceptions of willing and unwitting audiences alike.“If you make it trend, you make it true”As Renée DiResta from the Stanford Internet Observatory succinctly puts this dynamic. Our information environment shapes our thoughts and beliefs, as well as who we trust and associate with, even who we ought to fight.During an isolating and confusing pandemic, the biggest attention stealers that lured us to engage in a topic, to participate and comment, became our social reference points to construct our own online identity. What we value and who we trust, how we want to be perceived, and what enemies we need to mobilize against. We are social animals in need of a tribe. Creating stories together to make sense of our chaotic world and circumstances gives us agency, purpose, and belonging. For most of us, the conspiracy myths we co-created were a quick band-aid to our bleeding emotional needs in a traumatic crisis, but they proved corrosive to our society and humanity in the long run. Is there no way back?We passed another Lahu village on our way up to the spirit cave, where we planned to watch a local shaman perform a ritual to ward off evil spirits. The Lahu kids ran around the village square, with the more adult men playing a very skillful game like volleyball, but without hands, only feet and heads. A little crowd, including us, began watching them. They were really good; sweat started dripping, the moves became more stylish, and their smiles brighter. They enjoyed being the center of attention for a bit. It was mesmerizing. A nice little reminder that no matter how far and remote humans live, we all share similar passions and social dynamics.I struck up a conversation with one of our local assistants, a talented and kind young woman belonging to the Shan ethnic minority. She had left conflict-ridden Myanmar when she was 14 to work in China in some dubious waitressing arrangements, probably considered exploitative. When she returned at 16, she wanted to get an education that only military encampments provided. She would be sent out to remote villages to teach children how to read. After four years of this, she somehow managed to get a scholarship to study. But it was not enough for what she wanted to do. She then managed to get a full scholarship from a charity in Thailand (that was specifically for women from Myanmar) that allowed her to study in Bangkok, a world city. Even when the pandemic hit, she would study hard despite being isolated in her dorm room for over a year. After her studies, she managed to find a job in Chiang Mai at a film company, working as a production assistant. A decently paying job. Throughout this remarkable trajectory of a Myanmar village girl, she would keep sending money back to her family and sisters, never using any for herself.She had even bigger dreams of becoming a filmmaker one day. She produced her own short videos on the side. She shared one of her short videos with me, which she directed with her student friends. It was about a well-known but serious topic: a girl being taken advantage of by her best friend after drinking too much and then committing suicide by taking pills. “Based on a true story,” she assured me ominously. I leaned back to take a breath. We humans are not so different from each other. Our fondness for games and spectacle, our showmanship when attention falls onto us, our sense of duty to family, even our most quiet hopes and dreams are all facets of a larger, indescribable total to what makes us human. No matter where we are from and what paths we take, I believe we have so much more that connects rather than separates us. And yet, all we ever get are these small fleeting glimpses into the richness and depths of others. This is if we are fortunate enough to even find somebody to let us in on something real, if only for a second. Online influencers were arguably great at exploiting that desire to connect.Nobody has yet wrapped their heads around the full picture of what happened to us during the pandemic, individually and collectively. With our new information ecosystems, where the world seems at our fingertips, it would be good to remain humble and remember that our perspective is still very limited. Humanity is much larger than our neighbors, followers, or community leaders and their naive presuppositions about how the world works. We are modern hill tribes living in fragmented digital realities, with our own rituals, community beliefs, and cherished gurus guiding our worldview.In times of technological disruption, pandemic trauma, and grand myth-making, I believe our collective confrontation with science was inevitable. Science is a myth buster; it disrupts the soothing stories we tell ourselves and the profitable narratives of those who seek to manipulate with fictions. That’s why it has become a nuisance, even an enemy, for many tribal communities out there.Yet my belief is that science can also be a tool for diplomacy between warring digital factions if we allow it to be. The tree of scientific knowledge shares its fruit equally, no matter who we are or what community we choose as our peers. It provides a necessary cool against the heat of public discussion, the haze of day-to-day commentary, and our hot-headed human immaturity that has resurfaced with the new information ecosystems. Science can unite us by solving our informational conflicts and creating shared facts for a shared reality in which to root our understanding of the world. Scientific answers might not be as engaging, fast, or satisfying as we would like. Yet the scientific method might be the only process we have to come together around a much bigger digital campfire to co-create a shared common story of the world and our role in it. This seems to me much more enjoyable, rather than burning down rivaling villages who do not agree with our worldview.Staring at the peerless sky over Asapa, our remote mountain retreat, something slowly clicked in my head. How the puzzle pieces of our broken years full of distrust, hate, and suspicion have been assembled before. Wee Chee, the young virologist from Malaysia who lost her father to Nipah, raced back to my mind. She has not lost her way. If only we were to rediscover our compassion for our shared humanity and step away from blaming or fearing those outside our tribe, we could create lasting change together.Because the true uphill battle to reclaim our agency from ever-new viral threats, no matter if biological or digital, still lies before us.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.Continue reading chapter 11 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well: Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.Independent and interdisciplinary science is important. When evolutionary virologist Michael Worobey, a professor at the University of Arizona, got involved in the search for the origins of COVID-19, he had no idea what he got himself into. With a “soft spot for wild theories,” at least according to a former colleague, and a track record of tackling hotly debated theories around dangerous viruses, the renowned scientist is a force to be reckoned with. NPR even called him the Sherlock Holmes of origin investigations for his work on identifying the origin of HIV by hunting for chimpanzee samples in Kisangani, Eastern Congo. A dangerous trip where Mike developed a life-threatening infection after he injured himself and where his mentor, Bill Hamilton, contracted malaria. Only one of them survived. Yet it was critically important work. Mike’s field sampling and phylogenetic analysis, together with that of Prof. Beatrice Hahn, was instrumental in debunking the widely propagated notion that HIV came about from a contaminated polio vaccine trial in the 1950s. They discovered that HIV had its origin decades earlier, before the turn of the 20th century, and was spawned by at least four separate human-chimpanzee contacts that seeded the outbreak near Kinshasa (called Leopoldville in colonial times) and would spread for decades before it was recognized scientifically in the 80s by making people sick in Los Angeles in the US. Based on Worobey’s data, they reasoned that somewhere around 1910, HIV-1 emerged in humans during a period of rapid urbanization and demographic change (Leopoldville was the largest city in the region at that time) and thus was a “likely destination for a newly emerging infection.”In a 2022 podcast conversation with Kristian Andersen, the YouTube science communicator Sam Gregson, and myself, Mike recalled how he had been frustrated by the inconclusiveness of the WHO mission report. The WHO mission opened more questions about the origins that it answered, or at least that had been his impression given the media environment. “I never had a moment where I thought the furin cleavage site needed a non-natural explanation… As an evolutionary biologist, evolution can certainly deal with that pretty aptly,” he explained where he came from. “What was a bit of a curveball to me is that quote here: ‘Market authorities have confirmed that no illegal trade in wildlife had been found’” he elaborated on a different occasion, explaining why he grew hesitant about the market hypothesis.At the time, he was unaware of the struggles the WHO mission had in getting their Chinese counterparts to admit to wildlife being sold at the market. “I have been amongst the most open scientists to this idea that at least some form [of] a lab incident, maybe even with a virus that has not been characterized by the lab, could have infected someone,” Mike Worobey admitted. “So, I sort of initiated this fateful letter in Science magazine.” Mike reached out to virologist Jesse Bloom, a well-known lab leak proponent on the origin question, to organize the letter titled “Investigate the origins of COVID-19” to the journal Science (published in May 2021). They, along with 16 other authors, such as Alina Chan, Ralph Baric, and David Relman were arguing for giving the lab leak theory a “proper” investigation that should be objective, transparent, data-driven, and “subject to independent oversight.” The letter to Science made a lot of waves internationally and contributed to the vibe shift that legitimized the lab leak theory, ultimately prompting the Biden administration to start their 90-day intelligence investigation.Despite giving the impulse, Mike was not involved in drafting the wording of this letter, which came out way more accusatory of China, specifically Shi Zhengli, than he was comfortable with and retrospectively regretted. “That letter then took on a life of its own,” he recalled. All he wanted was to give the origin investigation another look. “I was pretty naive about how that letter would land,” he said with chagrin. “I should not have been and regret the tone.” Politics aside, Mike was a man of his word and no-nonsense scientific rigor. Evidence mattered to him, not political implications. The lab leak community was energized by believing scientists of such a caliber were now on “their side.” Mike was celebrated as a hero. However, soon enough, his work would become a target of their ire, and he would be cast as the greatest traitor to their cause.Like any good scientist worth their salt, Mike set out to poke holes into the natural origin hypothesis, starting by trying to falsify the outbreak association with the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. Wuhan is a huge place, one-and-a-half times the size of the five boroughs of New York City. “It has a whole lot of places where you might notice the first cluster of a respiratory infection,” he said. “Think about all the places where it could have emerged if it did not start at the Huanan market. We have to think about what are the chances it would pop up there?” That would be a remarkable coincidence indeed. If one were to make the case for a lab leak, that wildlife market and the early patients associated with it had to be explained somehow. Was the market maybe just an amplifier event? Did the Chinese authorities just look there preferentially but not in other places in Wuhan? How did the doctors decide which patients to test for COVID-19? If market affiliation was a criterion for testing patients, then maybe the patient association with it would be a mere mirage, something called ascertainment bias.These are all scenarios that could potentially explain why the case epidemiology looked like the virus came from the market when, in fact, it might have come from somewhere else entirely. After all, in the wake of SARS, China had set up an early warning and reporting system for detecting unknown viral diseases, which kicked in on January 3rd. This system might have led to an undue focus on the Huanan market. “There is, however, a way to step back to a period before any such bias could have crept in, by considering what happened in the hospitals that first pieced together that a new viral outbreak was underway,” Mike would state in his paper titled “Dissecting the early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan,” published in Science in late 2021.“I was focused, largely by myself in my basement, for month after month after month at what is going on in Wuhan spatially,” Mike explained how he spent his summer of 2021. Not only did he analyze the WHO mission report and all the scientific papers in Western and Chinese journals, he was also “reading news reports [and] digging of the web archive [for] some of these reports that had gone out by Chinese public health officials before the national authorities even knew the pandemic.” In the quiet of his isolation, following up on every single patient’s history and how, when, and where they were diagnosed, he reconstructed what happened.On December 27, Dr. Zhang Jixian, a clinician and respiratory specialist at the Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine (HPHICWM) near the Huanan market, noticed characteristic lesions in CT scans of the lungs of two pneumonia patients that reminded her of something she had seen almost two decades ago. The patients were a couple brought in by their son, who looked “ostensibly healthy.” Nevertheless, she asked him to also do a CT scan, and sure enough, his lungs were full of lesions as well. Lesions she had seen before—with SARS. “At that point, she figured it was probably related to SARS and that it was transmissible to humans because it had infected all three members of the family,” Mike explained.She also realized that patients could be potentially asymptomatic, running around and spewing the virus all over the place. From that point forward, she paid attention, and while the initial three patients did not have an association with the Hunan market, the next four patients who came to her hospital with the same symptoms all worked at the market. “At that point, on December 29th, she and the administration of her hospital got in touch with municipal and provincial health authorities.” The hospital administrators called other hospitals that were not close to the Huanan market for pneumonia of unknown etiology patients; it turned out that most of their patients were also linked with the market. The Hubei Provincial Hospital “identified both the outbreak and the Huanan Market connection and passed on these fully formed discoveries to district, municipal, and provincial public health officials by 29 December,” he concluded. They were not the only ones. Mike would write in his paper:A notably similar situation unfolded at Wuhan Central Hospital. On 18 December, Ai Fen, director of the emergency department, encountered her first unexplained pneumonia patient, a 65-year-old man who had become ill on either 13 or 15 December. Unbeknownst to Ai at the time, the patient was a delivery man at Huanan Market. [...] By 28 December, Wuhan Central Hospital had identified seven cases, of which four turned out to be linked to Huanan Market. Notably, these seven cases, like those at HPHICWM, were ascertained before epidemiologic investigations concerning Huanan Market commenced on 29 December.These findings are important because they highlight how the unknown pneumonia cases before the 29th of December were independently picked up by various hospitals. The market link became known only after, thus dispelling any notion of “ascertainment bias” being responsible for the diagnosis or discovery of SARS-CoV-2 patients. So, while Mike had set out to disprove the market theory, he dramatically strengthened its case. Many of the earliest patients fell sick at the Huanan market.But maybe it was just an amplification event while COVID-19 was spreading throughout Wuhan more sporadically. Mike wanted to test the idea that the market was not the place where the human-to-human transmission chains actually started. He did this by looking closely into all of the patients who fell ill in December 2019.Out of 164 early patients (December 2019) within the city boundaries of Wuhan that the WHO mission had identified, he was able to reconstruct precise geolocation data for 155. “About two-thirds were not epidemiologically linked to the market,” he explained, which means that when the WHO mission did the questioning, these patients did not work at the market, did not visit the market, and did not have contact with anybody who shopped or worked at the market. Some lab leak proponents jumped onto that, arguing that the market was just an amplification event but cases were already spreading in Wuhan at the time.“But there are two types of associations: epidemiological and geographical,” Mike continued. All the unlinked patients—sick people who were retrospectively identified by doctors as having COVID-19 with no market association—were not randomly distributed over Wuhan either. After having identified their place of residence, the unlinked patients seemed to live remarkably close to the Huanan market “compared to what you would expect by chance,” Mike elaborated. This was remarkable.Their geographic relationship to the market held even when Mike started controlling for all possible alternative explanations, such as demographic data. Was it a very populous area? No. Was it age-related? Since “COVID-19 does not affect all age groups proportionally, you are more likely to end up in the hospital” when being elderly, he explained his reasoning. So maybe there were just a lot of old people in that particular part of town? Again, demographic data said no. No matter how he sliced the geographic and demographic data, the early cases were “ridiculously centered on the market.” He tried to put some numbers to show that the low likelihood of chance caused the clustering. “We also did something called kernel density estimates”—a statistical method to build a probability density function, the equivalent of a bullseye— “and ask what is the peak area with the highest density of cases?” The kernel density method is entirely agnostic of anything but the geospatial position of those patient cases on a two-dimensional map. The absolute bullseye of those cases, when overlaid to the Wuhan city map, gives a radius of a bit more than 300 meters. What is within that radius? The only thing it really includes is the Huanan market. Remarkable again.He tried to make the point of this result clear. “You are not looking at where the market is in this picture.” He had calculated the density over a two-dimensional space. It was only after determining the bullseye that the 2D map was overlaid onto a city map of Wuhan. Where did the bullseye sit? Right on top of the Huanan market. “If you understand that analysis, that it has nothing to do with where the Huanan market is,” yet still hitting the market exactly, that result is just uncanny. Furthermore, Mike found that this “bullseye” is not just a statistical artifact coming from weighing patients with a known epidemiological association to the market; in fact, he removed all those linked cases and found that the unlinked patients—those that had no epidemiological link with the market—lived much closer to it than the linked cases. An incredible finding again.I think this is worth emphasizing: the only people sick in December 2019 in Wuhan were those who either worked and shopped at the market (no matter how far away they lived from it) or those epidemiologically unlinked cases who lived in direct geographic proximity to it. All these early cases were picked up and diagnosed independently by doctors in seven independent Wuhan hospitals before the various Chinese CDCs or other authorities ever heard about an outbreak. The Huanan market was the unequivocal epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan. This is where human-to-human transmission chains started to take off.Any other study published since Mike’s has upheld his findings. Outside of cases somehow associated with the Huanan market, there were no other clusters, no indication of the virus spreading anywhere in the world. A retrospective study of over 34,000 pre-pandemic blood donors that the WHO mission had asked for (and was performed by Chinese scientists) also showed the same thing. No positive cases in September, October, November, or December of 2019. Very few people were infected, and the virus was just not widespread in Wuhan before December 2019. The only case cluster in December was the Huanan market. These findings also indirectly disproved the Trump State Department’s fabricated claim that three WIV workers had been hospitalized with COVID-19. If, indeed, three young WIV workers had been sick with COVID-19 in October of 2019 to the point of being hospitalized, as the State Department alleged, then hundreds of other people would have had to be infected as well, many of them hospitalized with severe disease. This is what epidemiology and demographics would predict, because the hospitalization rate for young people is multiple orders of magnitude less likely than elderly. There was no way the Huanan market was not involved in the outbreak.So, what exactly was going on inside the market? Who could help him figure this out? Mike’s investigation into the early outbreak would bring him together with a colleague who had fiercely disagreed with his Science letter. Disagreed to a point that almost tainted their professional and personal relationship. For months, the two of them had worked together on a different project related to how the pandemic spread in America, but the origin question still loomed in the back of their minds. Both had pursued investigations into it after the WHO origin report came out. While Mike was focusing to understand the epidemiology and what happened to cases outside the market, Prof. Kristian Andersen had dived into a different facet of the outbreak, looking at what was going on inside the Huanan market. “The genomic data has always been inconsistent with the idea that it [the virus] was widespread by the time it was detected,” Kristian clarified, explaining why he did not think that the outbreak was going around in stealth mode for a long time. When Xiao Xiao and Zhao-Min Zhou from the Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation Laboratory published their paper on wildlife sales from 2017-2019 in the summer of 2021, Kristian was inspired to drill down through what information could be gathered and confirmed on activities within the market. How was the layout of the market? Where did the sick vendors sell their merchandise? What merchandise was sold? Where were live mammals held and butchered? What samples did Chinese scientists take?One of the key pieces of evidence was a Chinese CDC report from January 22, 2020, which protocolled the collection of environmental samples from the Huanan market—this was George Gao’s team. That report, which included a table with what environmental samples had tested positive, had been made public in the summer of 2020 by Chinese newspapers, namely the South China Morning Post and, funnily enough, The Epoch Times. Early Chinese CDC updates, and Chinese newspaper articles had reported about the market sampling at the time before geopolitics and blame games made it all controversial. Kristian knew that some of these data existed throughout 2020, but they were all in Chinese, so he put them to the side. The pandemic demanded all of his attention, especially when the alpha variant exploded in the traumatic winter of 2020/2021, and he, along with his colleagues, became so occupied with the pandemic that he forgot. Months later, in the annexes of the WHO report, some of this data was published in a low-key fashion. While Kristian had seen the data in the WHO mission report, it wasn’t until a Twitter user running by the name of “Babar” (@babarlelephant) put up a website that they created with pictures of the Huanan market in a type of virtual visit click-through tour that Kristian was jolted into remembering that there were some data to be followed up on.“Folks, just going back to the amazing resource from babar - can we get this table fully translated and overlaid with his map? It’s from that old Epoch Times article”Kristian would write to his colleagues at the time. (They offered Babar authorship on the scientific paper they were working on, but Babar declined. Later, the paper would thank Babar for their contributions). With all the ingredients in place, excitement quickly took over.“How could I have missed this?” he asked, raising his hands in response to the forgotten data. “All the details are in there. What stalls were positive, what stalls were negative… so I started looking at that.” He looped in Eddie Holmes again, who was still interested in looking deeper into the emergence and origins of the virus. Babar also put the photos Eddie Holmes had taken of the Huanan Market in 2014 online and geolocated them to a specific stall on the western side of the market.In the meantime, Kristian had gotten serious about having these early Chinese media and CDC reports translated professionally. Finally, with the help of contemporary translations of the market sampling efforts from Chinese news reports, the WHO mission data annexes, and the visual support from photos and videos “Babar” had collected from social media and all over the internet to help them orientate virtually around the market, Kristian and Eddie made some important discoveries.One of them was that the environmental samples within the market were not evenly distributed. There seemed to be a cluster in the corner of the western side of the market where multiple environmental samples tested positive for the virus. The corner happened to be where Chinese sources and contemporary evidence had identified wildlife stalls and merchants. Interestingly, no human case was associated with that particular stall. “I was like holy smokes! This cluster where we have these animals being sold, where they had reported on in 2020, right? This was the shop that Eddie visited,” Kristian recalled how suddenly the pieces fell together for him. A lot of virus positivity seemed to aggregate in this one small corner on the west side of the market—the same shop that Eddie Holmes visited the Huanan market in 2014 with his collaborator Zhang. Eddie’s first-hand experience and documentary evidence proved invaluable. “All this [virus] positivity stuff is like right on top of this shop that Eddie visited in 2014, and guess what—took photos of raccoon dogs.” The raccoon dogs, a species involved in the first SARS outbreak, were held in very specific cages. The early reports from the CDC, almost forgotten, indicated that environmental swabs of these very cages were positive, as well as two carts in the same stall. And then Eddie was like, “Yeah, if you look at the back of my photo, you can see two carts.” Kristian recalled their excitement. “And then there was this feather remover” that was found positive as well from environmental swaps. Why a feather remover? “Eddie was like, ‘Zoom into my photo and look at those raccoon dogs… what are they sitting on?’” They were sitting on top of cages that held some unspecified bird species. “You got to be kidding me,” Kristian exclaimed, his excitement still vivid.Within that tiny corner of the market, where no human case was reported, not only were machines, carts, and cages testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, but samples taken from the open sewer under and the sewage downstream of that stall had environmental swaps that had tested SARS-CoV-2 positive. It all fits with the idea that not only had SARS-CoV-2-susceptible wildlife been held in this corner, but they might have contaminated their environment and what they came in contact with. Isn’t that highly relevant to follow up on?I remembered what Peter Daszak and Marion Koopmans had told me about their WHO visit and how they came to a similar conclusion. These wild animals provided a direct link back to the bats. That they were never tested, nor even acknowledged as being there by Chinese authorities, was a direly missed opportunity. Chinese authorities aside, most Chinese scientists were not oblivious to what had likely happened here. George Gao’s team returned multiple times to take more samples from the Western side of the market, specifically that corner. In my interview with Shi Zhengli, I learned that she had also visited the Western side of the market in early February to take around 30 environmental swabs herself. At this time, it had been over a month since the outbreak and subsequent decontamination, so one would not expect to find any viral material anymore. Yet, surprisingly, she confirmed to me that five out of her thirty samples were still positive by PCR, albeit at such a low abundance and quality that sequencing those samples would have been impossible. These events certainly enforced the impression that the market, and that particular corner, was awash with viruses. This was not true for other places in the market.The big irony is that the WHO mission had meticulously collected much of the sampling location data, which Kristian and Mike now carefully re-analyzed. However, because of pushback from Chinese authorities, these loaded inferences about wildlife trade were not allowed to be made and spelled out explicitly in the WHO report. Nor was the clustering around the market discussed, although the WHO members had created one figure. But most of the data was there, just waiting to be taken seriously by independent scientists if one cared to look into the evidence and not just the politically negotiated conclusions of the report. That is why Kristian had been utterly frustrated by Mike’s and Jesse Bloom’s letter to Science, to put it mildly. “The message around ‘we should keep an open mind, we should keep investigating,’ nobody disagrees with this,” Kristian explained. If that had been the only argument, he would have also signed the letter if given the opportunity. But that was not the real message, spirit, or impact of the letter. He objected to its grandstanding tone and many open insinuations, which were already prevalent in the media at the time. It implied that we know nothing about the origins, that we have no data to inform our opinion, that the WHO mission was a failure and tainted, all while grandstanding Western scientists were explicitly accusing Chinese scientists of lying and a lab-origin cover-up. All without evidence. He saw the Bloom et al. letter, instigated by Mike, as enforcing a false narrative that was not only unjust but was also putting scientists in danger, including himself.Ever since his proximal origin paper, Kristian Andersen has been under severe harassment from the lab leak conspiratorial community. An escalation happened in 2021, when FOIA requests of Anthony Fauci showed how Kristian had first raised the alarm about the possibility of an unnatural virus, only to then change his mind with the emerging evidence. The conspiratorial fever pitch of 2021 media narratives contorted these events beyond recognition, leading to allegations of Kristian being paid off by Fauci to cover up a lab leak. Kristian understood sooner than most what it entails to become a target of conspiracy theories. The last thing he needed was his scientific colleagues and friends, who should know better, to pour gasoline on the fire with a poorly thought-out letter and bestow purely conspiratorial notions with a veneer of scientific legitimacy. Which, of course, happened in the most dramatic fashion. The fact that the contrarian non-expert Alina Chan was on that letter and indicative for much of its tone should have been a red flag in the first place. Mike stood behind what he saw as the letter’s main thrust—a call to keep an open mind on the origins until more data came in. A personal conflict.It got worse when Jesse Bloom published a preprint under great media fanfare, alleging he had recovered “deleted sequences” of the early Wuhan outbreak that Chinese researchers had uploaded to the SRA sequence database but ominously requested to have deleted after. Kristian, who collaborated with Jesse and still does on other matters, had a run-in with Jesse about the preprint, which he saw as unsubstantiated, riddled with scientific errors to create a self-serving story, and unjustly accusatory towards innocent Chinese scientists. Chinese scientists are not a faceless prop of the state; they are human beings that Jesse was accusing based on nothing but his own faulty reasoning and biases. Nevertheless, Jesse pressed ahead with the allegations that would catapult him to fame and sharpen public criticism of China. Ultimately, his insinuations proved to be baseless and highly misleading. On top of that, Jesse deliberately took data that was published in a different format and used it for his own purposes. It polarized the debate even further, making the conflict between Kristian and Bloom et al. authors like Mike even bigger. It didn’t help that conspiracy theorists would insert themselves into the conversation, elevate the renegades as heroes, and use their words and actions to attack and discredit the embattled Kristian as dishonest.Yet despite the polarized environment and personal obstacles, both Mike and Kristian had found something relevant, one outside the market, the other inside of it. Both scientists had a separate set of skills and knew that they could challenge each other critically if only they could overcome their ill will about the Science letter and subsequent media frenzy, which came with the predictable death threats towards Kristian personally. Not that any of this was Mike’s fault. Some lab leak activists love to decontextualize the words of one scientist to attack another, to instigate coordinated harassment and hate campaigns against their enemy, and this distorting effect is often hard to shake off.“Professionally and personally, this was not a high point,” Mike said, admitting to how the Bloom letter he instigated had strained their working relationship. Scientists argue all the time about evidence, sometimes bitterly, so it is nothing new. “It’s always good to have that heterodoxy up front rather than just having the same voices in the room,” Kristian acknowledged. But the personal dimensions and media frenzy were harder to ignore. Scientists are also humans. “Kristian sent me an email, and the subject heading was ‘Compartmentalization’,” Mike explained, meaning to just decouple from all the personal feelings and focus on the science. Today, both of them were able to laugh about the pragmatic email. But that is exactly what they did at the time—put feelings aside and focus on facts. Kristian explained how they bridged their divide:So, I think that’s where the good science comes in, where we disagree on some of these initial points, but we don’t disagree on the fact that this should be science-based. It should be focused on evidence, and we should just look at that.“To come together and do this work” was also something Mike was proud of. “Whereas in a lot of other cases, it would have been like a flame war and the end of a relationship, and then this scientific work that we did would never have happened.”Once the two scientists teamed up, with a promise to scientifically challenge the market origin hypothesis any way they knew how, they started recruiting from a wide array of talented scientists with varied expertise. Their goal was to systematically collect, analyze, discuss, model, and interpret all data that somehow stood in relation to the Huanan seafood market, as well as what epidemiology, phylogenetics, demography, geography, and statistics could tell them about the early outbreak. What does the totality of verified evidence tell us about what happened here?This team of independent scientists was a force to be reckoned with. Especially the work of a talented graduate student named Jonathan Pekar, a computational biologist, and his supervisor Professor Joel Wertheim at the University of San Diego. They would offer crucial insights into how the early Wuhan outbreak likely unfolded. Jonathan specialized in creating epidemic simulations on his computer, essentially rerunning the outbreak virtually tens of thousands of times to look for repeating patterns.The goal of these simulations is to test and learn crucial parameters about the outbreak dynamics, such as the rate of spread or the timing of the first infection that started the transmission chain. By starting with a wide array of possible parameters, the simulations produce a wide array of virtual epidemics that all unfold a bit differently from one another and are then compared to the observed real-patient data that was collected and verified by Chinese scientists, the WHO mission, and Mike Worobey. Those epidemic parameters that gave rise to simulations that matched the real data would give a good estimate of the conditions of the initial outbreak in Wuhan.Doing this, Jonathan and his supervisor Joel found something quite surprising. Many of his epidemic simulations would burn out after infecting a few people, rather than take off and start a sustained outbreak. It turns out that the original SARS-CoV-2 virus that spilled over in Wuhan actually was not extraordinarily infectious (certainly compared to later variants such as alpha, delta, or omicron), meaning there was a decent chance it would have burned out by chance, unable to sustain human-to-human transmission. This is because pandemics are not just about the virus but also about the hosts. They also have a social dimension. One of the most crucial parameters in Jonathan’s simulation was the likelihood that an infected person would come into contact with other people, as well as how many people. In a remote village, where population density is sparse and a single infected person can only meet a handful of other people, a virus like SARS-CoV-2 would have burned out with an over 99% likelihood. But in a crowded city like Wuhan, where there is a high population density, the odds of the virus causing an outbreak increased dramatically, to around 30% if started by a single infected person. No matter if a lab leak or a spillover event caused the first infection, these were the rough odds of SARS-CoV-2 causing an outbreak in Wuhan, given the virus properties and environment. However, did that not imply that humanity had a 70% chance to dodge that particular bullet? Did we just get massively unlucky?Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple. This is what the careful work of Mike, Kristian, Jonathan, Joel and around twenty other talented collaborators would make clear. I apologize to the coauthors and readers for not being able to go into the details of their individual contributions, which were often highly significant and can be found in the primary literature. Science is a highly collaborative endeavor, and no single book can do that reality proper justice.There was one more fact that puzzled the researchers since the early days that needed to be cleared up for the outbreak data to make sense. From the very start of the first few hundred cases in Wuhan, there had been two separate virus lineages, named pragmatically lineage A and lineage B. They differed by two mutations from each other but seem to have spawned independent transmission chains, with lineage A accounting for around one-third of all early cases and lineage B for two-thirds. Lineage B would be the one that exploded into the world and give rise to subsequent variants such as alpha, delta, and omicron.What was so odd about two lineages? Usually, whenever a new mutation happens, the phylogenetic tree of the virus gets an extra branch—a bifurcation on the tree that can potentially spawn a new lineage. Most of these branches are limited to a few people and die out. Others are successful and propagate forward, acquire more mutations, branch out again, and so on, making the family tree grow. While the genetic diversity between branches can be extremely high, the genetic diversity at the root of the tree, from which all subsequent branches spawn, is, by definition, zero. It is the starting point before the diversification of that particular tree. The most dramatic illustrative case example would be a super-spreading event, such as what happened in the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, Daegu, South Korea, in 2020. In that superspreading event, 5,200 cases would be traced back to a single infected woman. By analyzing the viral genomes of hundreds of infected patients at the time, researchers could reconstruct that all genetic diversification they observed started from one particular starting point: the woman in the church. She was the root of that outbreak, the center from which all other branches arose (in technical terms, this would be known as a “polytomy” or multifurcation of the genetic tree). The sum of genome sequencing of the genetic diversity of patients involved in an outbreak can usually be used to identify the root or starting point of an outbreak; this is what phylogenetics is often about.Surprisingly to Jonathan, Joel, Mike, and Kristian, doing the same exercise for the early Wuhan patients showed a different picture. Phylogenetic analysis could not identify a single clear genomic root from where the diversity started. At first, because lineages A and B were just two mutations apart, researchers just presumed that there was an intermediate genome between the two or that one lineage branched out from the other early before being noticed. However, the particular branching pattern (polytomies) of lineage A and lineage B told a different story: It appeared that one genome was at the root of all diversity from lineage A cases, and another genome was at the root of all lineage B cases, while these root genomes were not directly connected but rather separate from each other. Somehow, the early patient cases in Wuhan were not branches from a shared root but belonged to two independent trees. How was this possible? Did scientists miss swaths of early patients that held an intermediate genome connecting the trees? That seemed unlikely, given the complementary data that Mike unearthed. So, where or how did this early lineage split happen? And why did these two large polytomies suddenly explode almost simultaneously?Jonathan Pekar, Joel Wertheim, Kristian Andersen, and Mike Worobey explored plausible epidemic scenarios with computational methods that would recreate this particular early diversity pattern, and they ended up with a surprising discovery: SARS-CoV-2 most likely spilled over multiple times into humans.The reason why there were two early lineages has to do with the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population not once, but at least twice, from an animal reservoir that had diversified the virus by these two lineage-defining mutations before it spilled over. The moment an animal infected a human, the virus took off and started the human-to-human transmission chain, diversifying from the genome that spilled over, which was lineage A root or lineage B root, respectively. That’s why the lineages were associated with two separate large polytomies. Their calculations based on lineage-specific epidemic dynamics also showed that the timing of these spillovers happened close to each other but not at the same time. They were at least a week apart from each other, with lineage B spilling over first sometime in late November. This scenario best explains the totality of phylogenetic data, the progression of cases, and the family trees of the viruses we observe.The multiple spillover explanation also solved another important riddle that had tripped up scientists previously: how come lineage B is the predominant version when lineage A is ancestral to it? The epidemiology showed that lineage B cases came first, but genetics indicates that lineage A was closer to SARS-CoV-2 relatives found in bats. If it was a single spillover event or lab infection, and lineage B simply arose from lineage A, how come lineage B got a head start and seemed to have caused sickness earlier, further, and wider than lineage A?The observed genetic, timing, and patient case data are very hard to explain by proposing a single introduction event. However, the multiple spillover scenario neatly solves this conundrum. All it required was a pool of sick and infected intermediate animal hosts at the market, with a certain amount of viral diversity in circulation. If that condition was given, then lineage B just happened to make the successful jump into humans first, and lineage A spilled over a week or so later.I could not help but be reminded of what Linfa Wang and Peter Daszak told me about the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia. They also first believed that it was a single freak spillover event from bats to pigs, but later (once genome sequencing technologies were invented and became much cheaper), they found out that the genetic diversity of the viral genomes also suggested multiple independent spillovers from bats to pigs. It makes sense; with a single introduction, the virus would have run through the farm and likely burned out. Instead, the immunity from the mother sows, in combination with the rapid piglet breeding and weaning practices, meant that little piglets would become susceptible to new spillovers at this risky bat-pig interface the moment they were about to be sold. That is how a few pigs ended up propagating Nipah forward to cause the sustained outbreak. Retrospectively, outbreak investigations always only get to observe the survivors, those viral lineages and transmission chains that cause outbreaks, never those spillover infections that burn out by themselves after a few days in a new host and do not successfully transmit to others.Back to the Huanan market. By necessity, the observation of two distinct lineages—two survivors—provides a lower range for how many spillovers happened at the market. At least two spillovers were required, but it’s likely there were more that were not observed because they burned out. Given how quickly the cases exploded from the market, epidemic simulations are consistent with up to almost two dozen independent spillover events shared between A and B. Around three-quarters of them were always expected to die out within the infected human hosts, as the characteristics of the virus and population dynamics predicted. Over 99% die out in a village; over 70% die out in Wuhan. Yet we observed that not only one but two different lineages successfully established themselves in the human population. Either we were dramatically unlucky with two freak events, or there were just a lot of spillover events we did not observe because they burned out. In their totality, these multiple spillovers likely made the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in the market pretty inevitable. Once infected animals shedding the virus were brought into proximity with many, many immune-naive human hosts, once this very risky animal-human interface was put in place, we had sealed our fate.Jonathan, Mike, and Kristian’s computational modeling work would come to support the latter notion. Here is the relevant statement from the scientific paper published in Science (2022):The extinction rate of our simulated epidemics (simulations that did not produce self-sustaining transmission chains) indicate that there were likely multiple failed introductions of SARS-CoV-2. Similar to our previous findings, 77.8% of simulated epidemics went extinct. These failed introductions produced a mean of 2.06 infections and 0.10 hospitalizations; hence, failed introductions could easily go unnoticed. If we treat each SARS-CoV-2 introduction, failed or successful, as a Bernoulli trial and simulate introductions until we see two successful introductions, we estimate that eight (95% HPD, 2 to 23) introductions led to the establishment of both lineage A and B in humans.In other words, we were not unlucky victims of one or two single freak spillover events; rather, we ignored a very risky animal-human interphase at that particular wet market in Wuhan, which allowed for SARS-CoV-2, already circulating in animals, to spill over repeatedly until two of those human infections took off to take humanity by storm.The multiple spillover theory explained the available data pretty perfectly. But could it do more than that? What implications does that theory entail? With this multiple spillover model in mind, the team around Mike and Kristian could ask some more interesting questions about the Huanan market. For example, if multiple spillovers from infected animals were true, then by necessity, some other testable data would need to line up. For example, one would have to show that sick patients from both lineages A and B independently centered around the market. While the earliest patients might have been retrospectively identified and tested for PCR, full genome sequencing was scarce. Only two lineage A genomes had been sequenced, and neither patient reported any association with the market. But when Mike looked at their geographical location, both were significantly closer to the market than expected by chance, with one spending five days in a hotel next to the market before symptom onset. Certainly supportive of the multiple spillover theory.Then came another breakthrough from a surprising source. George Gao’s team from the Chinese CDC finally published a preprint about their analysis of environmental samples from the Huanan market. They found both lineage B cases and a single lineage A genome at the market, which contradicted the common notion that the market was a mere amplifier or super-spreader event. It confirmed Mike and Kristian’s suspicions. “Our analysis predicted that both lineages would be at the market,” Kristian explained. And behold, their prediction was correct. With the identification of the third lineage A genome, both lineages were now spatially centered around the Huanan market and radiated outwards into Wuhan from there. Both lineages were now found and confirmed inside the market by environmental swaps. As Mike explained:It’s kind of like me saying I’m going to shuffle this deck twice, and each time I’m going to pull out an ace of spades… It’s really unlikely to do it once; it’s ridiculously unlikely to do it twice, and so that's where we were with the lineage A. That’s important because it destroys the idea that the Huanan market was just simply a super spreader event.These results also contradict one of the last naive cop-outs from lab leak advocates, who have long been on the defensive about the market: the idea that an infected lab worker might have brought the virus into the market and caused an outbreak there, but not anywhere else in the city. This was a magical assumption, given how far the lab was away from the market and about 10,000 other more likely places in Wuhan where an outbreak cluster would happen than the semi-open Huanan market. Yet it was challenging to disprove because it is theoretically possible that an infected lab worker somehow went to that market by chance and started an outbreak there. But if the virus came from a lab infection, why would it show up at the Huanan market first and nowhere else? One of only four places in Wuhan that actually sold wild animals known to be highly susceptible to SARS-related viruses? Lab leak advocates had no scientific explanation for the Huanan market association even before lineage A was confirmed to be at the market.With both lineages confirmed inside the market, any idea that SARS-CoV-2 could somehow have been carried in twice, causing a low-probability sustained outbreak twice, in the same market but nowhere else, was rather absurd. “You don’t get a super-spreader event and have two lineages associated with that,” Mike concluded. On top of that, it would require that both lineages come from two different lab workers who were independently infected by slightly different viruses a week apart from each other, and both decided to go to the Huanan market far away from their work or place of residence on the other side of the Yangtze River. All while infecting absolutely nobody else at work or in their personal life yet still being so highly infectious as to set a wildlife market ablaze twice in a single visit.“You look at all the evidence; it points straight to a market in Wuhan,” Kristian Andersen was very clear about this. “It is not a single line of evidence we are using here,” he elaborated on their work. Indeed, taking the multiple overlapping lines of epidemiological, phylogenetic, geographic, forensic, and statistical evidence together, a single picture emerges: Infected animals were brought to the market, likely kept there for weeks in unsanitary conditions, giving opportunity after opportunity for circulating SARS-CoV-2 lineages to spill over into immune-naive human hosts visiting the market. While many of these spillovers likely burned out, at least two of them started sustained transmission chains about a week apart in late November 2019 that would radiate outward from the Huanan market into the city and from the city into the world. “I think it is important when we talk about what are the most likely scenarios; you gotta take all the evidence,” Kristian emphasized again. The power of the scientific method comes from triangulation—finding that multiple different experiments, methods, and scientists all converge on a single hypothesis, theory, or conclusion that can explain all different types of evidence parsimoniously and coherently without internal contradictions. Ideally, a scientific theory also has predictive power that can be experimentally tested, such as the supposition that if those environmental samples taken for the market were ever to be tested, lineage A would most likely be found.The market theory would also predict that SARS-CoV-2-susceptible animals must have been present in the western corner of the Huanan market in November 2019. Something Chinese authorities vehemently denied and that neither photographic evidence from random social media accounts in 2019 (or outdated photos from Eddie Holmes in 2014) nor the Xiao Xiao general survey could conclusively prove for that particular shop. Yet, in due time, unequivocal genetic evidence would be found to substantiate that prediction.No matter how one looked at it, all the scientific evidence to date told a very one-sided story about where SARS-CoV-2 came from. It pointed away from the lab and toward the Huanan market.For Mike and Kristian, their two dozen international coauthors, and large swaths of the scientific community, the picture arising from the totality of the evidence on key issues surrounding the origins of SC2 became pretty clear. The lab leak idea was a mirage, wholly unsupported speculation contradicted by evidence, running up against a compelling zoonotic spillover explanation with strong, albeit not perfect, evidentiary support. A naturally evolved virus caused the first known outbreak at a wet market. However, this recognition does not mean that there are no more questions to be asked or no more mysteries to be solved about where the virus came from. “This is not the end of understanding the origins of COVID-19. This is the beginning; it gives us the necessary focus that we need, which is that market in Wuhan,” Kristian added. What animal species were physically present at the market in late November? Were they really infected? Who brought the animals into the market, and from where? Where were the Wuhan animals exposed to a bat virus that could infect them? Did the wildlife traders have antibodies against COVID-19? Where’s the original bat reservoir? How long did the virus circulate in intermediate animal populations before it emerged in humans? We need to follow up on these questions if we want to prevent SARS-CoV-3.Mike, as best I can tell, hoped that their scientific breakthrough would infuse the public discourse around the topic with some much-needed reality check and lead to follow-up investigations into the wildlife trade, both in China and abroad. While no amount of scientific evidence was likely to change the minds of entrenched lab leak believers, there was a reasonable expectation that journalists, elites, and mainstream media would do their part in correcting the record. Indeed, the few remaining science journalists who had not yet lost their jobs in the new information ecosystem (which increasingly values commentary and op-ed desks over science desks) dutifully reported about the scientific pre-prints and later papers that would be published in the renowned journal Science after peer review. CNN, the BBC, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times all had a story running. So did National Geographic and Scientific American. The message about a scientific breakthrough in the origin case was out.In ordinary times, this should have been enough to bring lab leak speculations back on solid evidentiary ground. But I am afraid we do not live in ordinary times anymore.§The market origin papers were followed by an explosion of activity from lab leak proponents to denounce the independent researchers, to deny any type of breakthrough happened, and to deceive citizens about the new evidence. Many revenge plans were set into action, not dissimilar to what happened in the Trump orbit after “proximal origin” was published in 2020. The only difference was that this time, loud and powerful voices from both the left and right—crowds, journalists, and politicians—all seemed to do their damnedest to smear the work, ethics, and character of independent scientists in the process. A relentless campaign against the mainstream outlets that reported about the papers would also ensue, advocating to retract or correct their reporting or give lab leak innuendo equal space to peer-reviewed science. Many such efforts would eventually succeed. As always, it is impossible to map out all the plots, ploys, and players, but if I had to put my finger on one pulse-giving narrative, it would be a brilliantly crafted but extremely misleading article by Katherine Eban. A special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a magazine covering fashion, popular culture, and current affairs, she became in my opinion one of the most fervent crusaders for the lab leak narrative, providing motivated rationalizations to justify the feelings of elites in both media and politics alike.Katherine is an investigative journalist with a very specific beat and style. Years prior to the pandemic, she had written a book to supposedly highlight bad practices and dirty secrets in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry, relying heavily on selective quoting from leaked documents and utilizing quotes from real and self-proclaimed whistleblowers to tell the – in my opinion – most sensationalist and damning story possible. If one thing can be said about Katherine, it is that she is a truly gifted storyteller who always knows how to create heroes and villains from ordinary people and extrapolate their conflicts into world-sweeping battles of global relevance and moral saliency. In her corporate crime thriller Bottle of Lies, Katherine tells the story of Ranbaxy, an Indian generic drug manufacturing company that was found liable by the FDA for producing subpar medicines and fined $500 million USD in 2013. Her book, leaning heavily on what appears to be real fraud on the part of Ranbaxy and some oversight failure by the FDA, did however not stop at one company but framed the whole overseas generic drug manufacturing industry, from India to China to African Nations, as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. In her book-selling pitch, her investigation supposedly “reveals how the world’s greatest public health innovation [generic drug manufacturing] has become one of its most astonishing swindles.”I have my fair share of criticisms of pharmaceutical companies and capitalistic business practices, but painting a whole life-saving overseas industry with an overall too broad and sensationalist brush as a mere “swindle” is quite dishonest for my taste. There is no proportionality. The reality is that generic drug manufacturing serves hundreds of millions of patients all around the world, multiple layers of regulation are in place, and the vast majority of generic drugs are entirely safe and effective no matter where they are produced. That is the big picture. So, while alleged or real cases of negligence or misconduct unquestionably happen, they make for rather thrilling books but are hardly representative anecdotes. Kathrine’s broad, sensationalist framing, however, hit a cultural moment. “A new book argues that generics are poisoning us,” The New York Times would pick up her tale uncritically. Others would follow. The fearmongering about “overseas” drug manufacturing was convenient for elite newspapers at a time when geopolitical tensions increased. Such narratives about “foreign-manufactured medicines are poisoning us” are bound to make waves in popular discourse, especially with Trump’s trade war against China and public demands for companies to bring back American manufacturing jobs through onshoring supply chains and related industries. As an author, I tend to see that mainstream success in books is often reliant on hitting the sweet spot between popular appeal and satisfying the agenda of the powerful.Kathrine’s book became a New York Times bestseller and was quite impactful because it convincingly portrayed an overseas manufacturing industry as “a Wild West environment, where being first mattered more than getting it right.” Who doesn’t like to read a well-crafted thriller about the brave underdogs unearthing corporate corruption and governmental failings? I certainly do, and I am rooting for the underdogs every time. Those are the stories and tropes we readers want to engage with; nuance and context are secondary at best. Especially emotive narratives about foreigners striving to surpass us technologically with their recklessness (or lawlessness) leading towards mortal peril for citizens hit a deep tribal fear in us. It would not be a surprise to me that when Katherine Eban started hearing the same tales about allegedly reckless and unregulated “gain-of-function research” overseas, she potentially saw another opportunity to write a sweeping thriller.Correspondingly, she made her first foray into the origins topic in 2021 by mainstreaming various conspiracy theorists and political actors deeply involved in lab leak mythology. She portrayed shady Trump operatives pushing the bioweapon myth within the State Department as underdogs against the National Security establishment and conspiratorial activists on social media as either neglected whistleblowers or brave scientific renegades. These were her heroes, lavished with generous embellishments to enhance their credibility or abilities while downplaying or outright withholding their flaws, political entanglements, and activist nature from readers.In contrast, she was decidedly less generous about describing her villains, deliberately constructing dubious story arcs from cherry-picked documents, out-of-context quotes, and poignant insinuations from their adversaries. For example, she painted the warm and candid Shi Zhengli as compromised and untrustworthy for the pure fact that she was a Chinese scientist in China. Katherine would also rehash just about every major story trope for the lab leak myth: the alleged biosafety issues, the supposedly sick workers at the institute; the imagined hiding of the Mojiang miner connection when Zhengli published RaTG13; Alina Chan’s flawed preprint about “pre-adaptation” that never made it past peer review; the “risky gain-of-function research” Zhengli allegedly conducted with Ralph Baric; USRTK’s FOIA’d private messages; the Lancet letter that Peter supposedly crafted to suppress any inquiry into the lab leak theory;… on and on her 12,000-word article goes. Her story needed Zhengli, as well as people in contact with her, to be the villains—researchers who lie about many things either because they were coerced by or involved with foreign governments. The more mendacious her villains were, the brighter Katherine’s heroes would shine. In my opinion, she would utilize any and all misleading interpretations and one-sided comments from conspiracy theorists and motivated actors to craft the most sensationalist and thrilling story about how the lab leak underdogs had triumphed over the suppression of the lab leak hypothesis. In her retelling, it was allegedly suppressed by conflicted scientists and shadowy government bureaucrats. That was in 2021, and she was just getting started.When the market papers driven by Mike and Kristian received their first media coverage at the end of February 2022, her “sources,” that seemingly consisted largely of conspiracy theorists, activists, and power holders, were outraged about the results. Science had just destroyed their favorite narrative. They were incapable of challenging the meticulous papers on scientific merit, and the wide media coverage made it so they could not deny these papers existed. In this conflict with scientific reality, many lab leak believers would transition from being advocates for investigating a potential lab leak origin into outright science denial. Rather than simply changing their mind with the evidence, they opted instead to attack, smear, and discredit the independent scientists in the public’s eye. All they needed was a good counter-narrative to discredit the market papers. Something that would allow the world to ignore facts and focus on the messengers instead.“When I go out to report, I am not looking for expert voices; I am looking for sources,” Katherine Eban would explain in a panel discussion about her investigative approach to scientific controversies. It seems, from her own description, that she did not pay attention to scientific evidence or bother to understand contested science to differentiate between competing expert opinions. In my subjective experience, she also appeared to be very proud of that, as if scientific literacy on the issue would bestow a conflict of interest on science reporters that would color their judgment. In the panel discussion, she would allege that science journalists were conflicted by relying on experts as sources, and that would disqualify them from being critical in their reporting about scientific controversies. In contrast, her investigative approach focused on sniffing out human intrigues and interpersonal conflicts through a mix of contradictory testimonies, speculations about motivations, and human idiosyncrasies. The human angle. On that part, there was no shortage of conspiracy theorists and motivated actors who could provide ample ammunition to Katherine Eban in the form of insinuations, innuendos, and opinions against the authors of the market origin papers, even some of the science journalists who covered them.From these building blocks of human intrigue, the gifted storyteller could, in my opinion, fabricate a larger narrative that would not only implicate Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli in a supposed origin cover-up, but basically all of virology, the NIH, and a very prominent public health scientist, somebody who US Republicans have long sought to hang in the court of public opinion. About a month after the market papers made news, Katherine had her next thriller ready: “This Shouldn’t Happen”: Inside the Virus-Hunting Nonprofit at the Center of the Lab-Leak Controversy.The counteroffensive began.Her piece started with what I would classify as a maliciously misrepresented anecdote about a conflict between Kristian Andersen and Jesse Bloom. Since 2021, Jesse has gained a large media presence based on his contrarian stance and what I consider a willful falsehood about Chinese researchers having deleted pertinent sequences that he recovered under much media fanfare. In reality, the Chinese authors did nothing wrong. It was later found that Jesse manually deleted the sampling date of “30th January” and replaced it with “early in epidemic” to create the appearance of relevance to the origin question when there is none. Kristian had challenged Jesse, with whom he collaborated on other projects, and said that Jesse’s accusations against Chinese authors were baseless. This was the root of their conflict.Enter Katherine Eban, who crafted the “bespectacled, boyish-looking 43-year-old” lab leak proponent, whom her article described as “the most ethical scientist I know,” into the underdog trying to get the word about Chinese duplicity and cover-ups out into the world. In contrast, Kristian was painted as his irascible detractor, attempting to silence Jesse, all while also in cahoots with Anthony Fauci somehow. Why this odd construction? She would let the reader find out soon enough.“Fauci and a small group of scientists, including Andersen and Garry, worked to enshrine the natural-origin theory during confidential discussions in early February 2020,” she would state, referring to the February 1, 2020, conference call that Jeremy Farrar arranged after Kristian and Eddie Holmes began raising suspicions about the viral genome. First, notice her use of the evocative word “enshrine,” ascribing a malicious agenda to the meeting. Second, none of that happened; it was a completely fluid situation, as we have read about before. After Katherine set the tone, she pressed on to describe that these events were mere examples of a “wagon-circling” that “reflected a siege mentality at the NIH” when it came to the origin topic. Again, this was baseless best I could tell. But in my opinion, Katherine did what she knew best, creating heroes and villains through subtle insinuations, word choices, and framing of events, breaking context and truth when necessary to advance her story.Her construction worked well. Readers were wondering why there was a supposed “siege mentality at the NIH?” What were they defending? Katherine was ready to let them find out. Because in her thrillers, the cover-up conspiracy seemingly must go all the way to the top.“Of all those high-level people, almost no one ranked as high as Fauci, a scientific kingmaker who dispensed billions in grant money each year,” Kathrine would write, completely mischaracterizing the role of the former agency head as if he personally dispensed funds rather than the scientific committees at NIAID assessing the grants researchers submit to them. But she needed this inappropriate “kingmaker” framing to advance her thriller’s main villain plot: How Peter Daszak was supposedly circling Dr. Fauci to get grant money for his nonprofit that would ultimately be instrumental in giving the Chinese money and knowledge to create SARS-CoV-2 and cause the pandemic. By itself, I found this insinuation not only naive but also pretty paternalistic, if not outright Sinophobic, as if Chinese researchers were incompetent and only able to do great or terrible things with an American mastermind behind them. Then, Kathrine laid out her case for blame. Dr. Fauci, as head of the NIAID, was supposedly not upholding his oversight responsibilities. Peter Daszak was cast as a ruthless mercantile researcher for whom being first mattered more than doing it right. Shi Zhengli continued to be the dishonest foreigner operating in a regulatory Wild West, possibly in cahoots with the nefarious Chinese state and military. How could the reader take anything else away from this forced constellation, but that disaster was about to strike? Readers inclined to believe that a lab leak happened were fully on her side, but Kathrine found a way to tune the emotional force of her narrative to up the stakes even further.Because this alleged grant-outsourcing setup to fund risky research between Fauci, Daszak, and Shi that Katherine Eban constructed was supposedly not just a single incident, she assured her readers. No. As her article’s skillful framing alleged, these types of setups around grant money are characteristic of wider problems in virology and reckless gain-of-function research. It’s about power and corruption, her article alleged not so subtly in my opinion, and the whole scientific industry was supposedly the problem here, according to its tenor. That is why seemingly independent scientists are all “circling the wagon” around the NIH and its “kingmaker,” Dr. Fauci (who only headed the NIAID, just one of the 27 institutes under the NIH).Now Katherine could take us back to Mike, Kristian, and their market origin papers that made the news recently. Katherine would write, “Worobey, Andersen, Garry, and their 15 coauthors rushed their preprints into the public domain”, ostensibly implying in my opinion that this was to protect the “king” who dispenses grant money to them or to obstruct the public from finding out how the scientific gain-of-function industry has worked unregulated for years. Notice the framing again by using the phrase “rushed… into the public domain,” implying a hidden agenda or agency. Without ever arguing over the scientific analysis or evidence contained in the papers, Kathrine had created a compelling story framing that implied the market papers were a product of biased authors who had something to gain by pointing the finger away from the lab. Again, a casual reader might be excused to take from this a conclusion that either implied conflicts of interest or, worse, scientific fraud on behalf of the market authors. Too deepen this conclusion, Kathrine’s article also highlighted Kristian’s involvement in “proximal origin” using a “just asking questions” framing technique:Why top scientists linked arms to tamp down public speculation about a lab leak—even when their emails, revealed via FOIA requests and congressional review, suggest they held similar concerns—remains unclear. Was it simply because their views shifted in favor of a natural origin? Could it have been to protect science from the ravings of conspiracy theorists? Or to protect against a revelation that could prove fatal to certain risky research that they deem indispensable? Or to protect vast streams of grant money from political interference or government regulation?For a storyteller, the purpose of these types of questions is to frame emotions, not give answers. Eban’s thriller tale ends predictably, with a salient quote from a biased source that expresses a strong opinion she wants the reader to adopt as the take-away message: “The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin, he says, ‘want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.’”The moral implications of Katherine Eban’s thriller were sweepingly broad and on the nose. Just as with “generic drugs were poisoning us,” her—in my opinion —carefully constructed narrative hit a checkbox with the elites in media and politics. It gave permission to discredit anyone and everyone—not just Mike, Kristian, and colleagues—whose research would end up supporting a zoonotic origin. Katherine’s narrative, supported by accolades from conspiratorial influencers and crowds, made those in power believe that all virologists, in general, must have an agenda and be conflicted about the origin topic. Certainly, the market paper authors around Mike and Kristian were not to be trusted. This is, of course, extremely dishonest and ignores the reality of how Mike Worobey fell into the investigation and how, by trying to disprove the market origin hypothesis, he and two dozen independent coauthors uncovered evidence that would end up supporting a zoonotic spillover much more than a research-related accident.“If it had been otherwise, I would have published a different perspective in Science, and we would have published a couple of papers showing … that it was a lab leak,” Mike stated matter-of-factly. If that had been the outcome of their research, he believed he would have gotten away looking much better. He had been the animating force behind the Science letter that contributed to the vibe shift. He could have been the renegade, the maverick underdog, sitting in his basement for months tracing all those early cases to prove the WHO mission assessment wrong. He certainly would have saved himself a lot of harassment and trouble afterward. Alas, the evidence fell the other way, and conspiracy theorists have had a special ire for him ever since—a betrayer. Staying true to science can be inconvenient like that.Unfortunately, Katherine Eban’s article was not an outlier; rather, it served as the opening shot of the hunting season on the market paper authors. Alina Chan and Matt Ridley were not far behind, penning multiple opinion pieces for various mainstream outlets to discredit them. The cottage industry of conspiracy theorists around DRASTIC would post a barrage of pseudoscientific criticisms, none of which held any water, but collectively, they polluted the clarity of the scientific findings in the public domain; as if Twitter threads and blog posts could debunk peer-reviewed scientific articles. With Dr. Fauci as a potential trophy at the end of their crusade, soon, Kristian Andersen would be subpoenaed by Republicans, asked to come in front of US Congress together with Robert Garry (which they did voluntarily), and later smeared by Republican representatives and their client propagandists. The political witch hunts against public health scientists, virologists, and vaccine researchers had started, and the market papers put a target on scientists back.Quality newspapers that had previously covered the market papers often buckled under mounting political and popular pressure too. Fear of losing popularity with readers, perceived legitimacy, and access to elites prompted many editorial teams in big newspapers to run op-eds to counter the reporting of their own science journalists. They platformed contrarian scientists and fringe figures to give their opinions versus emerging facts, creating the impression that there is a vivid dispute, “alternative science” and high uncertainty among experts. They framed the origin question as a conflict between two warring factions, at best equally likely to be right on the issue.But at the same time, discarding the lab leak myth as baseless became a sin, punishable by character assassination and potential political persecution. An asymmetry where every garbage argument for the lab leak narrative was treated as newsworthy, and any counterpoint treated as possible conflict of interest dictated media coverage. The reality was that an overwhelming majority of scientists felt the body of evidence for zoonosis was strong, and any evidence of a lab leak was lacking. Yet in the press, remaining uncertainties not addressed or addressable by the market origin papers were played up, amplified, and repeated ceaselessly. Both-sidesism, false equivalency reporting, and “teaching the controversy” took up the majority of news coverage.The evidence is amongst the best we have for any emerging virus... What other part of science do you know where we say there’s some uncertainty therefore both hypotheses or all hypotheses are 50/50? Do we do it with creationism versus evolution? Do we do it with climate science? … That is the most unscientific thing you could communicate to the public.Mike was outraged and disillusioned. He was not alone; most scientists with a front-row seat to the spectacle became overwhelmed and increasingly lost trust in government, the free press, and the chattering classes. Many retreated from social media and mainstream media alike, unable to shout against the tornado yet in constant danger of being its next victim for speaking up. The rift between scientific knowledge and societal knowledge on this topic seemingly became insurmountable. Those scientists who were most knowledgeable about the topic had been tainted and could not get the evidence out to the public anymore. Their scientific breakthrough had been contained. Most citizens will never get to hear their story, the conflicts and obstacles that stood between them, and the excitement when the clues they unearthed started forming a coherent picture.Which is tragically unjust for the scientists who just did their jobs, but even worse for society. Independent science is important because the true power of the scientific method is unleashed when multiple different lines of evidence, created by different methods and by different people in different nations, all converge on one hypothesis. By 2022, various viral discovery programs, bat researchers like Alice Hughes, and the scientists around Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang, and Peter Daszak had collected enough data to show that only nature’s neglected gain-of-function laboratory, not genetic engineers, could bring about SARS-CoV-2’s intricate mosaic genome. This has been the work of hundreds of scientists for more than a decade.On the other side of the world, dozens of independent scientists, spearheaded by the efforts of Mike and Kristian and their international collaborators, established the Huanan market as the unequivocal epicenter of the first outbreak in Wuhan. Chinese scientists created a lot of good data despite the obstacles, often working behind the scenes to get the word out to their international collaborators at great personal risk. The WHO mission experts also added crucial insights about what happened in Wuhan, as did the rest of the scientific community that worked on molecular virology, epidemiology, or viral evolution to contribute knowledge about the nature of this virus. Any lab or research involvement, especially various ideas that the virus was created or heated up at WIV, was now easily refuted, contradicted, or made highly implausible by the available scientific evidence in 2022. Like with SARS-CoV-1, all carefully acquired and analyzed evidence pointed to the biodiverse Karst region of Southern China and Southeast Asia, with the wildlife industry possibly serving as a conduit to create the right circumstances for a natural virus to cause a sustained outbreak in a Chinese megacity.Scientifically, the situation was much clearer than for most outbreak investigations. This virus had nothing to do with gain-of-function research or any research labs. It took more than two years for the evidentiary basis to be established and for science and scientists to converge on actionable certainty around the topic.So why wouldn’t the world take this as an answer? Why would establishment media continue with false equivalency reporting, platforming media-hungry contrarians, and ignoring scientific evidence while running character assassination campaigns against independent researchers? Why do false and mutually contradictory myths about a man-made virus, a gain-of-function flask monster, still persist today? Why are baseless speculations and fact-free innuendo still allowed to distort our politics, sabotage our pandemic prevention efforts, and put biomedical science as a whole under pressure?At this point, I became intrigued as a science communicator. A chasm was opening in front of me in real-time. Where do our modern rifts between science and society come from in the first place? Were we always so divided, or did something change?My suspicion was that our current conundrums and crisis of trust in science emerged from another neglected biodiverse ecosystem. One that increasingly exerted a malicious force on our public perception of the pandemic that matched, if not surpassed, the biological virus itself in emotional energy and societal friction.During the pandemic, this neglected but dangerous ecosystem grew in power and now aims to rewrite the history and reality of how the virus came to be and who society ought to punish for creating it. Using a more intriguing narrative full of heroes and villains, outrage, and hope, the myth of a man-made virus that leaked from a lab became much grander than the mundane reality of multiple zoonotic spillover events at a wildlife market. And crowds were all too eager to buy into it.Unfortunately, as we should have learned from history, such periods of myth-making and grand narratives always bring forth leaders, sages, and prophets who seek to shape, subjugate, and weaponize them to impress their political worldview onto others. Their victory lap over science and society would have its roots in 2021, with the release of a rejected grant proposal Peter Daszak had sent to the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA for short.His life would never be the same.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.Continue reading chapter 9 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.A river of black drew a line through the darkening sky. Above the silver and gold ornaments on the pagoda’s crimson roofs at Wat Khao Chong Pran, the river flow turned southeast towards the fields. Rationally, I knew that the cave housed around two and a half million horseshoe bats, but observing a seemingly never-ending flood of hectic creatures fly out for more than forty-five minutes, I realized that I never truly appreciated just how many bats share the world with us.How little did we know about them? Physiologically, bats are extraordinary; they can speed up their metabolism 16 times, creating immense heat that would denature our proteins and fry our cells. A bat’s heart can beat up to 1,000 beats per minute, but it can also slow down to 6 beats per minute during torpor, a type of short-term hibernation. During a nighttime flight, its body temperature can rise to 42°C (107.6°F). Some species tend to live up to 40 years in vast, dense, and diverse colonies, which makes them uniquely suited as hosts to almost all viral families that befall mammals. However, bats do not appear to get visibly sick, and scientists cannot tell their age past adolescence. They have unique immune systems, which we do not yet understand, that do not overreact to viral infections.There are around 1,500 described bat species that have emerged from their last common ancestor over 60 million years ago. Because they are the only flying mammals, we conceptualize them all together under the umbrella term “bats,” as we do with “fish” in the sea. But based on genetic diversity, that simplification is rarely adequate. It feels like the equivalent of lumping giraffes and cows together with dolphins and whales, all of which diverged from a shared common Artiodactyla—even-toed ungulate—ancestor about fifty million years ago. It’s hard to justify thinking of them as the same, so why do we do it for bats?It is not an exaggeration to claim that bats come in almost all sizes, shapes, and forms, from the thumb-sized Craseonycteris thonglongyai—also known as the bumblebee bat, weighing just 1.5 grams and holding the title of smallest mammal on earth—to various majestic flying foxes with wing spans of over 6 feet, close to two meters. Some fruit bats look almost like dog puppies you’d want to cuddle and take home, while others might appear as if they’ve escaped from a horror movie production.The black river of horseshoe bats over my head would probably come closer to the latter for most people. We humans tend to be afraid of what we do not understand. These horseshoe bats are smaller insectivores (insect-eating bats) who get their name from the weird horseshoe-shaped disfigurement where their nose should be. Intuitively, we humans find them rather ugly—I was no exception, at least at first. I think this is partly because we assume their faces are weirdly deformed, like a fully cleft palate, rather than what they truly are: optimized. Horseshoe bats belong to a group of bats that echolocate—send out and receive sonar waves—primarily through their nostrils. Other bats rely primarily on their mouths. These varied shapes and forms in the middle of their faces, however, have intricate functionality for shaping their calls, impacting not only orientation but also their feeding and social lives, too.Given their enormous diversity, maybe it is not a surprise that bats exist in almost all variations of social structures, from eremites who don’t want to bother with others to ones who live in small family groups, villages, or even multicultural megacities. Some like to mingle with other bat species, while others are territorial and of the “get off my lawn” persuasion, with threatening grunts, fletching teeth, and all. These horseshoe bats flying overhead were not only mixing and mingling cosmopolitans; they are also the species we know today to most prominently carry SARS-related coronaviruses, close viral cousins of both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 that have caused havoc in our human world.Does this imply that an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 came from bats, too? Most scientists believe so. Yet ordinary bat viruses usually do not infect humans or transmit well between humans, and they are certainly unable to cause a pandemic. Something seems to be missing from our understanding, and I believe the intricate social lives of bats might hold the first valuable clue. But to get there, we have to understand some rather technical details of what makes SARS-CoV-2 so extraordinary in the first place.Since its emergence, it has been a confusing virus for a lot of reasons. First, a novel virus is very infectious to humans and spreads effectively between them via the respiratory route. Second, it does not cause severe disease in every patient, is sometimes asymptomatic, and is subsequently hard to track. Third, side-by-side comparisons to known SARS-related viruses seem to show that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a chimera. It has some parts with very high genetic similarity to other bat coronaviruses and other parts with low genetic similarity. On top of that, the virus has smaller but important genetic oddities, such as a novel human ACE2-receptor binding domain (RBD) and what looks like an insertion of a polybasic cleavage motif in its spike protein gene. In humans, this polybasic motif gets recognized by a protein-cutting enzyme named furin; that’s why it is better known today as the “furin cleavage site,” or FCS for short. Especially the chimeric genome, the occurrence of an FCS, and the seemingly “human-adapted RBD” gave researchers a hard time wrapping their heads around the novel virus in early 2020. Almost nobody had seen this combination of oddities before, albeit Eddie reminded me later that HKU1, a betacoronavirus from animals, also had an FCS and spread quickly among human. But SARS-CoV-2 was odd enough that even experienced virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, and Eddie Holmes would be driven to sound the alarm of suspicion in the murky weeks of early 2020. So, what chance did mere citizens have to make sense of the genetic intricacies of this confusing virus or assess what they mean by its origin? Especially when there is so much misleading information about them.“It’s like a cow with deer’s head, rabbit’s ear, and monkey hands,” the bioweapon influencer Scarlett had dramatically announced these confusing features of the virus to Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and his millions of listeners. A very false abstraction, sure, but with a kernel of truth. SARS-CoV-2 was a genetic chimera, as best scientists could tell. Its genome was made up of separate parts, like a mosaic. As the pandemic went into full swing, multiple man-made theories of varied quality were advanced on how SARS-CoV-2—and its odd genome—possibly came to be. From bioweapon development to gain-of-function research, construction from Shi Zhengli’s RaTG13 bat virus or de-novo genetic engineering to the alleged introduction of HIV sequences, from serial passage through human cells or “humanized” mice to arcane vaccine experiments, many asserted that some type of human manipulation was necessary to explain how this dangerous patchwork virus of high and low sequence similarities to other coronaviruses came about. The virus simply looked stitched together. Some of these early Frankenstein virus narratives still resonate today in public discourse and the halls of Congress. What unholy forces shaped SARS-CoV-2 into the pandemic pathogen that plagued the world? Was reckless gain-of-function research on its bat cousins indeed the culprit, or are Nicholson Baker’s “flask monsters” a mirage conjured up by fretful imagination?As the geopolitical stalemate provoked by elites ground the international search for the origin of the pandemic to a halt, investigative journalists in the US pursued a more human-centered agenda. Believing they were on the trail of something monstrous—a potential gain-of-function virus cover-up at the highest levels—they put “Big Virology” and its government funders under the microscope. Especially the NIH, the NIAID, and its head, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as well as Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance, and their collaboration with WIV—all long marked as targets by conspiracy theorists and anti-science activists—would find their every word questioned, their emails, communications, documents, and records FOIA’d, leaked, demanded by Congress, or otherwise requested.Leading the charge among them was The Intercept, a news organization covering national security, government secrets, politics, and international affairs founded by journalists that NSA (US National Security Agency) whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked his documents to. Distrustful of the government, The Intercept released documents of a 2014 research grant named “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” in early September 2021, claiming it provided evidence that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance had funded dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan in the past. It was a dramatic allegation, given that Dr. Anthony Fauci had just had a heated exchange with Senator Rand Paul in Congress, who accused the head of NIAID of “financing gain-of-function research” in Wuhan. The Intercept reported that during this multi-year project, Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli had worked to:Examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China, molecular characterization of novel CoVs and host receptor binding domain genes, mathematical models of transmission and evolution, and in vitro and in vivo laboratory studies of host range.These experiments—especially the last part, some of the in vitro (using cell culture) and in vivo (using model animals like mice) experiments— were retrospectively portrayed as being reckless gain-of-function research of concern by The Intercept. The 2014 work suggested “using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice,” and many of these experiments were conducted and reported to the NIH. Zhengli and Peter also published a 2017 paper in the journal PLOS Pathogens that described the creation of two chimeric viruses—the spike gene from one bat virus was used to replace the spike gene in the genome of another bat virus—that could infect human cells in culture. How was that not damning gain-of-function research?The NIH definition of gain-of-function research of concern only applied to experiments with viruses known to infect humans, where there was a reasonable concern that the new chimera could show “enhanced function.” This was not the case. Researchers found that, by exchanging the spike gene of these bat viruses with one of an unknown bat virus, a reduced function was to be expected rather than an enhanced one. This is because viruses need a lot more tricks up their sleeves than just a new spike protein to pose a danger to humans; otherwise, every pseudovirus experiment—recombinant backbones that cannot replicate or fulfill other essential pathogenic functions—would pose a pandemic hazard.But then again, while bat viruses are not covered by gain-of-function rules, they are not pseudoviruses either, so the legal definition has been a subject of controversy with reasonable arguments and disagreements by experts on both sides. The point of the gain-of-function regulation was intended to provide another layer of oversight over potentially dangerous research and avoid recklessness, but guidelines can only cover the general case. Every scientist knows that each experiment must be judged individually based on its risks versus its benefits, no matter if gain-of-function or not. Animal experiments, like infecting mice with a virus, require multiple layers of oversight and feedback from veterinarians, ethics committees, and university offices. No scientist makes these decisions by themselves. Scientific exploration, by definition, often treads into the unknown; that is why there are always discussions about the details, and regulations need to constantly adapt to keep up. There was a moratorium on gain-of-function research of concern between 2014 and 2017, and a new framework covering the enhancement of pathogens with pandemic potential (ePPP) has since provided new rules, albeit hardly any less technical and complicated than the last. Everybody in the field can understand the complexities.Yet in 2021, the perfectly complicated regulatory history surrounding evolving gain-of-function definitions and guidelines versus scientific exploration proved to be a goldmine for investigative journalists on the hunt for a scoop. It would not take long for The Intercept to unearth a supposed bombshell. In the FOIA’d annual reports that EcoHealth Alliance sent to the NIH, The Intercept discovered an experiment with chimeric bat viruses that seemed to show enhanced function, reporting:They twice submitted summaries of their work that showed that, when in the lungs of genetically engineered mice, three altered bat coronaviruses at times reproduced far more quickly than the original virus on which they were based. The altered viruses were also somewhat more pathogenic, with one causing the mice to lose significant weight.The details behind this decontextualized experiment were, of course, not damning at all. Sometimes the mode of infection is not linear, and the chimeric viruses initially grew faster for a day before the original bat virus caught up. That can even happen when running multiple replicates of the same bat virus. Biology is not an exact science. An NIH spokesperson would explain to the reporters that this “didn’t amount to gain-of-function because, by the end of the experiment, the amount of virus produced by the parent and chimeric strains evened out.” Either way, none of these experiments met the legal definition of gain-of-function research, which applies to the enhancement of human pathogens, not bat viruses.But for reporters on the hunt for something monstrous, those mundane explanations were rejected. They believed they had found damning results, and they were very confident in their own interpretation of the science. Thus, they reported that the NIH was just “shifting definitions” and that there has been a long history of controversy surrounding this type of reckless research, which they now proved substantiated. Nuance and complexity are, of course, the first things to go during a heated moral panic surrounding gain-of-function research.After months of media frenzy about a gain-of-function virus and the NIH’s alleged role in funding gain-of-function research at WIV, the information sphere was primed to deliver what the powerful wanted to hear, no matter how innocuous on its merits. The Intercept’s allegations and reporting confirmed the fears of many believers that something untoward happens in virology labs all around the world, and the vehement denial of the NIH just served as evidence that there was a concerted effort from “above” to hide this reality from the public. The conspiracy myth-entertainment complex, drunk from their recent victories in public discourse, was, of course, already three steps ahead of the evidence. If Anthony Fauci and the NIH were willing to “blatantly lie” about funding gain-of-function research, they publicly pondered, what else would they lie about? Did they know that gain-of-function research created the virus after all? Were they also involved in the cover-up?The plot for a gain-of-function research accident seemed to thicken. “Your house of cards is collapsing, Fauci and Daszak. The reckoning is near,” DRASTIC co-founder and narrative pulse giver Yuri Deigin would proclaim on Twitter. Even mainstream discourse shapers such as the Public Affairs Professor and popular NYT columnist Zeynep Tufekci, with hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, got away with writing: “Working hypothesis should be that there is an extensive and sustained cover-up.” All without a shred of substantiating evidence but merely to satisfy the vibes of the moment. The only reason that no evidence for the lab leak hypothesis could be found, as she and others insinuated, is because all evidence has been covered up, and the WHO investigation was a farce.In fact, the continued lack of evidence for a lab leak would just be considered by fervent believers to be more evidence for the alleged extensiveness of the conspiracy. But what about scientific evidence pointing in the other direction? Well, virologists had a clear conflict of interest, they alleged. Of course, these scientists could not be trusted. If science itself is to blame for the pandemic, then any scientific voice uttering protest is to be treated with suspicion! This self-sealing logic, dismissive of inconvenient scientific evidence, became the dominant opinion among popular discourse shapers, from influencers to pundits to politicians. It had the added bonus that these discourse shapers did not need to understand anything about virology to talk about it. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I guess.In contrast, the scientific resistance to prevailing suspicions and accusations of a genetically engineered virus is not a sexy story but a confusing and unsatisfying one. It started small, messy, and piecemeal. More informed suggestions about how this chimeric genome came about were always available, as we learned, for example, from Jeremy Farrar’s arranged conference call in a previous chapter. While Dr. Kristian Andersen, confused and worried, laid out what he perceived as genetic oddities, Dr. Marion Koopmans and Dr. Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands, as well as Dr. Christian Drosten in Germany, would disagree. They certainly saw nothing unusual in the novel genome. In parallel, other coronavirus veterans, such as Dr. Susan Weiss from the US or SARS veterans in Hong Kong with decades of experience with that particular viral sub-family, also rejected popular notions of engineering. As more evidence emerged, their veteran assessments would ultimately be proven correct and become the dominant position in science. Yet, in the very beginning, it was a difficult argument to make against a novel virus with genetic elements nobody had previously seen. The biggest obstacle researchers faced in making the case for a natural virus was the lack of reference points, namely informative viral cousins of SARS-CoV-2. Those only gradually trickled in once the outbreak’s severity turned into a global pandemic, jolting more and more scientists into urgent action. Scientific research tends to be much slower than the news cycle. Rather than speculate on inconclusive data, many researchers set out to find related coronaviruses to assess how unusual SARS-CoV-2 really was, either by discovering neglected genomes in large biomedical databases or by directly sampling bats in nature.The majority of researchers soon discovered (or, more appropriately, rediscovered from the pioneering work of the coronavirus experts now under general suspicion) that other SARS-related betacoronaviruses, not just SARS-CoV-2, all looked a bit weird and stitched together. For example, we previously learned about Tommy Lam’s discovery of a pangolin coronavirus sequence in a database that had an ACE2 receptor binding domain (RBD) very closely related to SARS-CoV-2’s. This is remarkable because, as Linfa Wang puts it:The spike protein of SARS-CoV is a door knocker on human cell surface, they then have to use the CORRECT key to open the locker (the ACE2 receptor) to gain entry into human cells. Just like any other key-locker pair, it is highly specific. Remarkably, the pangolin virus also seemed equally able to bind and infect human cells like SARS-CoV-2.We also learned from bat researcher Alice Hughes about another bat sarbecovirus—RmYN02, discovered in Mengla County, China—that had what looked like an ancestral genome to SARS-CoV-2, at least for about the first two-thirds of its entire span. The bat virus from Mengla County also contained an insertion reminiscent of the furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 boundary. If the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 stood out like a llama in a flock of sheep, Alice had somehow discovered an alpaca. Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, whose viral sampling trip with the Thai forestry department I was now on, had found another close cousin of SARS-CoV-2 with another reminiscent insertion at this critical S1/S2 boundary. Let’s call it the guanaco in the supposed flock of sheep, which looked more and more like a heterogeneous herd of related varieties.Then a bombshell arrived in 2021. Laotian and French researchers affiliated with the Institut Pasteur in France discovered a perfect match for the human ACE2-binding RBD of SARS-CoV-2 in bat viruses in Laos; matter-of-factly christened BANAL-52 and BANAL-236 after the - bat anal - sampling method. What was going on?Genetic engineering is not a plausible explanation for these genetic elements since they have all been discovered in wild animals. Their natural existence, first confirmed by Tommy Lam and Alice Hughes’s efforts, seemingly changed the minds of the “proximal origin” authors, including Kristian Andersen. But why? What could these diverse animal viruses that seem so closely related in one part but so distant in another tell us about the origin of SARS-CoV-2?Here is what I learned. CoV genomes might just seem confusing or unintuitive because they are shaped by a process called viral recombination. Recombination is a mechanism for genetic exchange between two different parental viruses that creates a new viral genome containing genetic information from both original viruses. It requires two (usually distinct) viruses to be present in the same host cell.As a useful but very imprecise abstraction, I like to think of recombination as a form of odd “virus sex” that produces unique offspring sharing a mix of parental genomic regions. Offspring that comes about by recombination is almost always a dud, meaning it cannot fulfill all essential functions necessary for the virus to replicate and infect new hosts, or is worse than the parental lineages at doing so. However, on extremely rare occasions, “virus sex” can bring forth recombinant offspring that is in some aspect better—more suited to its current or new environment—than the parental lineages. Any virus needs to constantly spread and adapt to persist; those viruses that are worse than the competition will perish. Natural selection is unforgiving. In fast-changing environments, recombination might be a good survival strategy for viruses. Gradual adaptation processes via single mutations can take a very long time to increase fitness and may be too slow to keep up with changing environmental conditions. In contrast, recombination can be considered a shot in the dark or an “evolutionary fast-forward,” where a lot of genetic changes (compared to the parental genome) happen all at once and can be put to the survival test. Extreme risk, extreme reward.In principle, all RNA viruses can undergo recombination. But how often they actually have “virus sex” can vary from the promiscuous to the prudent, depending on the viral family and environment. Filoviridae, such as Ebola, Flaviviridae, such as Zika, and even Paramyxoviridae, like Nipah, tend to be on the prudent side, as best we can tell. Recombination does not seem to play an important role in their evolution. In contrast, HIV and coronaviruses seem to fall on the more promiscuous spectrum, and I mean freaky. Recombination, as a mechanism for genetic exchange, is not particularly picky when it comes to partner choice. From long-estranged cousins and viral strangers to incestuous siblings and even their own offspring, seemingly anything goes. Sometimes, even host RNA seems to be thrown into the mix, albeit very rarely producing viable viral progeny. While our human analogies do break down at some point, scientists can observe direct evidence for this promiscuous mingling by finding chimeric viruses with mosaic genomes. These viral genomes consist of multiple parental genetic segments from the generations that came before it; ergo, they had virus sex in the past.Just as in humans, the genetic code in viruses is as much an instruction manual for protein production as it can be used to build family trees. While we might inherit our grandmother’s eyes or have facial features resembling our father’s forebears, chimeric viruses might inherit a gene or genomic feature that clearly comes from one side of a parental lineage but not the other. This brings us back to SARS-CoV-2. The discoveries of Alice Hughes, Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, Shi Zhengli, and Tommy Lam were the first to open our eyes to the chimeric nature of the new menace. The reason why parts of SARS-CoV-2 had patches of high similarity to these natural bat viruses found in China, Thailand, and later Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam is simple: they are all cousins sharing partially overlapping ancestries. Sarbecoviruses belong to a big, promiscuous, partially incestuous family (technically a sub-genus), like the Habsburg dynasty that ruled various nations in Europe for centuries through a complicated web of marriages, incest, and inheritance. Both genetic family trees provide evidence for shared ancestors, historical sexual encounters, and the occasional indiscretion leading to newly acquired genetic segments.The discovery of multiple sarbecovirus cousins in nature dispels naive notions that SARS-CoV-2 is a “unique” Frankenvirus. Because of their shared recombinant ancestry, all discovered viral relatives of SARS-CoV-2 looked equally stitched together from separate parts. Being a chimera with a mosaic genome runs in their family, so to speak, like the Habsburg jaw. I believe this basic observation is critical to understand because this type of genetic family history cannot be faked or recreated in a laboratory. It requires a colorful mingling of many natural sarbecoviruses, most of them undiscovered, whose promiscuous excesses go back and leave a genomic record for decades. Scientists know for certain that SARS-CoV-2 was not stitched together artificially because nobody had all the segments to stitch it together; even today, we have not discovered every required relative to do so.The recombinant sarbecovirus dynasty found in nature also makes unequivocally clear that at some point in its very recent history, a naturally evolved, immediate bat ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 must have existed. This particular deadly chimera did not spring from a computer sequence, was not dreamt up by a mad scientist, or was not recklessly assembled from disparate parts in a lab. The bat ancestor evolved in nature. Technically, this fact does not exclude the possibility that this bat ancestor could have been found by researchers, brought into the lab, and tinkered with. Recombination has a limited resolution; it cannot see if single mutations were artificially introduced. But on the larger genetic makeup, the recombinant mosaic genome tells us that the SARS-CoV-2 bat ancestor already must have looked a lot like the virus that emerged in Wuhan and that this ancestor came about as naturally as all of its countless cousins still out there, yet to be discovered.The black river of bats over my head now stretched over kilometers from the cave exit towards the distance, with no end in sight. With so many hosts in this single cave, just how many bat-borne viruses are out there? How many recombinant cousins of SARS-CoV-2 are still awaiting discovery?“This sight just makes clear how plentiful nature is and how small labs are in comparison”A voice next to me uttered. It belonged to Linfa Wang from the Duke-NUS Medical University in Singapore, who also watched the fly-out at Ratchaburi in awe. If Shi Zhengli’s research at WIV has endowed her with the moniker “the Batwoman,” Linfa Wang was the original Batman. The timid-looking and unassuming researcher was a true pioneer, an explorer. He took a scientific gamble 30 years ago on studying bat-borne viruses that would come to shake the world at an ever-accelerating pace. A shot in the dark at the time has hit the nail on the head of our current conundrum.We started chatting about how he fell into this mess. “Funnily enough, it’s the viruses that led me to the bats,” he chuckled. Growing up in communist China during and after the Cultural Revolution, in a family that did not even own a book, he originally wanted to pursue his dream of engineering because engineers could build something useful. Yet, when he reached university age, he was assigned to the biology program at a first-tier school, the East China Normal University in Shanghai, due to his test scores. He didn’t really like biology, so he specialized in biochemistry because it was the furthest away from zoology and living things. For his PhD in California, he studied transcription regulation in bacteria, a very mechanistic topic and the basis for what one might consider modern-day biological engineering. Biology repurposed to build something useful, one might say. Because he was very good at molecular cloning—a way to construct smallish genetic segments such as bacterial or viral genomes—other departments came around asking him for assistance. In a collaborative spirit, he would also construct some of their test organisms, including viruses that infected animals. With that coincidental virus cloning expertise, he suddenly found himself headhunted to work at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, which was concerned about viral threats to livestock and pathogens that could jump into animals. The Australian laboratory had a remarkable, cutting-edge biosafety facility for research that enticed the young scientist to stay and specialize in virology. There, his curiosity for viruses would be ignited.Just a few years later, in 1994, the Australian Hendra virus outbreak happened, and his team was on the case, which ultimately led them on an origins hunt from sick horses to Hendra’s host reservoir, large fruit bats. He keeps joking that he does not believe in fate, but his research trajectory certainly seems driven by serendipity. Linfa’s team would soon be dealing with some of the most dangerous bat-borne viruses in the world, including Nipah (Malaysia and Bangladesh variants), Ebola, and Marburg viruses, then SARS and MERS, all at Australia’s BSL-4 laboratory in Geelong, Victoria (at the time, the world’s largest). The first SARS outbreak in November 2002 specifically brought Linfa on a quest to understand where these dangerous zoonotic viruses originated and spilled over. This is when he started approaching Zhengli in China and Peter from EcoHealth Alliance for his quest. A quest that would ultimately lead to all of them being unjustly blamed for a danger they had recognized earlier and warned people about. What were the three of them doing all these years? Why would Zhengli’s lab be mired in gain-of-function allegations and fears of having created the virus?Initially, Linfa had a hunch to look at bats as a potential host reservoir for SARS. To do that, he needed someone in China who would be willing to go out and sample bats for viruses. That someone was Shi Zhengli. “In the beginning, we did not know where to get started,” Zhengli would later reveal to me. Soon after the pandemic started and Zhengli was blamed, the Batwoman seemingly disappeared behind a wall of silence. “Every time she gives interviews, she gets into trouble,” Linfa offered as an explanation to why Zhengli had become very selective in speaking up. After a few initial email exchanges with reporters early on, where many of her words were twisted and where they wanted her to defend against allegations, Zhengli completely gave up. For years, she has not left China or given interviews to outsiders.Yet, I believed it was important to learn how she became involved in Linfa’s SARS host search and what drove her research that was now being portrayed as so controversial. After I wrote a very thorough blog post on recombination, I sent it to her, asking if maybe we could chat about her work. I believe my scientific writing created some trust for an honest conversation, and the warm virologist opened up to me for an interview. She explained that when they started, all they had to go on were previous experiences. “Nipah, Hendra, all these viruses are carried by fruit bats. So, our first journey went to the Southwest of China, Guangxi Province, these warm regions that have fruit bats.” They sampled the fruit bats for eight months and took the samples to the laboratory to do PCR testing. “But nothing,” Zhengli exclaimed, throwing her hands in the air. Again and again, they continued to try with the same approach and failed. “That was a mistake,” she recounted lightheartedly. Contrary to Dr. Gao, the Batwoman seemed to have no face-saving issues by being so explicit about past naiveté or errors. It’s just science; doing something that nobody has tried before often fails before it works. Zhengli had to change strategy, going for serological testing that would not only discover acute infection but also evidence of past infections. Viral infections are short-lived; they rampage through a population and burn out. Serology gave Zhengli a bigger time window to catch these transient viruses. They also needed to expand what bat species they explored.Yet, the magnitude of the task still seemed crazy to me. There are billions of bats in China; how would they ever find the right ones? At this point, her face began brightening up, and while emphasizing every syllable with her hands, she started laughing about their desperation after months of failure. “It is completely random sampling,” Zhengli explained. She was delighted in the fact I understood what a shot in the dark it truely was. It was too ambitious and maybe too overly hopeful. Yet serendipity would intervene. Upon testing the new experimental setup and catching a few local insectivorous horseshoe bats in Hubei Province—Zhengli’s home turf—she finally got a signal. They found three bats that tested positive in their serological test. They took the samples for PCR analysis, and they got one short sequence of the RdRp gene out of one of the samples. A sensation: these bats had encountered a SARS-related virus, albeit a very, very distantly related one. Zhengli had found a target—a candidate host species. Over the next years, she and her team would travel to all of China’s dozens of provinces to catch horseshoe bats, and in many of them, other distant SARS-related CoVs would turn up. No province had closer matches to the original SARS virus than Yunnan in southern China, so she strengthened her efforts there.Then, just on the outskirts of Kunming, Zhengli narrowed in on one particular site called the Shitou cave. Over the next five years, she would collect bat droppings from there and PCR test them. A longitudinal survey. Then she would begin sequencing promising samples. This way, she would discover evidence of many novel chimeric sarbecoviruses circulating in bats, all of them harmless to humans. She never found a virus quite like SARS-CoV-1. Yet, collectively, the Shitou cave would constitute a sort of natural library for genetic segments closely matching the original SARS virus found in civets in Guangdong that caused the 2002 outbreak. After more painstaking work, Zhengli would eventually discover that all the genetic elements of the dangerous SARS virus were around in this cave, ready to mingle with each other. This region was the birthplace of the viral ancestor that would become SARS.This brings us back to “virus sex”—recombination—and how it might pose a danger to human health. In sarbecoviruses, the spike gene, a medium-sized genomic segment responsible for cell entry into host cells, shows a high diversity of sequences. The spike gene also has recombination breakpoints within and surrounding it, making this segment very susceptible for genetic exchange. High sequence diversity means that viruses might have a wide range of possible functions that can arise from them.If we think of general genetic diversity as “potential for new functionalities” and recombination as a mechanism to “shuffle varied genome segments” around, some alarm bells should be ringing. These are the requirements for some pretty reckless and chaotic “gain-of-function” experiments conducted within bat hosts by nature on a daily basis. With the discovery of more and more chimeric sarbecovirus genomes over the years, Zhengli and other scientists became increasingly worried. In essence, they were observing direct evidence of countless potential “gain-of-function” experiments that must have happened in the past. The Shitou cave and places like it are genetic cauldrons that facilitate the (re)combinatorial mixing of diverse “evolutionary fast-forwards” while applying selection pressures where only the fittest offspring genomes survive. The true scale of these gain-of-function experiments is mostly hidden from our observation within the remoteness of these bat caves. Is it millions? Billions? Trillions? How likely was it for these natural “gain-of-function” experiments to bring forth elaborate traits, such as the skill to infect humans?This is what the bat pioneers surrounding Linfa Wang, Peter Daszak, and Shi Zhengli wanted to find out. Zhengli and her team were the first and only ones to ever isolate a live bat sarbecovirus from fecal pellets in the Shitou cave. They named it WIV1 in honor of the institute. WIV1 stood out because it had a 95.6% identity to SARS and was an almost perfect match to the amino acid sequence for the S1 region of the spike gene. Subsequent cell culture experiments would show that, just like SARS, WIV1 had a broad species tropism and could use human, civet, and bat ACE2 receptors for entry. It had unlocked the door to cross-species infection. A sensational—and worrying—discovery. While Zhengli never found a bat virus closer than 96.8% to SARS-CoV-1, her discoveries still concluded the decade-long search for the natural reservoir and origin of SARS. It was horseshoe bats from the Karst region of southern China.After that impactful discovery in 2013, Shi Zhengli, Linfa Wang, and Peter Daszak began to warn the world. Bat viruses like WIV1, while not causing human pathology and not shown to infect humans, could, at a minimum, infect human cells in culture. Collaborators from the Baric Lab at the University of North Carolina—working with the WIV1 virus and Zhengli—would later argue that this makes bat viruses like WIV1 potentially poised for emergence. But how exactly would that work?For a long time, nobody knew. Even today, not all the mysteries of emergence have been solved. That’s why Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak were so keen on studying wild spike gene sequences in pseudovirus systems; to perform binding assays with RBDs they discovered in the wild and orthologues of various ACE2 receptors, even create simple chimeras, and test their pathogenicity in mice carrying a human ACE2 receptor. None of these experiments are considered “gain-of-function” by the NIH after review, nor are they reckless or dangerous to humans, as scientifically ignorant reporters at The Intercept and pundits pretty much everywhere else were now suggesting. These types of experiments on bat viruses, such as RaTG13 or other close cousins, could never have created SARS-CoV-2. It’s hard to see why these unrelated and irrelevant experiments suddenly needed to be re-litigated on the world stage in 2021. Virology is not magic, and a human pandemic pathogen is very different from a bat virus. Details matter, especially on technical topics. Maybe reporters were not driven by ignorance but rather active lack of curiosity in what the “conflict of interest”-ridden virologists were trying to explain when they had a scoop to sell?To uphold the pretense of journalistic neutrality, The Intercept would quote an expert accurately denying that there was any reason for concern with Zhengli’s experiments but then frame the story to be damning against this type of research either way, often with the help of contrarian “experts.” First and foremost, of course, was the credentialed lab leak influencer and now resurgent media darling Dr. Alina Chan. “The contents of the grants raise serious questions about the review processes and oversight relating to risky pathogen research,” she would readily supply whatever quotes the journalists likely wanted to hear. That Dr. Chan has no experience or expertise in biosafety regulation, risky pathogen research, or even just virology was conveniently ignored by the amplifiers.Everybody loved to weigh in on the topic that seemed so intuitively bad to us: scientists supposedly tinkering with dangerous viruses that can infect human cells. Whenever there is a demand for popular sentiment, the information sphere will deliver. Soon, even more established biosafety advocates, who had an axe to grind with virology for a long time, finally saw an opportunity to have the world see it their way. The British-French virologist Simon Wain Hobson believes that “virologists are making the world more dangerous” and that gain-of-function research has inexcusable risks while offering little benefits. “GOF influenza research may well be just one small step for virology; the problem is it’s a giant risk for mankind,” he has dramatically argued since 2013. “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” Richard Ebright, another advocate affiliated with Rutgers University, agreed with him. Zhengli’s work has been a thorn in their eyes since 2015, and now that the contrarians had the public’s attention, they would not waste their chance. Especially Richard Ebright, a bacterial microbiologist with in my eyes no discernible expertise, publications, or understanding in virology, bizarrely became one of the most quoted supposed “experts” in the COVID-19 origins debate, with dozens, if not hundreds, of newspaper articles featuring his commentary.No “mainstream” virologist who actually published on the topic of viral emergence or SARS-CoV-2 specifically would ever be given the same media exposure. “I had gotten one op-ed in NYT and two in The Guardian, I think, talking about the danger of ecosystem destruction and zoonoses,” Peter Daszak recalled. But now, “nobody wants me to talk about this stuff anymore,” he told me. “What changed?” I asked. Everybody just wants him to defend “his side of the story” when it comes to an alleged lab leak and gain-of-function research. After more than a year of unsatisfying repetition from experts that this was most likely a natural virus, there was a much greater hunger in the information sphere for “new experts”, people like Simon Wain Hobson or credentialed contrarians like Alina Chan and Richard Ebright, or even the conspiracy theorists from the DRASTIC amateur collective. Their relentless advocacy and amplification in the media led to tangible impacts on popular discourse. Gain-of-function became a dirty phrase, a moral panic, and any type of related virology research allegedly posed unjustifiable high risks while not providing any tangible benefits. It needs to be shut down for good, even banned worldwide, as tabloids like the Daily Mail would suggest. But do these tabloids, influencers, contrarians, and pundits really understand the risks, benefits, and stakes of these experiments better than the whole field of virology?In reality, there is little factual support for contrarian notions, as best I can tell. Zhengli’s exploratory experiments with bat viruses had negligible risk while offering some critically important knowledge. Her research team provided evidence that it was possible for some natural bat viruses to jump species and directly infect human or other mammal cells, sometimes very efficiently. She provided mechanistic details about the role of the spike protein that would later come in handy for designing vaccines and testing new therapies against COVID-19. She also showed that sarbecoviruses were masters at switching genetic elements. In fact, once the genetic keys to human infections were circulating in a bat population, Zhengli, Peter, and Linfa had responsibly warned the world that viral recombination would facilitate the creation of new dangerous chimeras and make their spillover into humanity likely. But how likely exactly?This question, more than any other, is what drove me away from the heated media frenzies and moral panics of the West into the calm heart of the Southeast Asian Karst region. A biodiverse Wild-Wild East, two and a half times the size of Germany and spanning parts of southern China, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, even bits of Malaysia. Karst mountains are created by erosion of soluble carbonate rocks over time. However, it is truly the power of water that, over eons, has shaped the landscape to include spiky spires, enormous sinkholes, underground rivers, and intricate cave systems below the old-growth subtropical forests and rainforests. In other words, this was bat country, and each valley and limestone formation can not only house millions of bats but is a microcosm in itself. “Each isolated limestone hill can host more than 12 unique species found nowhere else on earth, with up to 100 micro-snails, endemic begonias, orchids, and geckos, and yet an estimated 90% of cave-dependent species are undescribed,” conservation biologist, bat researcher, and real-life nature encyclopedia Prof. Alice Hughes had explained to me. “Cave scorpions, snakes, parasites, glow worms,” to her, caves were still a terra incognita for scientific exploration.Queasy, I now looked up at the wall, wary of scorpions, spiders, and other critters. Despite the romance of exploration, caving was certainly not my favorite activity. Peter Daszak, Chinese journalist Jane Qiu, and I had gotten up at five in the morning to go visit the main entrance to Ratchaburi cave, which is where, on this Saturday, the guano collectors arrived. Once a week, they would go in to collect the nitrogen- and phosphorus-rich bat excrements. It was a potent fertilizer that sold well. Researchers from the Thai forestry department handed me a full-body Tyvek suit—those that resemble white plastic bags and have become all too common during the pandemic. I put the Tyvek’s hoodie over my hat, protective glasses, and PPE mask before zipping it tight. I had no interest in leaving any Achilles heel open for potential contamination.When we climbed into the cave, a wave of heat and slippery rocks covered in bat excrement awaited us. I ventured in farther, accompanied only by a mixture of light and darkness, as well as the eerie sound of thousands of bats flying, disturbed by our human presence. Peter and Jane, similarly protected, were not far behind. The stench of bat urine and excrement burned up my nostrils in a violent fashion, making me think twice about this endeavor.We went all the way into what Peter called the “reactor core,” a natural cave pillar where disturbed bats kept circling around. Within the gigantic antechamber, I had to climb up a few meters of steep slope to get as close as possible to the bat reactor, right next to where a guano farmer was filling up his sizable cotton container with a tiny shuffle. Four other containers were already filled and awaiting transport in the middle of the antechamber. The chamber’s roof was broken in on one side, and the sunrise outside illuminated the cave, making me realize that a constant drip of liquids had accompanied me like rain. How much of that was moisture condensation from the cave walls, and how much came from the disturbed bat swarm circling above me? I would rather not contemplate that too deeply. Many bat viruses are shed via urine and excrement; even coronaviruses in bats are thought to be mostly adapted to gut- and gastrointestinal microenvironments, not the respiratory system. A bat coughing in your face is possibly much less of a risk than you touching your nose or eyes with excrement-sullied hands. Pulling my head cover even closer over my masked face, I was certainly very happy for my full protection gear.Viral recombination always seems abstract, almost like a freak accident, when two different viruses happen to come together in the same host to infect the same cell. But just standing for a minute in the “reactor core,” under the hectic buzzing of their rhinolophid host reservoir, I got the visceral impression that this specific type of genetic exchange is potentially much more common in sarbecoviruses than we might appreciate today. We underestimate the vastness of nature at our own peril.Maybe the extent and evolutionary role of “virus sex” is one of the most important clues to the puzzle of SARS-CoV-2’s confusing genome and biology—the one piece of knowledge that our public understanding has been missing. We do not get to visit those remote caves; we do not observe millions of bats mingling with one another. We do not intuitively comprehend the environment they live in. There is growing evidence that the lives of sarbecoviruses’ primary hosts, the rhinolophids—horseshoe bats with these nightmarish odd nostrils—are not only a lot more cosmopolitan than the average bat, but they are also a lot more socially intricate. Horseshoe bats vary in nostril shapes because that allows them to specialize in echolocation at very wide ranges of frequencies. Researchers have found that bat echolocation is not only used for orientation and hunting but also for communication and vocal learning. Some of the bat’s extensive vocal repertoire is needed to create specialized social calls used either for parent-offspring reunions, territorial defense, or maintaining group integration. Rhinolophids not only tend to speak a lot, but they also have many different dialects and even different languages, which have a profound impact on their social lives and mating behavior. Some speculate that the evolution and observed differentiation of vocal frequencies over time within a species leads to mating preferences and exclusions, driving genetic niche formation and ultimate species separation into species complexes.This constant genetic stratification of their host reservoir is a challenge for viruses. Some sarbecoviruses will be driven to specialize in a small niche or subgroup of the species complex by selection forces, whereas other viruses might develop or maintain broad affinity to multiple bat species that might inhabit the same spaces. Specializing in a niche gives viruses a competitive advantage in that niche, but having a broad affinity allows viruses to jump between different hosts in their physical environment. Broad affinity might not be strictly limited to different horseshoe bat species; in fact, host-jumping into other bat species might, in turn, create more viral diversity. Recombination only requires two viruses to infect the same cell; parental viruses cannot create offspring if they never meet, but their offspring might also not be as diverse if they never meet very distinct others.“So how do these hypersocial rhinolophids do on the ‘meeting new people’ front?” I had asked Prof. Alice Hughes back in Zurich. The bat researcher had seen it all. She responded:Some of those different species will roost together, especially when it is cooler or during hibernation. So, when we have done work in various cooler caves, we will see clusters. Rhinolophus [horseshoe bats] cuddled up to Miniopterus [long-winged bats], and the next one is Myotis [mouse-eared bats]. Now, these are lineages that diverged 50 million years ago.Soon after, Alice was involved in a paper discovering a new SARS-CoV-1 relative in a myotis bat, substantiating her point that SARS-like viruses can jump to other bat species hosts and circulate there.Beyond mere cuddling with strangers, bats are also known to switch roosts constantly. There are maternity-only roosts, summer and winter locations, and roosts that are calm or have special geographic features. Some bats like to stay and guard the house cave; others cycle outside but come back periodically over the year (maybe kids going to college would be a social analogy, if only we could tell bat age, that is); and many bats do food tourism with the seasons. All of this leads to constant turnover, with various bat species mixing and mingling with each other. No matter how one looks at it, it seems that there is a colorful and complex social, seasonal, and geographic mixing of various bat species, even when just studying single locations, like a specific cave or a forest. Zhengli had found dozens of SARS-CoV-1-related viruses in the Shitou cave. And Alice? Her “home cave” in Xishuangbanna botanical garden, where she did longitudinal sampling, had housed many different bat species that changed over time. She assumed some of the cave characteristics, like a long, high chimney-like exit, were very attractive to multiple species, so they competed for the space. In early 2020, Alice discovered four additional SARS-CoV-2-related viruses in her institute’s backyard before her work was shut down by the authorities and the cave walled off. Where are those bats now?Bats tend to move and mingle. Some of this has always been a natural part of bat life. More recently, however, human encroachment on bat territory—urbanization, deforestation, hunting, tourism, mining, etc.—is considered the biggest factor in displacing bats from their traditional roost sites and forcing species together that might not have ordinarily met. If some bat species that diverged millions of years ago often tend to huddle together—and we already learned that the sequence diversity in spike genes is very high—do the diverse viruses they carry infect each other and influence recombination patterns as well?This is one question researchers were able to answer recently with a resounding yes. Using a meta-transcriptomics approach (taking a sample and sequencing every single piece of genetic information in it), they discovered that many of the bats they sampled carried more than one virus. On top of that, the study found that some of the discovered viruses were shared between different bat species, suggesting frequent spillover events distributed the virome over multiple hosts. This represents a dramatic opportunity for virus sex (recombination) and the diversification of the viral gene pool with new genetic elements. A chaotic genetic cauldron.It is reasonable to assume that the intricate population structures, broad social interactions, and geographic migrations of rhinolophids all come together to exert strong evolutionary pressures for sarbecoviruses to constantly adapt to new environmental niches. Recombination, as an “evolutionary fast-forward,” is the only mechanism by which sarbecoviruses can survive in such a chaotic and fast-paced environment, which is why this is such a prominent and critical feature in their evolution. In other words, we should not be surprised to find a complex mosaic within the genomes of sarbecoviruses because it reflects the complex mosaic of bat and virus co-evolution. A constant fight for niche survival against the merciless competition of ever-changing circumstances, one where only the most opportune genetic elements and fittest chimeric viruses will persist. These biodiverse caves and social bats are nature’s vast “gain-of-function” laboratory that we should worry about when it comes to birthing dangerous new viruses. Nature can create diversity we can hardly fathom. On top of that, our human encroachment on bat territory is stirring that particular genetic cauldron ever faster, enabling the spillover and emergence of these diverse and dangerous viruses in us.In our current discourse, concerns about these natural gain-of-function labs are completely absent. No online crowd, hungry influencer, or populist politician has figured out how to profit from their existence. In fact, many ignore or deny that they exist to make the laboratory “gain-of-function research” idea more salient. Yet, should we somehow worry less about dangerous viruses created by our human mingling with natural ecosystems? Do biosafety risks magically evaporate outside of research labs? Why does the persistent danger of zoonoses not factor in when assessing the real risk versus benefit of Zhengli’s work trying to understand what happens in the wild?The guano harvesters next to me had only a simple towel wrapped around their heads; many had no mask or, at most, a simple cotton sheet over their mouths and noses; nobody next to me wore any glasses, gloves, or other protective gear. They were barefoot or with sandals, T-shirts, and some light pants. One started carrying out bags of guano over his head, some of its finer dust falling down on his face as he stumbled along the rocky climb in the semi-darkness. Outside, the guano kept piling up into separate little hills in a small marketplace. It seems many more people were involved in judging the quality, assessing the yield, and filling the guano with little shuffles and even bare hands into smaller bags to be sold to farmers as well as bigger distributors. Some negotiations about price seemed to happen right there, outside the cave. The monks were also involved in the guano business.Asking how many of the participants have antibodies against various CoVs in the blood is a tricky and controversial question. We were told that the scientists studying it, like Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, had to sample these guano collectors quietly to not raise too much awareness and ill will from authorities. Of course, there are medical privacy issues, public relations concerns for the Thai government, and the economic prospect of the allegedly corrupt monks who charged thousands of dollars to rent out collecting patches to the guano collectors. Nobody wants scientists to make a fuss about the potential dangers of this lucrative arrangement between religious worship, economic windfall, tourism, and cultural tradition. Especially not on such a politically sensitive topic. We were the intruders to be eyed skeptically. None of us came to lecture, but rather to understand, experience, and take to heart the lived reality of millions of humans who rely on the biodiverse Karst region for livelihood, community, or intellectual sustenance. All human-animal interfaces can be observed from two sides: the human and the animal. We do no one justice by downplaying one in favor of the other. “From my point of view, we should focus on some hot spots,” Zhengli said, explaining why she believed a more comprehensive approach towards risky animal-human interfaces was necessary. She continued:We should do surveillance not just of wildlife but also domestic animals and the people that are highly exposed to domestic animals. I think the whole ecological change we should pay attention to. I am trying to persuade the policymakers to pay attention.“It’s not the bat’s fault. They have been with these viruses for millions of years,” Linfa Wang elaborated on our tendency to focus blame on the wrong culprits. In recent years, the pioneer had ventured into another unchartered territory: bat immunology. His colleagues had asked if he was crazy; said he would tank his career and not make any progress; there just are no tools around to even study immunology in the flying mammals. However, Linfa needed to understand. “Bats did not evolve to carry viruses,” he reasoned. Something made their immune systems special to deal with them—defend but not overreact. He speculated that the adaptation to flight is what made bats’ immune systems so hardened. “Flight is a very stressful activity. If bats had the same system as us, they would get sick every night after flight.” Most mammals, including humans, are different. “We need inflammation for defense, but out of control, it is bad for us. The human immune system kills yourself.” Linfa believes that if we can learn lessons from bat immune systems, it will help us temper and modulate our overreacting immune system in the long run. Our immune system is involved in almost all diseases; if we find ways to better regulate it, medical benefits could be large. “We believe it has everything to do with a long life, less cancer, and better dealing with viral infections,” he offered an optimistic vision of where better knowledge of our distant flying cousins could lead us. We should shed the idea that only bad and evil can come from the only flying mammals just because they carry these deadly viruses—at least deadly for us humans with our subpar immune systems. Why blame them for our weaknesses?“It’s really us, the disturbing of habitats, the recent farming practices, climate change…” Linfa Wang would trail off. “Bats and humans don’t have very close contact... until recently,” he added after a short pause.Scientific studies, including some conducted by EcoHealth Alliance, estimate that tens of thousands of spillover events happen every year, most of them from bat coronaviruses that have yet to be discovered and that do not cause an outbreak for a variety of reasons. “The spillover from bats to humans is always very, very low frequency for two reasons. First, bats don’t shed high levels of virus, and second, most are viruses that are not ready to jump.” Linfa Wang would explain this paradox. He offered the Hendra virus as an example. Bats transmit it through urine, so prevalence can be assessed easily by laying out plastic sheets for collection. He found that only 1-3% of bats had detectable levels of virus shedding, always with very low titers. “But if you do serology, you can go all the way to 45% prevalence” in the population. It seemed that, in bats, “viruses don’t need to replicate to high levels because they can propagate” even with very low amounts around. That is why bats do not appear sick even when infected; their special immune system has a good grip on viral infections. Low viral titers in turn reduce risks of spillover to other mammals, including humans. The bat immunologist offered his take on this uncomfortable reality, saying, “If bats would carry high levels of viruses, like we do in our nose, I always say the human population would have been wiped out by now.”This also implies that we better not stress the bats too much. Stress reduces immune defenses, which seems to be universal for bats, our farmed animals, and humans alike. When bat immunity drops, viral titers—and with it, shedding and spillover risk—rise. In the end, we create our own misery by creating risky animal-human interfaces that are so conducive to spillover and transmission. “Retrospectively, when they sampled the Nipah outbreak in Malaysia, it was also two lineages,” Linfa recalled. Meaning there were at least two distinct introduction events that would ultimately be responsible for the Malaysian Nipah outbreak, possibly many more that did not cause onward transmission chains. The combination of bats, attracted by human-made continuous food source, right in proximity to susceptible pigs that are rapidly bred, weaned off and sold at high frequency, provided a fertile ground for the emergence of Nipah. Today, Linfa and others have every reason to believe that our displacements of horseshoe bats in the Karst region, together with human encroachment into bat territory, might exert a similar pressure on the sarbecovirus hosts, leading to more and more spillover events in the region.So why do we see so few outbreaks of novel coronaviruses if serological surveys already provide evidence for thousands of spillovers every year? “Most are viruses that are not ready to jump,” Linfa had said before. These are not human pathogens. I think we laymen have a bit of a naive understanding of all the obstacles viruses have to surpass in order to cause an outbreak in humans. There are a series of barriers and filters that have to be overcome. The vast majority of bat coronaviruses that spill over just might not be able to enter human cells very efficiently. Even those that can enter efficiently might not replicate well in the host cell or get shut down by our innate human host defense, such as the interferon pathway, without humans ever being the wiser. Even well-infecting and replicating viruses, such as WIV1, which Zhengli discovered and that can partially evade the interferon pathway and therefore might potentially make humans sick, still cannot spread between their novel hosts.Transmission is extremely complex—something scientists do not yet understand sufficiently on a mechanistic and molecular level, and they certainly cannot yet design for it. Only nature has figured that part out so far. Even if some genetic jackpot viruses somehow manage to surmount all the prior obstacles and succeed with human-to-human transmission, they might still be unable to spread effectively enough to cause a sustained outbreak. A potential pandemic pathogen would need to be infectious enough to infect fresh hosts quicker than it runs out of steam. On top of that, outbreaks are also always social phenomena. Even a perfectly capable pandemic virus—like the SARS-CoV-2—would have died out by itself with a very high likelihood if it had spilled over in a remote village rather than in a Chinese megacity that supplied countless immune-naive hosts.Whether these sarbecovirus spillovers happen directly from the bats, or rather via an intermediate animal, like the pigs for Nipah, is also an open question. Both routes are possible and plausible, with outbreaks of novel viruses in farm animals being even more common than in humans and some evidence suggesting intermediate animal hosts being necessary incubators for bat viruses to become human pathogens. Most spillover events are not observed or documented. Scientists only know about their presence from bat sampling efforts and seroprevalence studies in humans, such as the guano harvesters or locals in contact with wildlife, in certain regions where such spillovers are assumed. However, even geographically, we have gigantic blank spots on the map. Regions like the remote, forest-covered, and mountainous areas of northern Thailand, which borders Myanmar and Laos, are all mostly uncharted territory.“If you give me a billion dollars to find the origin, I would spend 90% of that looking outside of China in Southeast Asia,” Linfa offered his estimate. According to him, there is just so little known about bat diversity here compared to China, where Zhengli, Alice Hughes, the Chinese Academy of Science, the Institut Pasteur, and others have done much more sampling work. The discovery of the Laotian BANAL viruses, the closest bat relatives to SARS-CoV-2 until today, certainly argue for increasing efforts in this region. Today, the Karst region’s unique and biodiverse ecosystem is, in considerable parts, still relatively untouched by humans. This has been changing fast in recent years, especially with deforestation, slash-and-burn cash crop agriculture, and economic development leading to the degradation of the old forests and more human-animal interactions. Even outside of disease prevention, the Karst region’s importance to the global climate and biodiversity conservation is probably second only to the Amazon rainforest, with projections suggesting around 40% loss by the end of the century. A worrying development. Our human encroachment and disruption of bat ecosystems here make the whole region one of the prime hotspots for zoonotic spillover, as scientists like Linfa Wang, Shi Zhengli, Peter Daszak, Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, Alice Hughes, and their many regional and international collaborators have found. They argue that we need more bat sampling and domestic animal surveillance, not less, to better approximate disease risks and guard against them in the future. I agree.It has been said that science can be a humbling experience. How little we know about the true scope of viral diversity out there seemed conceptually clear to me before I came to meet the virus hunters in Thailand. Yet somehow—even after reading the relevant papers, studies, and estimates—the reality and complexity of that effort did not fully sink in until I was standing at Ratchaburi. That black river in the sky still continued to fly out, twisting and turning like a pencil stroke during a bizarre calligraphy exercise. Meanwhile, after multiple hours of painstaking work capturing some of the bats flying out, the field researchers’ most demanding tasks were still ahead of them. Setting up a nearby field lab to work into the night, the young researchers from Supaporn Wacharapluesadee’s and Linfa Wang’s group, together with the Thai forestry department, had to process the captured bats. Taking them gently but with an experienced grip out of their cotton bags, they measured their weight, size, and wingspan. Busy students were shouting numbers, protocoling measurements, labeling Eppendorf tubes, and passing the bats along, almost like on an assembly line. The virology students were taking various samples, especially wing clips—tiny biopsies taken from wing tissue that would regenerate within days for the bats—to create primary bat cell cultures that were on the agenda for the Singaporean team. These cell cultures might come in handy to study the molecular mechanisms underlying the special immune system in bats. In between workstations, the bats were always put back into their airy cotton bags to relax them. The whole ordeal took about 30 minutes per bat, and then they were released back into the dark night.All in all, the more than 12-hour workday would yield data from around 50 bats. Fifty. Only a small fraction of them will carry viruses. A drop in the ocean of the total viral diversity out there. Ratchaburi alone housed millions of bats; even if researchers sampled every day, it would take years to test just 1% of all the bats in this single cave. According to Alice Hughes, it is estimated that 90% of caves in Southeast Asia remain scientifically undescribed and uninventoried, while some estimate around 60% of bat species still remain to be discovered, with a staggering number of the bat species we know about having never been sequenced. These numbers can make one’s head swirl. Metaphorically, scientists only get to throw a small bucket into that endless ocean of viral diversity, and every time they catch a fish, it is a new species that is often related to a known one, sometimes completely unknown, but never the same thing. Viruses are not stable; they evolve, adapt, and burn out. To say scientists are merely “under-sampling” bats and viruses is almost a misleading euphemism. In reality, humanity is mostly flying blind in a viral universe, with only a handful of scientists even capable of catching glimpses of the true scope of our ignorance. For me, the visceral experience of our limitations in front of the vastness of nature belied the popular belief that the confusing SARS-CoV-2 chimera must somehow be man-made. Who truly understands what unique and dangerous viruses nature can come up with?“We are very limited in knowing nature,” Zhengli told me. “That is a problem. We are not ready.” Unfortunately, our ignorance cannot protect us from the Frankenviruses coming out of nature’s neglected gain-of-function laboratories. Zhengli was pessimistic about whether we know enough to stop other novel sarbecoviruses from causing an epidemic or even a pandemic. This is a scary reality. Zhengli, Peter, and Linfa had been sounding the alarm for years because they could see a bit beyond our current blindness to these risks.Yet, in stark contrast to our underappreciation of nature’s creativity, genetic engineering today is surrounded by scary myths of scientists’ supposed omnipotence. “Doctors in white coats doing things we would not even understand even if they made everything public,” Peter Daszak would say. He has a point. Virology is complicated and unintuitive. But as somebody who spent years trying to assemble a moderately complex viral vector—a traffic-light splicing sensor with two alternating reading frames—let me tell you: scientists working in virology have a very good idea about the type and complexity of “flask monsters” genetic engineers supposedly can conjure up in a lab. They do not compare to nature. Just because we can scribble with the language of biology does not mean we can speak it or understand its many nuances. A virus, birthed through countless trials and errors, evolutionary fast-forwards, and merciless competition against a trillion foes in a fast-paced niche environment, is like a perfect symphony. We can try to listen to it and learn from it; genetic engineers might even be able to copy-paste its genome into a lab to study it. But no genetic engineer in the world can yet come up with something even remotely like it.“I always say that making a recombinant virus is easy. But to make a virus like SARS-CoV-2 before nature came up with it is impossible.”Linfa Wang was very clear about this. Over the years, other virologists had told me the same thing. Viruses are complex biological machines that only show their true colors in action and interaction with their niche environment. SARS-CoV-2, as painstaking mechanistic research has uncovered over the years, has a lot more intricacies and tricks up its sleeves than the few oddities Prof. Kristian Andersen identified as potentially engineered in the early days. No engineer could have dreamt these hitherto unknown feats into SARS-CoV-2 before nature invented them. Everything we know about virology, evolution, genetic engineering, recombination, and bat ecosystems screams that this is a natural virus that was not tinkered with in a lab.This insight into the nature of the virus is something we can be confident about, given the knowledge and evidence we have today. All the questions, moral outrage, and media panic about gain-of-function research and genetic engineering in virology labs, no matter where one stands on these issues, are irrelevant to understanding the true origins of SARS-CoV-2. They are an emotional distraction to the scientific question of its emergence.That being said, a natural genome does not entirely preclude the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was brought to Wuhan by researchers, wittingly or unwittingly. After all, wasn’t Zhengli and her team collecting samples for years in Yunnan? Zhengli need not have created the virus to still be guilty of bringing it into the world, as her detractors would immediately pivot their accusations when I challenged them on their engineering fantasies. What if Zhengli secretly collected and cultivated a naturally evolved bat virus (to a level that could infect lab workers and subsequently escape)? A killer virus that was already “pandemic-ready” before it ever saw the inside of a lab? Or what if one of her researchers acquired an asymptomatic infection in the field working with bats, who then brought the “pandemic-ready” virus back to the city without notice? A natural virus does little to dispel these hard-to-refute allegations against her. Proving a negative—that something did not happen—is often impossible scientifically.With the Chinese authorities stonewalling any further investigations in Wuhan, what hope did Shi Zhengli or researchers in her lab ever have of clearing these accusations against them?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.Continue reading chapter 8 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.Continue reading chapter 7 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information.“They got a police escort to get us shoe shopping, and I basically wore a wedding dress… There are even photos in Pakistani newspapers… and I just thought, if I can give a talk wearing this, I can give a talk in anything.” Alice Hughes laughed wholeheartedly while I shook my head in giddy disbelief. It was a good day, which we both needed. She vividly recalled how she was culturally ambushed by her hosts on a day she was supposed to teach a course about spatial ecology in Pakistan in 2012. They needed her to put on a blue sari robe and traditional women’s shoes, which they could not find for her size anywhere in the city, despite chaperoning her through six shoe shops with a full police escort. This only came up because I had asked the renowned bat huntress about the most uncomfortable situation she had ever been in. She offered me this anecdote as an answer, which was telling in more ways than one.Dressed in worn-out hiking shoes, a light jean shirt, and carrying a massive backpack, the 38-year-old professor sitting in front of me looked slightly out of place for a posh cafe in Zurich. She was a member of the university faculty in Hong Kong, and she has done her best to break any stereotypes one might have about ivory tower academics and women in academia. Her name appears in over 190 publications at the time of writing, and her resume is much closer to that of an accomplished male peer at the end of his career than someone her age. She is an adventurer, a world traveler, and a force to be reckoned with. At 17, she was the only one in her group to not get sick in the Peruvian rainforest. Drug traffickers had held her at gunpoint in Paraguay on the Brazilian border when she was 21. She had ventured too far while exploring; her colleagues had already filed an international missing person’s report. All alone, without knowing a word of Portuguese, she somehow talked her way out of it. At 23, her PhD was not spent behind a desk but was colored by visiting some of the remotest places in Southeast Asia. Climbing through picturesque mountain ridges plastered by checkered corn fields in Vietnam, traversing untouched lakes in Malaysia by rowboat, venturing deep into tiny caves in Thailand, or wading through rainforest creeks in southern China, her every day seemed like a nature documentary if it weren’t for dramatic motorcycle accidents, horrible falls in caves, and broken bones on remote islands while fending off angry snakes in her bed.However, exploring hundreds of meters deep into low-oxygen caves, where some others never return, is her favorite way to spend her time. “Oh, remember the Thai cave where teenage football players got trapped by a flood that saw even a trained Navy Seal rescue diver die? Yeah, I was there too, kilometers deep.” She laughed again at my panicked expression. I would not be comfortable venturing into those narrow pits of darkness. Yet when I asked her about ever feeling some dread or panic on her trips, only the “Blue Sari Incident” came to her mind. Alice might not have worn a dress for the many years since (I quote: “I’m more comfortable in FieldKit even if it’s been soaked in cave water”), but she has explored hundreds of caves, captured thousands of bats, studied their ecosystems in more than a dozen countries, and continues to teach courses for students all over the world.She lived for discovering new species of bats, fungi, lizards, or cave spiders, snakes, and scorpions; protocoling glow worms hanging from the walls and undescribed flying squirrels from the jungle; sometimes petting the occasional red panda; or investigating trafficked animals like pangolins, moonrats, muntjacs, raccoon dogs, and civets. Even mapping karst geography, local ecology and recording climate parameters were part of her routine. There was simply nothing about the natural world that didn’t fascinate her, and that made her incredibly knowledgeable. It is impossible to come away from a conversation with her without knowing some new and fascinating animal trivia that one must vow to read up on more. She delighted at the thought of being in places few humans have ever set foot in before. At times, her career seems much closer to an Indiana Jones-style adventure revamp than what one might picture as the dry academic research of an ecologist. “You know, my father wanted me to get married and be a homemaker since I was three,” Alice recalled, followed by some joshing around. “You might see me squeeze through a lot of narrow spots, but fitting in the narrow box of convention is the one tight spot I cannot accommodate.” It was a hilarious and carefree afternoon, a welcome distraction from her grim last few years.After we sat down near the Zurich lakeside with ducks and swans gathering at our feet in hopes of a snack, I got her on a more serious note. Since she was eight, she wanted to be a conservationist. Listening to David Attenborough, Gerald Durrell, and other nature documentaries growing up in Great Britain, she remembered crying as a child about deforestation and habitat loss, about the unsustainable way we treated our planet. She lifted her hair behind her neck to pull up a modest necklace—a medallion with an extinct dodo on it, a sign of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust—that she received as a child. She has been wearing it ever since, a reminder and talisman of her childhood pledge to save as much of the world as she could. We are all idealistic and naive when we are young, but as we grow older, most of us seem to forget or give up. Alice appeared to have found another way via science. “People see idealism as something to grow out of, rather than finding a pragmatic way forward where you can instrumentalize elements of it.” For her, saving the planet starts with truly observing it in all its detail, diversity, and vastness: the beautiful and the curious, the dangerous and the unconventional, the boring, the nerdy, and the slimy. She was in the business of understanding and saving ecosystems, not just token species that capture our attention. That’s what gets her up in the morning. That’s why she ventures into the wild, equipped with a geolocation device, a laptop, and whatever specialized gear she might need for the expedition or sampling, from basics like lights and ropes to diving gear, harp nets, field lab equipment, and what one of my friends would call a “bat Shazam”—a custom-made recording device that captures the echolocation sounds and frequencies from bats. Every bat species makes its own unique sounds. Usually, she has to listen with her bat shazam to what species are around before she can get research funding and a permit from the authorities to sample them.Before the pandemic, she had finally found a place that would not get boring, even a second home, in Xishuangbanna—a large botanical garden and national park in the tropical Yunnan region of southern China. A biodiverse paradise nestled between green mountains with now-turquoise rivers cut out of the karst over the ages. A place of life and Chinese folk legends, and a hotbed for scientific collaborations. She was leading a team of 18 scientists, half of whom were bat researchers. She was a stable pillar of the small research community; her students loved her and came to her for advice. As one of the few female professors, she would also be a trailblazer and confidant for talented women in a male-dominated environment. Her publications often drew the jealousy of male peers, but her success and work ethic made her untouchable; many students from all over the world wanted to learn from her. And yet, one day, she had to leave it all behind.By the end of 2021, she left as quietly as she could, crossing the border by foot to Hong Kong because it was less controlled than the airports. She would not have made it out otherwise. She left with just a single piece of luggage and a backpack full of 34 hard drives loaded with her research data. She held her breath when she passed the last checkpoint—in China, moving has been severely limited—and finally crossed the border to a still-free Hong Kong. Her exit was planned in secret, with a new job already lined up, her official resignation timed to hand in right after the defense of her last PhD students, and leaving her open grants and tons of money behind at the institute so as to not ruffle any feathers and to ensure the jobs of the team she left behind. “It was hard. I had a successful group. I was really proud of my students. It just wasn’t safe anymore,” she told me soberly, but I could tell how much this place and its people had meant to her. Students were shell-shocked; one cried for six hours, and others tried to physically hold on to her, preventing her from leaving. But she had to go.Alice had been under surveillance by the Security Bureau for months. She did not know exactly how long, but it was likely before she and her group were baselessly arrested on a regular field trip to a cave on her institute’s grounds earlier that year, despite having the necessary permits to sample there. It was not the first encounter with the police, either. Starting around the middle of 2020, when her team was first taken to the local police station for questioning, it had become increasingly impossible to do her work. Authorities did not want her sampling bats there. Soon after, a regulation was passed that prohibited foreigners from conducting any field work or bat surveillance. But even before that, authorities would make up rules as to why her permits were suddenly invalid. “You never knew where it came from. Did they make it up? Or was it their bosses? Or the bosses of their bosses?” Towards the end of 2020, reporting by the Associated Press about her research sparked another escalation. It led the local authorities to wall up and barricade access to caves they had regularly surveyed for years. Categorical bans on talking to the foreign press were issued to the institute. WeChat messages would be deleted from her phone. In July 2021, a foreign national rule was implemented, prohibiting foreigners from visiting Yunnan. This rule included Alice’s partner at the time, who was based at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.Her own movement was also severely limited. “Foreign nationals who did live in Mengla needed a letter from HR with police permission every time we left,” she said, explaining to me how this contributed to her relationship coming to an untimely end. In China, traveling as a foreigner meant two weeks of forced quarantine in designated hotels. The last time Alice did this, in March 2020, it was in a downtrodden hotel with a wall entirely full of black mold and a rotten food supply, which led to others in quarantine being hospitalized. She refused to eat during this period and went into a type of shock. To finally be released after 14 days, she had to sign an agreement promising not to speak of any problems during quarantine. She didn’t want to go through something like that ever again. Censorship and threats were omnipresent. “Even talking just about COVID-adjacent work… I did get the State Security Bureau basically calling me up and questioning me extensively as a consequence.” The repression went so far that they weren’t even allowed to talk to the press about the literal elephants that walked through their institute’s garden because some authorities worried that even this might look “bad” for them. To me, it appeared that the authorities had only one message: any attention to this region was too much attention.Why was Beijing so afraid of foreign researchers in Yunnan? And what exactly had Alice gotten herself into?This all started because Alice had the unique talent and experience, or should I say misfortune, to be the right person, at the right place, and at the right time to figure out scientific clues to the origins of COVID-19. In early 2019, months before the pandemic started, she had collected some fateful samples from bats at a cave in Mengla County, which was basically her institute’s backyard, within the Xishuangbanna botanical garden in Yunnan Province. The samples were sent to a Chinese collaborator in Shandong, Northern China, for sequencing and analysis.On January 21, 2020, while on a trip to Buenos Aires, her phone started buzzing excitedly during the wait in the immigration line. WeChat messages kept popping up uncontrollably. The frenzy had started with her collaborator, Shi Weifeng, from the University of Shandong, who performed genomic sequencing and analysis for their project. “ALICE!!!... We sequenced your samples… found a very close relative of 2019-nCoV… We plan to run more analyses, but we want to write a paper quickly and submit it to Nature.” Alice recalled the gist of the wall of text that flew her way. The renowned scientific journal Nature represents the pinnacle for many life scientists, particularly Chinese researchers, who not only find publication in Nature prestigious, but it can also reap handsome rewards. Being first was important to getting into that journal. Weifeng had named the new bat betacoronavirus RmYN02 because the samples came from a horseshoe bat—Rhinolophus malayanus—in Yunnan. They wanted to write it up and publish it within 10 days. RmYN02 was strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in bats, similar to SARS-1. A big deal discovery.However, a mere two days after that hopeful conversation, they got scooped. Someone published a similar finding before them—none other than Shi Zhengli, who released her RaTG13 analysis, claiming the exact same thing: SARS-CoV-2 originally came from bats. Those few days made all the difference. While Weifeng and Alice’s findings remained mostly obscure to the public, Zhengli’s paper—published in Nature—would open Pandora’s box of attention and unhinged abuse for her. I wonder how it would have turned out if Weifeng and Alice’s team had been first. In all that furor that followed about WIV having the closest viral ancestor with 96.2% similarity, nobody but a few researchers cared that RmYN02 was actually much closer to SARS-CoV-2 for about two-thirds of the whole genome, with a similarity of 97.2% sequence identity. But because RmYN02 diverged a lot more than RaTG13 for that last third of the genome, including the spike and RBD, the overall similarity for the whole genome was just 93.3% compared to RaTG13’s 96.2%. Alice’s “partially the closest ancestor” did not sound as sexy or relevant in media coverage, but it was incredibly important from a scientific perspective. Just as the pangolin viruses had a key receptor binding domain much closer than what Kristian Andersen ever found within a lab, Alice’s new virus from Yunnan showed that yet another genetic puzzle piece—this time the largest of them all—was to be found outside, not inside, of a lab. RmYN02 discovery, if nothing else, would be the unequivocal proof that SARS-CoV-2 was not made or derived from RaTG13, contrary to what many conspiracy theorists suggested at the time. For a long time, I did not understand that argument until I learned about the importance of viral recombination for coronavirus evolution.Early in 2020, RmYN02 was found to have another explosive genetic feature that would shed light on the origins of the pandemic. Coincidentally, this discovery would also dramatically change the minds of the “proximal origin” virologists in the West, who would later be falsely portrayed in conspiracy myths as having been “coerced” by Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. For scientists, only compelling evidence is coercive, and the discovery of RmYN02 provided the necessary illumination into the murky oddities of the new virus’s genome.SARS-CoV-2 seemed so very special because of the “suspicious” insertion of a furin cleavage site (FCS) in the very narrow S1/S2 region of the spike gene. The fact that it looked artificially inserted was a bit of a fluke. No other previously sampled relatives had these extra amino acids in that position, so any alignment and comparison to other SARS-related viruses made it stand out like a llama in a flock of sheep. Until RmYN02, that is. This particular bat virus also contained a rather reminiscent insertion in the exact same position. While RmYN02’s insertion did not form a full polybasic cleavage site, it nevertheless showed that in what was supposed to be a homogeneous flock of viral sheep, there were at least some alpacas, too. Found again in nature—no human intervention required. Since those early days, scientists have discovered all kinds of insertions in that genetic region, making it clear that SARS-CoV-2’s sequence oddity in that S1/S2 region was indeed not that special. We constantly underestimate the diversity nature can come up with. The discovery of RmYN02 was among first hard clue toward unraveling the mystery of the FCS, as well as a strong argument for natural evolution rather than human design being its originator.News travels fast among experts. It might not be surprising at this point, but Shi Weifeng, Alice’s collaborator, had good contacts with Western scientists. He did a sabbatical in 2017—an academic semester abroad—with none other than Prof. Eddie Holmes. Since the start of the outbreak, the two had been involved in a different project about early patient genome sequences with Dr. George Gao from the Chinese CDC. On the eve of February 24, 2020, Weifeng reached out to Eddie Holmes to discuss this one bat virus they found in Yunnan and what it could tell about the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2. He sent Eddie a draft of their RmYN02 analysis. Eddie, already primed from his ongoing work and discussions about the “proximal origin” paper, immediately spotted the partial insertions at the S1/S2 boundary. Hours later, he messaged his coauthors the early draft of Weifang’s paper along with just one word: “Discuss.”“Holy crap - that’s amazing,” Robert Garry could not help but blurt out first. Kristian Andersen, still dogged about keeping the possibility of a lab leak open, said that this was no polybasic cleavage site, but it certainly provided a mechanism for how the FCS came about. “I think this lends pretty strong support for an animal origin of the ‘confusing’ features of the virus [SARS-COV-2] … It shows that the virus likes to ‘mess around’ in this part of its genome, that is pretty important knowledge.” Andrew Rambaut weighed in about how one could get to a furin cleavage site using RmYN02 by just simulating a few deletions. Eddie explained that RmYN02 is the closest ancestor for certain parts of its genome, so clearly some recombination—the exchange of genetic elements between viruses—was going on with SARS-CoV-2. After a bit of back and forth, Kristian Andersen again said, “It does not rule out lab infection/release… However, there are now no more ‘mysteries’ to explain… We see the optimized RBD in pangolins and parts of the furin site in bats (which is pretty cool!!!).” Eddie Holmes concurred, saying, “I am now strongly in favor of a natural origin.”Soon after, they would submit a revised version of their “proximal origin” paper to the journal Nature Medicine, being firmer in their conclusions. RmYN02 was, to the best the experts could tell, a major contribution to figuring out the much larger story behind how SARS-CoV-2 came about. Other contributions would later follow, from none other than Alice Hughes yet again. She had managed to collect four more close relatives in late 2019 and early 2020 before the mantle of silence was thrown over Yunnan, her work, and ultimately herself. Over the next eighteen months, doing science not only became impossible but a liability. Her illuminating results became a sin not easily forgiven by an authoritarian state that had decided by April 2020 that it was politically smarter to keep others and itself in the dark. How did we get here?§As the public health crisis unfolded in the West, the Trump administration’s political fortunes increasingly relied on putting their own pandemic failings on China. Scarlett, the so-called bioweapon whistleblower, wasn’t the only one to succeed in the very crowded field or even be the only one entangled with the Trump administration. It is impossible to outline all the plots, ploys, or players involved in shaping public perception. But after we learned how influencers and media manipulators operate, I think it is illustrative to focus on some events that directly sabotaged science and have rippled forward even into the present.Take the White Coat Waste Project, a niche activist and political pressure group until 2020, founded in 2013 by former Republican strategist Anthony Bellotti. Anthony reportedly had spent years working on efforts to defund Planned Parenthood—a non-profit for reproductive health care—and Obamacare—the health care insurance system President Barack Obama set up. His real passion, however, was animal protection. At least that’s how he portrayed himself to Buzzfeed News, who later worked up most of his story. Anthony’s idea was to win Republicans over for animal welfare, traditionally more of a progressive issue in the US, by reframing the topic as a problem of undue big government funding. The White Coat Waste Project would serve as a “taxpayer watchdog uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers” and put pressure on government labs. Using FOIA requests to investigate governmental labs, the activist group would seek information they could abuse for their agenda. They often combined libertarian and anti-communist coding to appeal to Republican ideologues. For example, with sensationalist reports such as “USDA Kitten cannibalism” superimposed over a Chinese flag and the NIH headquarters, Anthony Belotti had a knack for combining suggestive headlines and shocking imagery with cherry-picked numbers. His policy recommendations, however, were always the same: defund all animal research.On the one hand, the idea that some US government funding was sent to WIV was not exactly new. Every scientific study coming out of this collaboration publicly acknowledged the fact that WIV received US government funds. No FOIA requests were needed for that. Even pretty ignorant conspiracy theorists had figured out this connection between NIAID, EcoHealth Alliance, and WIV within days in late January, including the correct grant identifiers. Scientific collaborations tend to span the globe, connecting researchers in every major city and most minor cities with each other internationally, especially if they work in the same field. The fact that some grant funding was shared was not exactly newsworthy, at least in the hands of amateurs. Anthony Bellotti, on the other hand, can be fairly described as an experienced activist with deep connections to the highest offices, and he was sitting on precise financial figures for some grants from numerous FOIA requests he had filed in the past. An opportunity presented itself to put White Coat Waste on the political map. Together with US Congressman Matt Gaetz, a long-time collaborator, he convinced reporters at the gossipy British tabloid the Daily Mail, already deeply steeped in conspiratorial narratives, as well as the Washington Examiner, a DC-based right-wing outlet, to cover his story of how US taxpayers funded “dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute,” an eye-catching allegation.The same day the newspapers put out their story, his activist group used the media coverage they had instigated to petition US Senator Marco Rubio to put pressure on the NIH to stop “financing China.” Less than four days later, a partisan reporter lined up a question about the NIH’s grant for WIV at the Trump press conference. Peter Daszak remembered this moment vividly. He was in the kitchen with his family, the TV playing in the background. Suddenly, he told them to be quiet. Trump had just publicly announced, “We looked at this just an hour ago. We will end that grant very quickly.” A week later, National Institute of Health leaders officially terminated the grant, a move that was not well received by NIH staff, who expressed their disgust at the decision. Shutting down essential pandemic prevention research during a pandemic?Peter Daszak was not the only one flabbergasted. Many other scientists were equally disturbed that research that had been exceptionally highly rated in peer review and that was directly related to the pandemic could be canceled with a stroke of a pen, at the whim of an erratic president. It rippled through the scientific community, prompting 77 Nobel laureates to come together in the next week and write a scathing letter to the NIH and the health secretary. Another rift between science and society opened by politics. Because the termination was basically illegal, the NIH had to begrudgingly reinstate the grant, but any money flows were suspended immediately until EcoHealth Alliance arranged an outside investigation into WIV. This was an absurd requirement for a non-profit; they simply did not have the power or mandate to demand anything from the Chinese government.While EcoHealth Alliance would struggle to exist from this day forward, the White Coat Waste Project has since become a household name in Republican circles. Later, White Coat Waste would participate in what I would characterize as smear campaigns against Dr. Fauci and garner influential supporters with deep political ties on their advisory board; such as the ex-State Department advisor David Asher who would be instrumental in seeding other false lab leak stories through the Trump State Department. It seems to me that Anthony Bellotti had long aimed for popularity, persuasion, profit, and power. Sharing deeply decontextualized information with overt emotional framing is what made it happen for him. Such is the attention economy.However, I believe there is an important thing to be learned from this episode, one that many who documented the rise of this activist group have missed. Before using the lab leak narrative to further their goals, White Coat Waste made several attempts to exploit the attention of the outbreak for personal gain, as political activist organizations tend to do. On March 24th and April 10th, 2020—before they landed the viral media hit about the Wuhan lab funding—White Coat Waste attempted similar-quality fabrications, claiming that US taxpayer money was funding the Chinese wet markets that caused the pandemic. Given the animal cruelty at those wet markets, this was much closer to their hearts. Yet somehow, those narratives just didn’t have the same media impact. Only a laboratory-focused blame story exploded onto the world stage and into the US president’s mind. There surely seems to be an asymmetry in our algorithmically empowered social networks when it comes to what type of content will go viral or not. For certain people—usually those in power—the information sphere somehow seems to always deliver the right story.As the first COVID-19 wave ravaged US cities, the need for the Trump administration to blame China was dire, but his assertions lacked any credibility. Another opportunist, the Trump-friendly columnist Josh Rogin, writing for The Washington Post, leveraged an old memo from a diplomatic visit in 2018 to the Wuhan Institute. He wrote an inflammatory opinion article based on this diplomatic communication about the supposed lack of lab safety. The story was exceptionally well crafted, basically claiming that diplomatic cables warned the US government about serious issues with WIV BSL-4 lab safety and management weaknesses while performing dangerous research. He backed up the story with damning quotes and a lot of paraphrases. Because the cables Rogin referenced were confidential, it would take months to realize that reportedly, he had skillfully decontextualized the quotes therein, as well as the overall content, to tell a very different story than what was actually in those cables.The diplomatic visit to WIV was in the context of “planning for a potential visit by Trump and actively looking for positive collaborative efforts that Trump could point to,” Peter Daszak explained to me. In short, they were in preparation for a PR stunt. Peter had seen this many times before with the prestigious PREDICT project, and the visit was to be arranged by USAID and NIH personnel embedded in the embassy. The US had already funded WIV with some grants, and scientific collaborations make for good diplomacy. Chinese researchers hoped that if they explained how they have a fully accredited lab that they cannot use at full capacity because of a “shortage of talent to safely operate,” it would spawn further collaborations with the US and maybe invite researchers to come work with them. It was basically a “come to our cutting-edge facility; we have plenty of space” advertisement. They might even acquire more funding from the US and international organizations to hire more talent for more experiments. The diplomatic cables clearly outlined this context, but Josh Rogin just focused on the “serious shortage” quote that would not allow the lab to operate safely (at full capacity), which seems like an outright omission and the manipulation of his readers. His so-called “biosafety issues” were, however, the substantiation many needed to raise the issue of a laboratory-origin virus again, including the Trump administration.These supposed revelations were deeply impactful, even causing scientists like Kristian Andersen to second-guess themselves. After Rogin’s reporting, which came with the seal of credibility from The Washington Post, Kristian instigated another round of discussion with his coauthors about whether they had missed something in their proximal origin paper. “If they had bad biosafety, it’s just so friggin’ likely something leaked,” a slack message to colleagues expressed his intuition at the time. He had no reason to distrust the reporting. Why else would The Washington Post publish something with such confidence if they did not have the evidence to back it up? I guess most citizens, including scientists, did not appreciate that when the narrative need for the powerful is dire, the information sphere tends to deliver.Of course, the powerful have many avenues at their disposal to manipulate the news cycle. As the Trump administration came under more criticism for their mishandling of the pandemic, they quietly enlisted the help of a New York City-based consulting group called O’Donnell & Associates. The “solutions-focused government relations firm” wore only a thin veneer of a consultancy. Best I can tell, they were political fixers, a kind of one-stop-shop for lobbying, procurement, public affairs, crisis management, strategic media relations, and political strategy. By April 17th, they had distributed their “Corona Big Book,” a document full of political talking points that should get GOP politicians in lockstep with the administration. The executive summary included just three short key messages to be constantly repeated: “China caused this pandemic by covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world’s supply of medical equipment. My opponent is soft on China, fails to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party, and can’t be trusted to take them on. I will stand up to China, bring our manufacturing jobs back home, and push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.” After that memo, the president, sitting congressmen, senators, administration officials, and a cottage industry of pundits and outlets, from Breitbart to Fox News and everything in between, would make these talking points their priority. The “Corona Big Book” also provided instructions on what politicians should do when faced with media criticism of the Trump administration’s pandemic failures: “Note - Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China.” Of course, the consultants knew that admitting mistakes and trying to defend Trump’s pandemic conduct and handling was a losing strategy in a critical election year. Going on the offensive was the only way out. That is human psychology, maybe even biology: nothing mobilizes the tribe better than attacking a shared enemy.For a long time, scapegoating China has been a crowd-pleaser in the US, and a shared enemy brings more than just some strange bedfellows. Take, for example, the Epoch Media Group and its many affiliates. The Falun Gong-aligned organization is best described as an anti-communist influence operation, a deep-pocketed propaganda tool that had fallen out of relevance for a long time. When COVID hit, they seized on the opportunity to regain that relevance with wall-to-wall coverage about the “CCP virus,” which was happily amplified by the American right. Much of their shady success story has been worked up by excellent journalists working for The Atlantic and The Guardian. “They’ve been waiting for so long to find some large-scale evidence of the abject villainy of China,” explained a disillusioned former employee to the journalists. He was a source inside the New Tang Dynasty—the TV arm of the Falun Gong-founded propaganda outlet broadcasting in 70 countries. On April 7, 2020, New Tang Dynasty and The Epoch Times released a well-produced, but horribly false, documentary called “Tracking down the origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus”. It featured several credentialed but fringe figures, such as Judy Mikovits, a long-time discredited anti-vaccine activist and later “Plandemic” conspiracy theorist. Accordingly, the documentary took up many half-baked ideas from conspiratorial communities that have festered since the end of January 2020, from HIV sequences to Canadian spies to supposed vaccine patent myths.This “origin” documentary made a particular point about recycling falsehoods about Shi Zhengli and her American collaborators, such as Ralph Baric, a renowned virologist working with coronaviruses. It also recycled some spurious claims about Chinese military connections and directly stated that Shi Zhengli’s lab was working on bioweapons. According to Angelo Carusone from the non-profit organization Media Matters, such opportunistic retreading of existing conspiracy narratives is characteristic of the Epoch Times and similar outlets. “They’re not drivers, they’re not weaving new conspiracy theories, they’re amplifying what’s already out there,” he said in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. “There’s an incredible demand for a version of the world centered on one big villain,” he told the reporter. The Epoch Times “provides that very simple narrative.” If its lucrative conspiratorial fabrications helped foster resentment against China while serving the Republican Party, all the better. The Epoch Times grew its “revenue by 685% in just two years” on the back of their COVID-19 conspiracy content, an NBC investigation would later report. Conspiracy myths are cash cows in the attention economy, after all.Predictably, the well-produced Epoch Times “origins” documentary went viral, garnering millions of views on the video platform YouTube alone. Unfortunately, this mattered. For a long time, YouTube has served as a recruitment tool for conspiratorial communities because its curation algorithms and recommender systems learned that the best way to maximize engagement was to drive people down rabbit holes. What is mostly harmless when it comes to entertainment, music, or education is nevertheless a boon for manipulators. A well-produced video on a topic serves as a well-lit gateway into an ecosystem of smaller, more radical niche content that would never have been found otherwise.Our susceptibility to conspiratorial beliefs exists on a spectrum. While most people would not be taken in, for a subset of individuals, a documentary like this might pique their interest enough to look deeper into the topic. All while algorithmic systems dutifully deliver up whatever is needed to satisfy our confirmation bias. Soon, susceptible citizens are nudged to follow up with more videos, more blogs, more Reddit posts, etc., until they eventually become trapped in false beliefs. Just like Scarlett had been a funnel into the Guo-verse, The Epoch Times “origin” documentary drove curious viewers into an alternative media ecosystem with the help of YouTube’s engagement algorithm, creating a willing audience segment for more related content.On top of that, The Epoch Times documentary and similar works of conspiratorial fiction also served another important purpose. In its 54 minutes of collecting and amplifying currently circulating conspiracy myths, it created a shared set of alternative facts from which to create spin-offs. With its popular success, a willing community of online creators started producing content for this very specific, conspiratorial niche market. The “lab leak myth-entertainment complex” was born. And demand for influencers who delivered content for it was rising fast.Like pandemics before it, COVID-19 was always expected to inspire the birth of fear-based narratives and conspiracy myths. But what event in human history has ever seen more attention than a worldwide health crisis paired with a geopolitical blame game between two superpowers about who caused it? Glued to our screens and in need of pandemic-relevant information, many citizens not only witnessed the show but felt somewhat invested, or were at least interested, in the outcome.Soon, on every social media network, from YouTube and Reddit to WhatsApp and WeChat to Facebook and Twitter, virtually everywhere, independent man-made content creators saw an increase in their popularity, followers, and demand. With it, something quite interesting happened. Market competition. Some influencers got bored of the Trump-associated pundits and MAGA machinery dominating the lab leak narrative when they had much, much richer stories to tell that would resonate with different audiences. After all, wherever there is popular demand for a hot take, there is also power.One of the most vocal and influential conspiratorial communities found in opposition to the “natural” origin of COVID-19 was a group of mostly anonymous Twitter amateurs, wannabe investigators, and internet sleuths who fell a bit too deep down the rabbit hole. Supposedly trying to uncover the truth about what really happened in Wuhan, they had spent months googling their way through the internet for answers. Right-wing blogs, scientific databases, Chinese papers, and researcher affiliations were scrutinized with the hope of trying to connect the dots to uncover a gigantic cover-up conspiracy. The fact that most of their theories were mutually contradictory was not as important as finding supposed plot holes in the “official narrative.” In a sleuthing practice sometimes called “anomaly hunting,” these motivated conspiracy theorists would look for unexplained coincidences, trivial errors, or—to be completely honest—anything that seemed unintuitive to their understanding as evidence of their deeply felt suspicions. The fact that BtCoV-4991—an earlier partial sequencing of the virus now known as RaTG13 after the full genome sequencing by Shi Zhengli’s group—was identical to the closest ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 had puzzled them for months. Did Zhengli hide the real ancestor of SARS-CoV-2? Was RaTG13 real or made up? Where did BtCoV-4991 even come from?By April 2020, when the lab leak advocates from the US government and right-wing media to the anti-CCP Chinese diaspora and Indian nationalists were in dire need of new material, media manipulators went fishing for clues and new stories on Twitter. Soon, headlines such as “Is Bat coronavirus 4991 a smoking gun for China’s COVID-19 cover-up?” would find a willing audience and elevate random Twitter sleuths to their minute of fame. Around this time, social media-savvy journalists and influencers alike paid close attention to possible lab leak scoops to boost their profiles, too.By May 2020, a group of like-minded conspiracy theorists had found another and combined forces under the acronym DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19), a self-proclaimed sleuth collective with the self-prescribed mission to independently investigate the origins of COVID. When an Indian teacher, known by the handle “TheSeeker268,” uncovered (read: found on a publicly accessible Chinese website) a 2016 Chinese PhD thesis, all hell broke loose. It was from one of George Gao’s students, Huang Canping, who described BtCoV-4991 and said that it was collected from an abandoned copper mine shaft in Yunnan after miners came down with a deadly illness. Soon, DRASTIC knew what to google next: mainly contemporary reports from 2014 about the deaths of the miners and how Zhengli’s team went to the mine because the suspicion had been a coronavirus. What a coincidence—finding the closest ancestor (they knew about) related to this pandemic with mysterious deaths of the past! For many conspiracy theorists, this “undisclosed connection” was finally proof that the official narrative was wrong, and in their furor, they would start attacking Peter Daszak on Twitter. The zoologist, ever in the media since the public cancellation of his grant funding, had become the Western stand-in for Zhengli, who did not frequent any Western social media. Naively, Peter would try to argue on Twitter and correct the record as best he could, but arguing with true believers just makes them more obsessed with defending their beliefs and more likely to double down. For them, Peter was defending her, so it must mean that he was in on the cover-up, too. His life would take a similar trajectory to hers soon enough.In the meantime, the “dead miners” idea would provide a treasure trove for further myth-making for vocal DRASTIC members. Most of them were spending countless hours a day creating arguments, screenshots, personal analyses, and similar content while throwing doubt on the “official narrative” or swarming the comments of virologists and picking fights with them publicly. Soon, some Twitter bystanders, a group enriched with bloggers, journalists, and other amplifiers in need of constant scoops, would follow them down the rabbit hole, opening the door to even more mainstream media interest. With their sensationalist stories about the secret COVID-19-Yunnan connection came unwelcome real-life consequences for scientists on the ground.This brings us back to how Alice Hughes’s work in Yunnan and how her whole life was uprooted. As the pandemic’s impact worsened—and the constant media drumbeat and political environment made sure Beijing would never get a fair hearing on the origin issue—obfuscation and deflection were likely the only plays that Beijing felt it had. “At first, everyone was out there looking for an answer,” Alice explained. “And then it became apparent that no matter what answer we found, the world was not going to listen. The outcome they wanted was ‘Let’s blame China’.”Discovering SARS-CoV-2-related viruses in Yunnan looked bad for Beijing. Taking cues from their geopolitical adversaries and ideological enemies, scientists and inconvenient science would subsequently be attacked on both sides of the Pacific. As mentioned before, scientists tend to have an allegiance to the truth, not the state, which makes them inherently suspect to politicians. A liability. What other undesired discoveries would they make? Initially welcomed, scientific efforts to shed light on the origin of COVID-19 were now seen as a potential threat to the larger party narrative. These tensions between inconvenient scientific reality and politically motivated fictions only deepened as time progressed. It wouldn’t take long for scientists to find themselves on the wrong team when conducting the type of research that was Alice Hughes’s specialty—research that could actually uncover the true origin of COVID-19 in China.One has to understand that Beijing was not only threatened geopolitically by origin science but also domestically. During the lockdown in Wuhan, China’s ruling party came under increasing pressure to deal with the fallout of the virus. Catastrophic images of people sealed into buildings, the death of Li Wenliang, the doctor-whistleblower reprimanded for sharing a first lab report about the virus in late December, and the starvation of a disabled teenager because supplies could not be arranged or delivered—it all merged together to provoke an unprecedented national outpouring of grief and anger at authorities. A cacophony of misery is often a fuse for political change and an existential threat to the regime. For Beijing, it meant it had to do everything in its power to deflect blame and reassert control of public sentiment again, using tried-and-tested propaganda about foreign enemies and Chinese victimhood to unite its people. Taking any responsibility for the pandemic, even acknowledging it started in China, quickly became unthinkable politically.Alice Hughes recalled that in the beginning, people were allowed to say the outbreak started in Wuhan and at the Huanan market. The authorities wanted bat researchers like her to go out and find the cause of the “natural catastrophe” that was the outbreak. “All efforts, all teams across China were incentivized to look more at wildlife, and no work on bio-surveillance of fur farms, etc. was done… because they wanted to find a ‘blameless reason’ initially,” Alice explained to me. From day one, looking too closely at the wildlife trade or smuggling industry was dangerous. But a few months after the pandemic started, under pressure from outside and inside China, finding a blameless reason for the outbreak became increasingly impossible. Panicked, the ruling elite needed to point away from its own failings at any cost. Yet having what appeared to be a repeat of SARS-1—possibly because of the often-illegal wildlife trade (trade in those markets even of exotic wildlife can be legal with the right permissions, which are however often lacking in reality) at wet markets that was allowed to persist under their noses—certainly looked bad for the authorities. Despite early acknowledgments by the Chinese CDC—which wrote on January 22, 2020, about how their investigation found that wildlife trade at the Huanan market existed and that this was “highly suspected” to be related to the current epidemic—any mentions about these activities at the market would soon be promptly removed from social media by censors and banned from the press. The state-controlled media apparatus rather opted to sow doubt, deflect blame, and support any absurd origin theory that deflected from the illegal wildlife trade at the market, a scattershot strategy that science journalist Jon Cohen would aptly call “anywhere but here.” Chinese authorities also cooled down dramatically on supporting any related bat research that could lead to inconvenient findings.“During the pandemic, people became extremely risk-averse,” Alice Hughes explained. With the pressure to not contradict the official narrative, self-censorship and shutting down activities that could unearth inconvenient data took over in Chinese society. A lot was at stake when not trotting the party line, especially for local politicians.“Now, if you are that government official, you do not want to be blamed; you do not want to go to jail, so the easiest way to protect yourself is to put blocks in place.”Alice said. Blocks to research, blocks to scientists’ movement, blocks to information flow with respect to anything and anyone that might make them look bad. According to Alice, the only way out for local authorities, as well as Beijing, was trying “to not let this inconvenient information be generated in the first place.”This is when things escalated for Alice. By the summer of 2020, her team had already identified four additional closely related cousins of SARS-CoV-2 in wild bats. The first time her team was brought into the police station for questioning about their sampling in Yunnan was when the RaTG13-dead miners’ story first surged in Western media. A few months after the story appeared in the media, Western and Chinese journalists tried to gain access to the copper mine in Yunnan, much to the ire of local authorities. A team of international correspondents would be blocked by a quickly arranged roadblock using cars on the street. The Western press lavished on that incident, with John Sudworth from the BBC being first with his story titled “Bats, roadblocks and the origin of coronavirus,” pushing the idea of a cover-up in Yunnan to the world stage. To them, obfuscation was proof that the Chinese were hiding something in that region.Being blocked from the mine did not stop their search for a sensationalist story in the region, raising the temperature with authorities even further. Unfortunately, this culminated in some Western journalists opting to break into Alice’s institute and interrogate her bat researchers while she was not around. Their recklessness brought Alice into a very dangerous position, whom authorities now suspected her as a foreigner of coordinating, or even inviting, these investigations by foreign journalists. “There are a lot of dishonest journalists out there who just want to tell their story.” She lamented how the press often treated her, using cherry-picked half-quotes that sound damning without the necessary context and caveats. Even worse for Alice, these journalists acted without regard for the consequences their behavior had on scientists in China. Alice has been under surveillance by the State Security Bureau ever since. It became impossible for her to speak up while in China. The journalists swarming to Yunnan, with various innuendo-laden and ignorant stories about alleged cover-ups, prompted Beijing and local authorities to restrict and silence any and all information coming from its southern province.“The same thing has happened in Russia and China for decades. This is how these countries operate. And that means even if there is nothing to cover up, because of that risk adversity and need to control the narrative, that is how it operates”Alice shared her perspective. For the outside world, the restrictions in Yunnan looked suspicious, even like an admission of guilt. It gave credence and power to that particular “dead-miners” lab-leak conspiracy myth. But isn’t that story also a bad outcome for Beijing? Well, not necessarily. Let’s look a bit deeper.Interestingly, while a mantle of silence would be thrown over the wildlife trade, bat sampling, and, ultimately, the whole of Yunnan, the notoriously censorious government would not suppress conspiracy myths about WIV. We can only speculate as to the exact reason, but if Alice were to hedge a bet, it was because these myths were perfect for Beijing to use as a prime example of malicious foreigners making baseless accusations. “Within China, any suggestion of a bioweapon was basically pushed back, with Fort Detrick and the military games being the source. It was looked at from the outset as the West trying to blame China without evidence,” Alice recalled. Absurd bioweapon allegations from abroad reinforced the perception among Chinese citizens that they would be unfairly blamed no matter what; it made the propaganda of Chinese victimhood feel true. Emotions are important for shaping beliefs and worldviews. For Beijing, the only perception that truly counted for the stability of the regime was that of its own citizens, not foreigners. They realized the lab-origin idea, with a little tweak to the location, was working in their favor.Politically, Beijing’s gamble worked. Today, a majority of Chinese citizens still believe that the virus likely originated in an American lab and was brought to Wuhan during an event in October, while others remain suspicious about the US-funded lab in Wuhan. Either way, the US was involved, and few believe that Beijing could have done much to prevent it. Overall, it was silly and reactionary finger-pointing, reminiscent of the Trump administration. But I guess geopolitical blame games are a two-way street that governments are very comfortable with, at least more comfortable than taking responsibility for their numerous pandemic failings.Meanwhile, Chinese scientists felt the cold grip of rapidly increasing repression surrounding any research that could find something unwelcome or be construed as non-patriotic. The Chinese Academy of Science and the Health Bureau soon began demanding strict oversight over any and all papers, as well as exerting vetoes on publications, collaborations, and data sharing. The public’s right to know was irrelevant to CCP leaders; it seems to me that what mattered to them was not being held or seen responsible for the devastating pandemic. If that meant that some innocent scientists like Shi Zhengli were taking the brunt of the public’s frustrations, that was collateral damage they likely could live with.With every passing day, abuse and harassment directed at ‘the Batwoman’ became dramatically worse. Hundreds of hacking attempts to break into the institute’s servers prompted the takedown of a viral database. Zhengli was worried about the integrity of her data, but that database takedown in February provided just more ammunition for conspiracy theorists around the world.The Twitter group DRASTIC went so far as to claim the database was taken down shortly before the pandemic in an attempt to cover up that Zhengli was working on multiple SARS-CoV-2-related viruses, but that is not factual. Today, we know that Shi Zhengli was not hiding any viral sequences, partly through her own publications and partly through a lucky coincidence—forgotten sequences from an unpublished manuscript from 2018 resurfaced in 2022 from behind an embargo. It showed that she did not possess anything closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 and was not interested in this distant clade of viruses because they were just not related enough to SARS-1. In the fifteen years she has spent hunting for coronaviruses, she only ever found one virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2, and that was in that mine in Yunnan. She found just enough damaged RNA leftover in the bat anal swab sample to run full genome sequencing. That the RaTG13 sequence in her computer would be taken as proof of her guilt, while Alice Hughes’s team was not only sitting on a partially closer ancestor but also a handful of other closely related viral family members they had just sampled in China that year from bats in the wild, is likely one of the great ironies of our ignorant times.Despite living in the information age, with an incredible amount of knowledge at our fingertips, we seem less and less capable of making sense of our world. The idea that some live-action role-playing investigators on Twitter—with no expertise and obvious conspiratorial ideations—had any insights to offer on a scientific mystery should raise a lot of red flags. Indeed, serious journalists could see that these were anonymous amateurs who had no credibility and were not trustworthy. But somehow, they were amplified anyway because they provided stories that were both popular with audiences and served the interests of certain powerful actors. However, news outlets with a reputation for quality were still reluctant to jump on the lab leak narrative. What they truly needed was a more presentable face and a credible background to sell those stories to their audiences. They didn’t have to wait long because, also for them, the information age always seems to deliver.Reminiscent of the trajectory of the ambitious bioweapon whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan, another ambitious postdoc named Dr. Alina Chan would soon rise to the occasion. After respectable work for her PhD in yeast genetics, Alina moved to Harvard Medical School, working on methods to transfer large chunks of genetic material from yeast to mammalian cell culture. After three years with no first-author publication, she switched labs to a group at the Broad Institute, another prestigious place affiliated with both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, it appears to me that her struggles for impact continued because in these cutting-edge environments, one either gets lucky and makes a name for oneself or is eventually pushed out of academia. Success seemingly did not come fast enough. Alina was already weighing her options and branching out, serving in an advisory role on a longevity start-up company working on human artificial chromosomes for the last 6 months of 2019 I would learn. However, this ran out as well. With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, new opportunities arose.It was fantastic to see in real-time how half of the world’s biology laboratories wanted to help with COVID-19. What is less spoken about, however, is how many of those research groups lacking historical expertise added to a flood of substandard and flawed preprints, even from renowned labs. And while peer review typically weeds out most flawed preprints, in hectic times, journalists and the public have jumped the gun again and again, amplifying flawed analyses such as the alleged HIV-insertions from Indian researchers that went viral in the media. Equally bad is when sensationalist media coverage and the current news cycle are used by researchers to inform their project ideas.Alina Chan’s preprint started with a flawed assumption based on contemporary reporting at the time that SARS-CoV-2 seemed not to mutate much in the beginning. Today, of course, we know this idea was rubbish, having seen this virus evolve in real-time and suffer through the various variant waves, from alpha to delta to omicron, sweeping the world. But at the time, with limited sequencing data, bad inferences were easily made by the countless makeshift virologists of the moment. Alina Chan and her two coauthors apparently thought that by making a side-by-side comparison of the genetic diversity of a handful of genomes from SARS-CoV-2 to a handful from the first SARS cases, the stability of mutations could somehow be estimated, and conclusions about evolutionary dynamics could be drawn. They claimed to have discovered a striking result: while the SARS virus had adapted rapidly to humans, no such adaptation happened in SARS-CoV-2, thus the latter must have somehow been already adapted for humans. Where this adaptation happened could not be said for certain. Since at least March, Alina had been quite intrigued by the idea that a laboratory leak was responsible, at least from her social media comments. In her preprint, she suggested that the virus “adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely”—words that would make much hay in the press later.Good science establishes the facts first before coming to the interpretation, and her “facts” did not hold up. In my opinion, the problems with her preprint ultimately boil down to trivial mistakes and inexperience, as is not unusual for newcomers to a field. Her approach was like comparing apples to oranges because she did not familiarize herself enough with the scientific literature of SARS. By the time SARS spilled over to cause an outbreak that made people notice, it had already diversified its genome for months in animals.“The first eleven cases of SARS-CoV-1 were geographically dispersed across a wide area from Foshan to Dongguan in the Pearl River Delta area of southern China and occurred over a 4-month period from November 2002 to March 2003”, Robert Garry, a CoV virologist from Tulane University, would dryly note in response to her preprint. “None of these eleven cases were epidemiologically linked. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that SARS-CoV-1 from these human cases had a common viral ancestor from a human.” He elaborated further that SARS did not “rapidly adapt” to humans, but rather those observed cases had a higher genetic diversity because a diverse set of SARS viruses spilled over from an animal population—thus were introduced repeatedly to humans, seven of the 11 being wildlife traders—many independent times over months. Dr. Chan made a dramatic scientific error in modeling these early SARS cases as patients being related to each other—coming from the same introduction event—when they were not. Thus, it appeared to her that the SARS mutation rate was hypercharged from one patient to the next rather than just a flawed comparison.Her next mistake was assuming that, because SARS had supposedly been adapting “rapidly” compared to SARS-CoV-2, it follows that the latter must have already been adapted to humans. A pretty bold leap for a trivial analysis that basically comes down to counting the number of mutations on a handful of genomes for each virus. But usually, to make such a strong inference in science, a lot more detailed work would usually be required, such as mutational scans, binding studies, phylogenetic modeling, or similar. Something more than simply counting mutations based on a flawed comparison. “Setting aside the naivety of this argument from a virological perspective,” CoV virologist Robert Garry noted dryly, “an extensive analysis utilizing a more complete dataset and taking into account progenitor viruses...” basically showed that the substitution rate—a measure for the speed of adaptation—had actually been slightly lower for SARS-CoV-1 than SARS-CoV-2. In other words, SARS-COV-2 was slightly less well adapted to humans than SARS, even by Dr. Chan’s own naive assumptions. Furthermore, even in those early genomes she used for her analysis, the first dramatic human adaptation, a mutation in the spike protein called D614G, had already occurred but somehow was ignored by Alina and her co-authors. No matter how one looked at it, SARS-CoV-2 was not pre-adapted compared to SARS by any means. Alina Chan’s whole scientific conclusion rested on a naive premise, an erratic comparison, and the ignoring of relevant sequencing data.With that, Dr. Alina Chan’s venture into virological fame should have met an abrupt but mostly quiet end, like so many other preprints at the time. It was not a factual contribution to our knowledge. However, the boundary between fact and fiction is no obstacle when a story serves the interests of the powerful, the motivated, or the popular. And none other than the motivated conspiracy theorists at DRASTIC would ultimately make sure that Alina’s analysis would be discovered by the right amplifiers.After Alina published her flawed preprint online, she posted a “tweetorial”—basically a bullet-point version of the findings and their implications on Twitter—on May 4, 2020. At first, nobody cared. Or, better said, nobody noticed. I can imagine it must have stung to get so little resonance. In the following days, Alina seemingly tried to participate in various online conversations about the origin to raise awareness about her preprint, again with little engagement. Then luck would intervene; a conspiratorial Twitter account that had spent the last 16 hours posting on the “RaTG13-dead miners” topic finally engaged with her and started tagging all the DRASTIC members, as well as Peter Daszak to get him to respond to their allegations, all in Alina’s Twitter thread. Tagging can be an efficient way to get engagement.What followed was that Peter Daszak took the bait. He tried to clarify his role, which was that EcoHealth actually did not fund and was not involved in the Yunnan sampling in 2013 that found RaTG13. Because so many DRASTIC people were tagged and saw Peter Daszak engage—he was already an enemy to them at the time—an epic, multi-day-long, hundreds-of-comments-spanning group argument ensued (referred to as a “pile on”) right in Alina’s preprint Twitter thread. This meant that anyone who saw any of the comments from that fight would see Alina’s post on top. Alina started engaging with DRASTIC members right at a time when their “mysterious deaths at Mojiang-Mine” story became popular. Many amplifiers who followed the story of the miners suddenly saw their timeline fill up with Alina Chan’s replies and, with it, her “pre-adapted virus” preprint. Finally, on May 16th, her preprint was picked up by a writer and long-time lab leak believer from the British tabloid Daily Mail with the sensationalist title “‘Coronavirus did NOT come from animals in Wuhan market’: Landmark study suggests…” referring to her preprint. It further continued:The Mail on Sunday can reveal that analysis of the coronavirus by specialist biologists suggests that all available data shows it was taken into the market by someone already carrying the disease. They also say they were ‘surprised’ to find the virus was ‘already pre-adapted to human transmission’, contrasting it to another coronavirus that evolved rapidly as it spread around the planet in a previous epidemic.Well, not only did Alina’s preprint not make most of these extravagant claims about the market, but she also did not bother to correct the flawed reporting, or at least cautioned that it was just a preprint and had not passed peer review. Instead, it appears that she doubled down and gave interviews with more daring follow-ups. Her study was ultimately never published in the scientific literature because of its obvious flaws. But at the time, it did not need to pass any quality control or scientific merit check because it delivered a powerful idea to motivated audiences and media manipulators alike: the virus was pre-adapted to humans, and thus a laboratory origin can not only not be ruled out; it might even be the only logical explanation.After the Daily Mail article greased the gears of Alina’s meteoric rise, the American magazine Newsweek wrote a front-page cover story about it, a beacon to signal right-leaning audiences and manipulators alike that maybe there is “alternative science” they could use for their political myth-making. A week after that, the British Viscount Matt Ridley, a wealthy conservative writer best known for his climate change contrarianism, AIDS-origin conspiracism, and general rightwing political activism, noticed Dr. Alina Chan. A regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages, The Telegraph, and many other mainstream outlets, it seems that he became intrigued by Alina and what role she could play. As a – in my opinion - veteran manipulator on ideologically inconvenient scientific issues, he probably saw the potential of a young, presentable, media-hungry, contrarian researcher with the credentials of elite academic institutions. They struck up a collaboration that would soon yield one of the most manipulative works of fiction of the pandemic, a book called “Viral” that took the Mojiang miner story front and center to argue for a lab leak origin.Alina had finally gotten her shot in the attention economy. It certainly seemed to me that she was apt at playing her cards. Media interviews, publicly throwing doubt on scientists, catchy memes, false equivalencies, manipulative framings, misleading commentary, and creating new myths to circulate to the press — she proved a natural at playing the contrarian outsider, the underdog against the scientific establishment. After her flawed preprint, she tried to question the authenticity of the pangolin sequences, and positioned the role of the furin cleavage site as likely artificially introduced. Most often, however, I observed that she opted to — mostly dishonestly, sometimes fairly — criticize the work of domain experts. In my opinion, she had a real talent for repackaging conspiratorial narratives into mainstream visibility by giving them a veneer of scientific rigor. The roots of her talking points, however, are not her own creation but rather a recycling of the sleuthing work of DRASTIC, a connection that sometimes led to sour grapes with the conspiracy theorists who felt their work and ownership over certain ideas infringed upon I would learn.“Chan has sometimes acted as a clearinghouse for lab-leak clues, knocking down the loopiest ones but elevating others,” the MIT Technology Review would write in a charitable profile documenting Dr. Chan’s rise to fame and social media influence. What the article left out is that the falsehoods she would pick up upon were, at least in my opinion, clearly carefully selected to craft herself as a hero-martyr, a truth-teller, exposing a cabal of virologists who hid the truth of their reckless misdeeds and culpability from the world. She presented herself to the MIT Technology Review as a whistleblower who only wanted to get the truth out, then change her name and disappear. None of that was true. Three years on, she has leveraged her name and fame into positions she is scientifically unqualified for, best I can tell, such as the Bulletin’s pathogens project and has enjoyed mainstream platforms and coverage ever since. Scientists might believe that citizens deserve good information, yet influencers use information not to inform citizens but for persuasion, popularity, profit, or power. I would argue that abusing the veneer of scientific inquiry and the trope of an anti-establishment maverick, Dr. Alina Chan managed to leverage her identity and credentials at the right time to tell her audience and the powerful what they wanted to hear.She was, of course, neither the first nor the most successful contrarian academic influencer to play such a role, nor would she be the last. No matter where one looked online in 2020, academically credentialed influencers and contrarian medical doctors seemed to pop up left and right in opposition to whatever scientific topic made the news cycle of the day. It was an opaque phenomenon that has become a new reality in the information age. From the fearmongering myths about mRNA vaccines to the supposed dangers of masks, from vitamin crazes to alleged repressed miracle cures such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin against COVID, “alternative facts” about anything pandemic-related were starting to dominate our information spheres.It seems that if enough media attention is kept on a specific topic for long enough, no matter if through organic interest, powerful amplifiers or via inauthentic amplification schemes as we have seen with Scarlett, a fight will eventually break out between two opposing poles: one upholding facts, the other self-serving fiction. These two poles keep the argument alive until it becomes self-reinforcing, even self-sustaining, with no further input required. It is a crowd-sourced phenomenon that seems to create its own supply. The lab leak myth-entertainment complex, a cottage industry of creators, commentators, influencers, politicians, and conspiracy theorists, made sure to create ever-new stories for willing and unwitting audiences alike. Its sole purpose was to nudge, shock, delight, or enrage citizens into engagement and keep them coming back for more. Over time, this entertainment complex created its own heroes and villains, spinning tales about supposed victims, martyrs, and luminaries. As Dr. Alina Chan’s media stardom rose, she gained glowing profiles in the press that would make some Nobel laureates blush. She was invited to scientific panels and even the UK parliament to publicly pontificate outside her expertise, and she was getting a lucrative book deal arranged by the well-connected Matt Ridley. Everything just seemed to fall into place for her.In stark contrast, actual researchers on the ground, such as Alice Hughes, have seen their lives slowly dismantled, their movements inhibited, their speech censored, their students interrogated, and their research blocked and criminalized. Leaving Yunnan was personally painful and terrible for her career. “Starting fresh at this stage of my career was incredibly difficult,” she explained. She even had to take a demotion in Hong Kong after being a full professor in Yunnan, “and that hurt, as I had to really fight to get it.” Most of all, she missed her team and all the students she mentored and had to leave behind. When she arrived in Hong Kong in late December 2021, she landed in an empty apartment without even a bed to sleep in, lying on the hard floor pondering what to do next. She wanted to build up a small team and try to become a full professor again. “I tell myself it was only a title, and it is not gonna stop me from doing what I care about,” she confessed to me, but she was not naive about the setback and the difficulties ahead.Doing science to find the origin of the pandemic had put a target on her and other scientists’ backs. Alice would later learn from a former acquaintance that her freedom might have quite possibly been in real danger had she remained in Yunnan. Staggering personal costs for trying to create real knowledge, rather than commentary, for society. “All we wanted to do was good, meaningful science that made a difference,” she told me with a tone of distant sadness I will never be able to forget. “My life has basically been on hold since the pandemic because, yeah, we found significant stuff, and because of that, we had to change our entire life.”Compare this to merely commenting pundits, contrarians, and influencers with no skin in the game who found themselves rewarded mightily for selling myth, manipulation, and magical thinking surrounding the uncertain origins of the virus. An all-consuming, narrative-creating propaganda machine—one that democratic citizens once believed only possible in authoritarian states—seemed to have found its disturbing crowd-sourced facsimile in our digital spaces. In 2021, we would see that propaganda machine take over elite beliefs, mainstream institutions, and ultimately the world stage, sabotaging the WHO mission to Wuhan and wider scientific inquiry, and with it, our best chance of figuring out where the virus really came from. How was that possible? How can online chatter and narratives have this power?I believe we might be able to start understanding by taking an insider’s view into the events and mechanisms that drove our descent into collective confusion.Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.Continue reading chapter 6 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.I got interested in the lab origin controversy at an odd time in my life. After having spent a decade in biological labs for my research, I gradually developed an interest in systemic approaches to understanding biology. There are just too many moving pieces in a biological system to capture all, or even just the most relevant, causative molecular mechanisms of complex phenomena like cancer resistance. I always found analyzing genes one by one dissatisfying. I felt it would be more useful to find the right framework to explain what the larger rules, regularities, and limitations of their interactions might be. Towards the end of my PhD studies, I had done proteomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics—the trifecta of despair when a project is not going well, some might joke—trying to understand my organoid model system. Imagine long, dry Excel lists with thousands of gene names, with some value and some statistical power behind them. But systems biology is about creating big data sets and analyzing them to discover informative, larger patterns. As biology transforms into information science, large quantitative methods have become more prominent. Data became destiny.Accordingly, for my postdoc, I switched fields towards bioinformatics, learned how to code, and had the lucky opportunity to spend a few years in a machine learning lab to satisfy my curiosity. It was a personally enriching, albeit academically only semi-successful, period of my career. My experience, however, became handy later. When I decided to leave academia during the pandemic with vague ideas of writing about science for a living instead of, say, coding or pipetting, my dissatisfaction with not understanding the larger forces shaping the complex systems we are part of never really left me. Looking back, I must have sent over half a million of my words out on Twitter alone, the majority of them after being sucked into the man-made controversy. Originally in favor of lab leak speculations, I was getting all too familiar with the various contrarian scientists, conspiratorial actors, and conniving opportunists that thrived on this topic. Who had a point and who was making things up? Yet again, it seemed like there were just too many moving pieces to understand what was going on. Once more, I found myself curious about the larger forces—in this case, the complex dynamics within social media—that seemed to produce certain collective confusions in our public discourse. A different, more systemic approach was needed to bring them into the right frame. What caught my curiosity was the rise of the influencer economy.“When I had the first thousand followers, I thought it was crazy that so many people wanted to hear from me,” Professor Angela Rasmussen (she prefers Angie) recalled the early days of her rise on Twitter. Today, the outspoken and sharp-tongued virologist is known for not taking b******t from anyone. Whether it is incompetent politicians, abusive contrarians, self-serving pundits, or out-of-touch institutions, if they make public declarations that go against what she knows the evidence to be, she is unwilling to let it slide. “The public deserves good information.” She is as sure of this today as she was in the early days of the pandemic. This simple conviction would lead her to become one of the most popular—and most harassed—virologists on Twitter, as well as a prominent figure in interviews, news reports, and articles. She admits she hasn’t always been confrontational, but it was a necessary skill she had to unfortunately learn to be listened to and to move up the ranks in a male-dominated academic environment.Scientifically, the professor was occupying herself not so much with viruses per se as with their host's response to them. This dates back to her PhD, when she attempted to change a rhinovirus to infect mice with a mild flu. Researchers lacked any model systems to study these viruses plaguing the human upper respiratory tract. The project was mostly a struggle; it turned out that her rhinovirus was just not well suited for its new host and had a really hard time surmounting the animals’ basic immune responses to make them sick. After her seemingly endless uphill battle—speaking from experience, that is almost any PhD project—her curiosity about how much the host plays a role in infection and disease progression was ignited. Over the subsequent years, she has studied the host's varied responses to more and more dangerous viruses. Why do some patients with hepatitis C virus infection develop carcinomas rapidly, while for most others it is a slow process? Why was MERS, another zoonotic coronavirus, self-limiting and transient in Rhesus macaques but somehow causing deadly disease in humans? Why are some mice susceptible to a mouse-adapted Ebola virus, whereas others are resistant? What genetic factors decide which host gets to live or die?While considered niche questions at the time, when the Ebola outbreak hit western Africa in 2013–2014, scientific interest in this topic suddenly spiked. Editors at the prestigious journal Science—who had first rejected her work identifying genetic factors responsible for Ebola susceptibility—came back and begged her to send them the manuscript again. An outbreak had suddenly made her findings highly relevant, putting Angie’s work on the map. “I still tell my students that getting published in the big journals is often luck; my Ebola paper would not have been any worse if published in PLOS Pathogens instead of Science magazine,” she explained. Unfortunately, these lucky events have become almost necessary to make it in the competitive world of science. It’s publish or perish. For Angie, the visibility of her Ebola work in a prestigious journal gave her enough wind in her sails to study a whole range of other virus-host interactions, from Lujo to Lassa to ultimately SARS-CoV-2. But with the latter, a whole different kind of exposure was soon to befall her.In January 2020, she had less than a hundred followers on Twitter. She only started tweeting more frequently about the new virus (still called nCoV2019 at the time) when sensationalist headlines tended to run with a story before the evidence was in because it annoyed her. “I have been critical of journalists & armchair scientists who have been stoking #nCoV2019 panic,” she wrote at the end of January 2020 before highlighting some bad scientific takes that upset her. She bumped heads publicly with Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett and especially the mono-dramatic Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Eric-Feigl Ding, who painted a very stark picture of how bad this pandemic would turn out. Both cared more about getting the message out and jolting people into action than getting all the details straight. In contrast, Angie tended to be on the cautious side, not willing to step beyond the evidence—maybe even be too conservative about it. Science is a slow process, and even dramatic results usually require replication, contextualization, and further follow-ups. Angie was a cooler head, if you will, but one that had very little patience for dramatic announcements about inaccurate R0 numbers or freakouts about asymptomatic cases. Her smackdowns (strong-worded rebuttals) of Dr. Feigl-Ding’s sensationalist tweets, coupled with her “matter-of-fact” expert explainers, quickly found a receptive and thankful audience. She would gain over 1,000 followers in the second week of February 2020.Her public spats soon increased as interest in the ins and outs of virology spiked, and the politicization of the pandemic gained momentum. The following week, she gained over 1,500 followers, mostly because of her response to US Senator Tom Cotton’s bioweapon fearmongering, which she followed up with a long bioweapon debunk. The next week, things escalated further. There was the CDC coronavirus test disaster under Robert Redfield. The coronavirus task force from the White House supposedly led Vice President Mike Pence got constantly bombarded by Trump himself. Then Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, being put in charge of a second controversial coronavirus task force, caused unnecessary public confusion about the information coming from the Trump administration. Angie was on a roll, a voice of seeming sanity, and people noticed. She gained over 6,200 followers that week alone, and at least five thousand more every week after. She was present and constantly available for expert commentary, and soon, mainstream journalists would start asking her for perspectives, too. By the end of March, hundreds of thousands had read her take on a viral mask figure that had made the rounds online, gaining her 8,500 followers that week.Then April came, and with it, the Trump administration’s dire need to deflect from their failures by blaming China. Washington Post writer Josh Rogin claimed to have uncovered an old diplomatic cable that warned about biosafety issues in Wuhan, trying to breathe life into Trump’s allegations. Angie answered with a popular “distraction” meme; the caption ridiculed how political journalists would rather go for some vague diplomatic cable to drum up bioweapon fears instead of considering published scientific work from virologists that this was not an engineered virus. She was not a fan of the bioweapon conspiracy myth or the Trump administration’s malicious blame games. Certainly not while citizens were dying and leadership, not distraction, was needed. She also vocally supported Anthony Fauci against the politicization of the pandemic response by GOP operatives. The US was failing in its response to the pandemic because of political incompetence, much to the frustration of many scientists at the time. When White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett and his team predicted with a “cubic model” that all COVID-19 deaths would stop by May 15, 2020—flying in the face of the CDC’s prediction of over 200,000 deaths by June 1st—Angie found again the right words:I am a virologist, not an epidemiologist, but even so, I know that severely ill #COVID19 patients are not going to miraculously stop dying on May 15th. Economic advisors should not presume to forecast deaths. That's magical thinking, not epidemiology, and it will cost lives.She was right, of course. Around 1,500 Americans died on May 15th, similar to the day before and the day after. Her tweet went viral again, being shared over 1,100 times and likely seen by a million people. She gained over 11,000 followers that week. Angie had a knack for science communication and Twitter sass, reducing complexity and packaging ideas into tweets that resonated with many people. And yet, she never wanted to be so popular. “To be honest, I miss the times when I just had a hundred followers and could have normal conversations.” She had to become very careful in choosing her words, often deciding not to comment anymore because the “shitstorm” that would follow was not worth her time, mental health, or personal safety. With more than 400,000 followers on Twitter today, her voice not only carried weight during the pandemic; it seems to have filled a popular audience demand. She was at the right place at the right time, armed with the right ingredients to stand out. In a neat parallel to her scientific curiosity about host-virus interactions, it appeared that some understudied host factors—in this case, audience demand—played a decisive role in making her go viral. Citizens trusted her because she was a virologist who just told it like it was. She was authentic, relatable, and accessible. Her remarkable success and trajectory are, however, not unique in the information age. It is a sign of our changing times.“We trust influencers because they arise from the crowd,” Renée DiResta from the Stanford Internet Observatory stated one late October night. Our writing and research have increasingly started to overlap in the last few years. We finally connected in 2023, when disinformation researchers, just like virologists, were targeted by the same anti-science actors I had been monitoring for years. The warm internet researcher and prolific writer has studied how various covert actors, such as the Russian Internet Research Agency—part of the military intelligence—influence public discourse on social media. Increasingly, her focus has fallen on the role of influencers and how they shape community consensus. “Influencers speak authentically to their communities, or at least appear so, because they use the same vocabulary, have the same biases or worldview, and we can relate to them,” Renée offered as an explanation for why we seemed to crave them.But what made some of them successful? In theory, anybody can become an influencer. However, the attention economy is a cutthroat market; one’s competition is often millions of other compelling voices, depending on niche and platform. Whenever there is such extreme competition between people, being authentic, talented, or knowledgeable alone does not get you far. You need that little bit extra, be it luck, resources, favorable circumstances, the right contacts, a special identity, or a wealthy benefactor. Most of all, you need a unique and timely message that people want to buy into.In marketing, this would be called the USP—the unique selling proposition that lets your product stand out from the crowd of other products. The USP imbues your informational product—your voice or opinion—with market value in the attention economy. When the pandemic started, many credentialed or seemingly credentialed experts on social media suddenly found themselves in a position where audiences were eager for their voices. If they could communicate well, entertain us, or tell us what we wanted to hear, odds were they would quickly rise to prominence. In general, turning our attention to experts in times of crisis is not a bad thing, but who we choose to trust and amplify can have dramatic consequences. Both in science and in journalism, there are well-established—albeit imperfect—mechanisms and norms to evaluate the relevance, contextuality, truthfulness, or accuracy of information. Falsehoods are often caught before they go out, and professional judgment determines if opinions have enough value to merit attention, sometimes on a global scale. Social media is more individual, rapid, and unfiltered. Amplification appears arbitrary, seemingly free of gatekeepers. The naive assumption was that, in the free marketplace of ideas, the best information would naturally rise to the top. Evidence suggests this could not be further from the truth.“Oh, gatekeepers still exist,” Renée argued. She and her colleagues studied the way rumors and misinformation propagated on social networks. “The influencers sit at the center of their respective networks, and they function as new gatekeepers for information that bubbles up in the periphery of their social following.” If they chose to amplify a piece of content, it also served as a signal for the network to amplify as well. Suddenly, you have a crowd of people sharing the same information, post, link, or whatever. This signals the algorithms that the content is popular and should be shown to more people on the platform. Influencers are also connected to other influencers, so if one of them decides to pick up a rumor, for example, other amplifiers are more inclined to do so, too. That is how information can quickly cascade from the periphery to the center of society and, with it, to the mainstream and extensive news coverage, sometimes within hours. Twitter was famous for that, which made it a useful tool for crisis communication, such as earthquake, flood, or live shooter warnings. “In the past, we have seen something similar with local newspapers. Sometimes a story would be picked up by a local newspaper in the morning, and in the evening, it would be on national television,” Renée offered as context. We live in fast-paced times, and the internet just accelerated that. Generally, I think we should want relevant information to move and disseminate quickly through society. But in the age of social media, we rarely ask who gets to decide what information is relevant.Editorial choices are always a point of critique for news desks; however, traditional institutions were at least constrained by journalistic norms and professional ethics, as well as consensus-finding within the people of the institutions. Influencers, acting as gatekeepers of information, remove those constraints. They have great power to amplify with none of the societal responsibility. This distorts the quality of the information most people see. “Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney,’ or ‘citizen soldier,’” as The Washington Post writer Paul Farhi would tweet. He has a point. Many influencers are amateur news amplifiers who do not have the training, professional ethics, or institutional support to share information responsibly. Today, falsehoods travel around the world five times, the saying goes, before the truth has the chance to get its boots on. But influencer incompetence is not the whole story.I believe the impact of influencers on our discourse is even more dramatic than that. They introduce an entirely new set of biases and vulnerabilities into our societal discourse. This is because influencers depend on keeping their audiences happy, growing their income, and fending off competition to remain successful. How do these pressures shape their amplification behavior? How much of what they share only benefits themselves and their brand? What about conflicts of interest and hidden sponsorships? And how exactly does an amplifier make money in the attention economy? As I was researching this topic, I discovered that there are few comprehensive studies and even less public awareness of these new phenomena. Luckily, I had an ace up my sleeve: personal access to a professional influencer to shine a light on these murky questions.“When the Twitch leak happened in 2021, I was already among the top 0.03% of platform income earners globally,” my brother explained. Since then, his income has multiplied. Today, the 38-year-old influencer is one of the biggest German video game streamers, with over 220,000 followers on the streaming platform Twitch and over 110,000 subscribers on YouTube. He is represented by an agency and is currently considering moving to the Portuguese island of Madeira, like many of his streaming colleagues. Madeira is a haven for EU video game influencers because of its low taxes and EU time zone, and it sits directly on top of the glass-fiber cables connecting Europe to North America in the Atlantic Ocean.I asked him to walk me through the business model that has made him and many others successful with the rise of new information technologies, social media, and online platforms. The big tech companies are very cagey about that information because it is a bit of a scandal in itself. Thanks to my brother and a leak of payout information from the platform Twitch, we can put some hard numbers together on the real inequality that drives the influencer economy. On Twitch, a mere 10,000 of its 8 million streamers earned more than $10,000 USD per year. That is only the top ~ 0.12% of all content creators—not viewers or audience—that can be considered to have at least a side income from streaming. To reach a livable salary of about $40,000 per year, that number drops to about 2,500 (0.03%). As the Harvard Business Review noted, there is no middle class in the creator economy.I gather its logic is well summarized by one merciless doctrine: “Winner takes all.” Once the upper echelons of attention are reached—no matter on what platform or network—serious amounts of money start flowing. The top 81 streamers earned more than $500,000 USD, and 25 streamers earned more than one million dollars per year, with the top earners coming in at close to 5 million per year. I have to emphasize that this is from Twitch alone and only a fraction of the total because influential streamers of this size have countless other avenues to make real money. “Promotions, donations, gifts, campaigns… I got 800 dollars per month just sitting on this chair. I didn't even have to advertise or say anything about it.” My brother incredulously laughed again about the varied ways money can come in when you are in demand. Direct Twitch payments via advertisements and subscribers are less than 30% of his income stream nowadays, despite being his main job. Being exceptionally popular as an influencer opens a lot of other opportunities for money, fame, and even more influence. The winner takes all.No matter what you do, you just have to be the first search result for your niche on the top of the page on the platforms. So people will see and click on you. After that, the algorithms cross-promote you to ever-new audiences and followers. The moment I started hitting the front page on Twitch on the new Diablo 4 release, my growth and followers exploded like crazy. That is what everybody is aiming for and what got me pushed even more.I tried to faithfully translate his points from our discussion from the original German. My brother’s niche in video games is a genre called action role-play games, or aRPGs, and Diablo 4 was a long-awaited successor to the genre-defining Diablo series. In 2023 alone, my brother's video game stream had a watch time of over 4.2 million hours, equivalent to half a millennium, while over 1.7 million messages were written in his chats. With that kind of audience engagement, advertisers, sponsors, and even journalists paid notice. For example, Der Standard, an Austrian quality newspaper, wrote: “Interestingly, on February 15 [2023], he set an all-time audience record of 71,675 people streaming the game ”Lost Ark" at the same time.”, noting that Austria’s biggest football stadium only can house 50 thousand people.Staying in the conversation and keeping people interested also makes influencers interesting for companies that want to spread less well-intentioned products or causes.“Sometimes I get approached with extremely lucrative or compelling offers, sometimes with absurd propositions. All you really have to do once you reach this point is to provide new content regularly.” He finished matter-of-factly: “Put in the hours and pick and choose from the offers flying your way of what you want to do and what can help you grow even more.” I asked with raised eyebrows what he meant by “absurd offers.” He explained:Well, the companies that use casino games, Pay2Win, or other microtransactions based on “dark patterns” are the most problematic and you can't really advertise them in good conscience. They manipulate and exploit vulnerable people and drive them to bankruptcy. That's why I always scrutinize the individual offers and have also set up a blacklist of companies and subject areas at my agency that are not advertised. Although these offers would be absurdly well paid and sometimes bring 10x the price of a “normal” dealTo his credit, my brother has always been the down-to-earth type of person who values integrity over money. In response to his success and new responsibilities, he teamed up with an old study friend—University Professor for Game Design Dr. Johanna Pirker—to start a videogame and tech podcast. Instantly among the top 10 in Austria, they educate, raise public awareness, and criticize exploitative monetization schemes in games, among other zeitgeist topics. Despite being an influencer himself, he has become very critical of the profession overall:This whole system cannot continue as is. There are no regulations, nothing. Influencers can say what they want, tell lies, be super unethical. They don’t have to declare who their sponsors are, where the money comes from. Some don’t declare what is paid native advertising [sponsored content that is made to look like authentic opinion] or whether they have any conflicts of interest. Many do. I could triple my income if I went full populist.I was surprised he laid it out so clearly, but being an influencer is mostly uncharted territory when it comes to any regulation, oversight, or simple consumer protection. To our detriment.While most citizens experienced the pandemic as a time of loss, grief, and restriction, online influencers and manipulators saw it as a golden opportunity for self-serving ends. “The goals of influencers can be summarized as persuasion, popularity, profit, or power,” Renée DiResta neatly argues in her book Invisible Rulers. Often, these goals go hand in hand with the political or economic interests of the currently powerful. The reason why the internet abhors a vacuum and why the information sphere seems to constantly deliver new narratives in support of powerful interests has a lot to do with influencers. Pushing hidden agendas and political messages via influencers has become a huge vulnerability for a democratic society, as well as an opportunity that vested interests can exploit to shape public discourse in our shared information ecosystems. This lucrative symbiosis between influencers and the powerful has been toxic for the public good, and this brings us back to the lab leak narrative. Even after falling victim to such exploitations, few citizens understand the true scope of the problem.§You might recall the ambitious Hong Kong postdoc Dr. Li-Meng Yan, or Scarlett, who played an instrumental role in creating the false “bioweapon” myth together with fake-dissident billionaire Miles Guo and Trump operative Steve Bannon. Their media operation, including Gnews, the social media platform Gettr, as well as an array of paid amplifiers from the Chinese-speaking diaspora surrounding the influencer Lu De, got the ball rolling. But this was just the beginning. In April of 2020, when the Trump administration's dire need to blame the pandemic on China required new narratives to distract from the scientific evidence, Miles Guo and Steve Bannon hatched a lucrative plan involving Scarlett. She was supposed to come to America, where they would carefully craft an image of her as a dissident whistleblower “telling the truth” about the CCP’s intentional release of a bioweapon. A compelling shtick for credulous audiences and lucrative beyond measure for the manipulators behind the bioweapon influencer. To understand our current vulnerabilities, I believe we are now equipped to look a bit deeper into the mechanisms, motivations, and malice of their story.“I think Scarlett made these decisions for her own benefit. Getting to the US. Getting money. Getting fame.” Leo Poon, the SARS-1 veteran and Scarlett’s former supervisor in Hong Kong, explained to me. He had been reluctant to talk about her motivations, worried about the influence she wields today. “I am sure she will use all my comments on her to promote herself and to discredit science,” he had said more than once, expressing his concerns. Dishonesty and discrediting former colleagues, even her own husband, were a pattern with Scarlett and her new allies. On April 28, 2020, Dr. Yan quietly left for Hong Kong airport. Miles Guo had bought her a first-class ticket to the US and arranged for her arrival. “Everything seemed normal before she disappeared,” Leo Poon recalled. “In the morning, she said she is not feeling well [and] she wanted to go home; maybe take a few days holiday.” They had all been overworked and exhausted in the lab, so he told her to rest, take a few days, and recover. But later at night, her husband called Leo, wondering if Scarlett was still working late because he could not reach her. After more unsuccessful phone calls, unease had set in with Leo. Maybe she had fallen sick or unconscious? She had told him she wasn’t feeling well. They tried calling everyone, but nobody knew what happened to her. At almost midnight, they went to the police to file a missing persons report in Hong Kong. Soon, they learned from the police that she had taken a flight to the US. They tried to make contact, but with no success. Two weeks later, they would hear from her personally on the messaging app WeChat. She informed her husband that she is relaxed and safe in New York, with bodyguards and lawyers. Then silence.After two months of quiet scheming and preparation, during which Li Meng Yan reportedly worked to increase her English skills, studied the prepared talking points, and received training by a media coach—all paid for by Miles Guo—she was finally ready to play her role.On July 11, 2020, out of nowhere, Fox News “journalists” would come out with an exclusive scoop about a Chinese whistleblower: Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a supposedly top CoV virologist who was ready to spill the secrets about the virus. How exactly this article came about will likely remain a mystery; the Fox writers who got the scoop on the story never responded to any of my inquiries into the matter. There is no way an unvetted stranger gets taken up by a mainstream news outlet on a whim. Given how everything else around Scarlett was crafted by Steve Bannon, my suspicion is that someone in his circle of influence arranged this initial media opportunity. In any case, just two days later, Fox News host Bill Hemmer already had her live on TV—the clip was later watched 2.8 million times on YouTube—in a sensationalist five-minute segment titled “Hong Kong scientist claiming China ‘covered up’ coronavirus data speaks out.” As a seasoned Fox News interviewer, Hemmer carefully utilized strategic disclaimers such as “if you are right,” “would you explain what you think the implications are?” “tell us what you believe,” etc., while he himself appeared totally unimpressed by even the most dramatic claims. To me, it certainly appeared as if he somehow knew not to believe anything Scarlett tried to sell him. Nevertheless, spreading intriguing and politically convenient rumors is not unusual for Fox News; it is probably routine for reporters to play along with strategic disclaimers to not have the network held liable for guests’ obvious falsehoods. A softball interview, Scarlett’s scripted replies—it all just seemed very inauthentic to me personally.Yet for audiences who were inclined to believe the many political lies, large and small, that came with supporting President Trump, Scarlett’s appearance and story were more than welcome, and credulity was easily extended. “Overnight, Dr. Yan became a right-wing media sensation, with top advisers to President Trump and conservative pundits hailing her as a hero,” The New York Times would later write. In that summer, between June 11 and September 11, she made over 18 media appearances, from Fox News to the One America News Network to multiple episodes of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. On September 7, 2020, Dr. Yan and the influential Chinese YouTuber Lu De even met US bioweapons experts as well as Trump ally Peter Navarro in the White House. According to reports, “they spent eight hours supposedly advising senior officials and advisers to the U.S. government on the origin of COVID-19 and the CCP regime's (illegal) virus research.” Of course, the Trump White House has offered up a clown parade of fringe characters over the years, but in a time of pandemic crisis, their cultivation of these actors is still somewhat telling. This whole stunt was orchestrated by Steve Bannon and also included the former New York mayor and Trump operative Rudy Giuliani. There is even a cozy picture of all of them together in Miles Guo’s house, with Scarlett and Steve Bannon reflected in a mirror in the background. A powerful, tightly knit network. Scarlett’s star rose.On top of media appearances, there was also substantial inauthentic activity and paid promotion of Li-Meng Yan on social media, with dedicated bot networks and hundreds of sock puppet accounts—a classic of Guo’s digital operations—of Scarlett blasting out her message. Even in 2023, when I last checked, there were several hundred sock puppets with her name, message, and profile picture still existing, and that’s just on Twitter. Facebook had dedicated groups for her. Her YouTube interviews and clips have reached millions. Scarlett was also amplified through Gnews and Himalaya Exchange—another Guo-owned outlet pushing shady investment schemes—as well as the right-wing blogosphere like Zerohedge and the conspiracy myth entertainment complex surrounding The Epoch Times. They all went in lockstep, trying to amplify “Dr. Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese whistleblower,” and her unsubstantiated, made-up bioweapon claims.While the Democratic Party blamed the failed pandemic response on Trump—quite effectively and, in many ways, justified—Scarlett played a pivotal role in the Republican counter-narrative, blaming the pandemic on China instead. When Trump’s handling of the pandemic became a liability, the PR advice from political fixers was “Don’t defend Trump; blame China.” Shifting blame to a geopolitical enemy was not a bad political strategy, and it likely helped energize and mobilize the MAGA crowd shortly before the 2020 presidential election. While Trump ended up losing the election to the more popular Biden, it is still remarkable how he managed to garner the second-most votes of any presidential candidate ever. Trump received about 5 million more than the previous record holder, Barack Obama, despite overseeing arguably the largest pandemic failure and loss of lives the nation has ever experienced. Putting the blame for the virus on China worked for his voters; they came out enthusiastically for him. Maybe this type of voter mobilization around an outside enemy is one of the powers of shared conspiratorial myths.All this political energy from the pre-election season benefited Scarlett. “She always wanted to have a bigger name,” Leo Poon reminded me again about Scarlett’s past. He tried to give her opportunities, introduced her to collaborators, and helped her progress. He even supported her when it came to traveling to a prestigious keystone meeting overseas in March 2020. She was free to study and talk about what she wanted. However, Scarlett seemingly always wanted more than he could give. She wanted a promotion. She wanted first-author papers even without great contribution. She wanted fame, best Leo could tell. In her media stunts over the summer, Scarlett reinvented herself and her history. She was not merely another postdoc; no, she was a top virologist who was being suppressed. She claimed that she was not allowed to talk about the origins despite being offered a seminar. She claimed that her supportive professor Leo, who was the first to be suspicious about information from China, was actually part of the cover-up for the CCP.She was becoming increasingly radical, and her comments were filled with delusions and fabrications that were at odds with reality. After first writing to her husband that she was okay and he did not need to worry about her in May, her feelings towards him seemed to have turned sour, too. A few months later, she claimed that the Sri Lankan researcher had actually tried to kill her multiple times to prevent her from telling the truth about the virus. Leo shook his head in disappointment. Not only has he known Scarlett’s husband for years, but why would a gentle Sri Lankan researcher with no ties to mainland China suddenly become a CCP assassin? “It makes no sense, but some people still believe it,” he groaned. With the US election looming, Scarlett’s attention-grabbing fabrications were not done.On September 15th, she reached peak attention at an interview with Tucker Carlson, who I personally consider to be a chief Trump propagandist. Then still at Fox News, Scarlett was interviewed by him about a core piece of the bioweapon propaganda, her preprint article that suggested “sophisticated laboratory modification” of the coronavirus. The “study” was uploaded on September 14 to a website called Zenodo, an open-source repository of research—not a peer-reviewed journal. It’s unclear whether the preprint was ever sent for any peer review. Nobody knew who the supposed coauthors on it were (all pseudonyms except Scarlett), let alone whether they even existed. The supposed “research” was financed by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, both sponsored by Miles Guo and connected to Steve Bannon as well. “Neither organization has published scientific literature before, according to a Google Scholar search,” as a fact check from Politico journalists dryly noted. Nevertheless, her preprint, just like the earlier claims about HIV-insertion from Indian researchers, exploded into the information ecosystem and was downloaded millions of times. It looked like science. Spurred on by that success, Scarlett quickly released another preprint just a month later, with an even more explicit title: “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon.” To most scientists, these preprints were obvious bunk. Soon after that, two more such – what I would characterize today as fanfiction – “Yan Reports” followed. Having the shape and style of scientific publications—while not adhering to any norms such as evidence-based reasoning, data, or analysis—her “Yan Reports” were a way to package targeted propaganda into a previously trustworthy format, to give it a veneer of scientific authority. Deceptions and manipulation often work by taking something familiar and trustworthy, like a messenger, format, or news outlet, and subverting it to political ends.Of course, I was not the first to investigate Scarlett’s background story. Already in November 2020, The New York Times documented most parts of how Miles Guo and Steve Bannon had carefully crafted her persona, trajectory, and media appearances. “How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation,” their investigative article was titled. Despite the illuminating reporting from NYT early on, nobody could yet grasp the full picture of the entire operation, why it worked as well as it did, and ultimately, what the manipulators in the shadow truly gained from it. It was not just a partisan media stunt but symptomatic of much larger vulnerabilities in our information ecosystems.Intentionally or not, publishing Miles Guo`s and Bannon`s bioweapon propaganda in preprint form—via the cultivated Chinese influencer Scarlett—had been a brilliant move. It allowed the manipulators to create dramatic amplification based on an elaborate social hack. Usually, preprints are something boring that nobody will ever read or pay attention to except for a few domain experts. Even touring Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and having Tucker Carlson feature a conspiratorial fake whistleblower was just more preaching to the choir, unlikely to reach new audiences. But on Twitter, a platform known to stoke cross-partisan conflict, Scarlett’s preprint and media appearances managed to engage a very specific audience: the chattering classes, politicians, media makers, and lastly, virologists who recently found new influence because of the pandemic.Angie Rasmussen was just one of the many scientists who felt compelled to criticize the preprint. By September 2020, a plethora of journalists and politicians now followed virologists worldwide, relying on them for pre-digested pandemic-related information. Following virologists on Twitter often provided a quick scoop on new pandemic developments for health reporters. When outrage erupted in the scientific community over Scarlett’s pseudoscientific bioweapon preprints, many of their criticisms, debunkings, and assessments were considered newsworthy and made it into mainstream media. Scarlett did her best to stoke the flames of conflict, verbally attacking, insulting, and smearing her scientific critics, sometimes goading them into reacting. Furthermore, many political journalists who were in the business of monitoring right-wing political operatives such as Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson would turn to virologists to reach out for comments. “It looks legitimate because they use a lot of technical jargon. But in reality, a lot of what they're saying doesn't really make any sense,” Angie was quoted by Scientific American. For some, those expert assessments were a good way to score political and social points. Expert quotes from virologists would become silver bullets for political journalists to shoot down political adversaries with the authority of science.Others were less confrontational. They simply felt that when someone like Tucker Carlson spreads pretty blatant disinformation to millions, it is newsworthy by itself and in need of correction. “On the one hand, we don’t want to give credence to just so much garbage,” added Gigi Kwik Gronvall—an immunologist and biosafety expert—in an interview with CNN. “On the other hand, because it’s getting taken seriously, it’s important to point out that this is not science.” But no matter what motivations or news outlets one turned to—CNN, NYT, Snopes—everybody had a story running about how outrageous and false Scarlett`s preprints were. In marketing, it is often said that there is no such thing as bad PR. I’d wager a bet that the attention economy is pretty much the same. There is no such thing as “bad attention” because no matter how much pushback Scarlett`s bioweapon propaganda received, it just tended to increase attention to it and made Scarlett more famous.My brother would probably conclude that Scarlett, as an influencer, seemed to have found a way to catapult herself to the “top spot in the bioweapon niche.” Her outrage-baiting preprints became the top search result. She was the number one content creator when people googled the word “bioweapon.” From there, the algorithms and other dynamics would take over-amplification. Media makers would probably think of her as shaping the news cycle for a couple of days. No matter what frame is used, amplification beyond traditional niche boundaries is what brings new audiences. Journalists whose topics make it into the news cycle shape the public discourse of millions, while video-game influencers like my brother suddenly become visible to people who have never seen an aRPG game, maybe even entice them to try it out. That is the whole point of going viral—to expose communities outside the usual target groups. Today, outrage-based viral marketing is often just a business strategy.This is the dirty little secret and ultimate goal of companies, states, or manipulators who sponsor influencers: to make their product or message go viral and persuade unsuspecting people to buy into something they traditionally would never consider because they would never encounter it. Scarlett’s rise might have caused dramatic pushback by scientists and some media, but she also reached countless susceptible citizens who were not following the bioweapon discussion at all. The mere exposure forced people to consider the possibility and proved enticing to those who weren’t sold on the “official narrative” about the virus in the first place. It did not matter how many of the new people she reached were shaking their heads or making fun of her work. There is simply no real downside to stealing people’s attention with stuff they find objectionable or irrelevant; the moment you get them to think about your product or message, you’ve already succeeded. This is a foundational vulnerability in the attention economy. All that mattered for Scarlett and her political puppet masters was that new audiences would be exposed because this would mean that previously unreachable converts could be won over for the cause.In subsequent months, Scarlett leveraged her newfound fame into a permanent media presence, including her own podcast called “The Voice of Dr. Yan,” thousands of subscribers, patrons, donations, and, of course, the same shadow financing and patronage of Bannon and Guo for years to come before they had a fallout. She had always wanted to make a name for herself. It is pretty easy to see she reached her goal.This new reality of how propaganda interfered with the attention economy was a bitter lesson to learn for scientists, responsible influencers, and journalists alike. “I have become very careful about what I comment on,” Angie Rasmussen explained. Ever since she became more famous, clout chasers have crafted elaborate lies about her with the sole goal of triggering her into responding. It was a conundrum. If she responded, it just boosted their profile and message; if she did not respond, the falsehoods about her were left standing unopposed. While personal defamations are somewhat easier to ignore, what are scientists who are targeted with lies about their work or profession to do? What about lies that misrepresent their research or what we know reality to be? Or even worse, what about lies that actively harm citizens in the short or long run?It is hard to put concrete numbers on the harm from online disinformation. However, for the thousands who got sucked into Guo’s and Bannon’s larger media operations, the prize his most hardcore followers collectively paid comes to a very concrete number: one billion dollars. This sum was calculated by the US District Court, Southern District of New York. But even so, they have not found all the victims yet. Guo reportedly made his career through a mix of shady business dealings, investment frauds, and corruption in the booming Chinese real estate market, a sector already saturated with shady figures. When his co-conspirators—high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party, including the former vice president of the Ministry of State Security, Ma Jian—were exposed and given life-long prison sentences, he ran. Worth almost two billion at the time, most of his wealth was tied up in real estate projects he could not take out of China. Truth be told, it seems to me that even in China, his astronomic wealth was most likely a mirage, as it was entangled in debt disputes totaling around 17 billion yuan, as the Chinese newspaper Caixin would report later. I will refrain from pointing out similarities to another shady real estate mogul, but why Guo found a second home in the MAGA movement does not seem like a big mystery to me. In any case, he seemingly needed a new income stream to continue his lifestyle in the US, and one thing he excelled at was manipulating people into giving him money for supposedly lucrative investments. That is why he started his media operation with Bannon in 2018.Five years down the road, in March 2023, Miles Guo was indicted by the Southern District of New York and arrested on 12 counts, including conspiracy to defraud, deception, wire and securities fraud, concealment, illegal money transactions, and so on. The many victims of his media operation and investment empire were either tricked into sending Guo their money voluntarily, as gifts or donations, or manipulated in some of the many fraudulent investment schemes and ventures Guo Media offered to them. “[Miles Guo and his co-conspirators] operated through a series of complex fraudulent and fictitious businesses and investment opportunities that connected dozens of interrelated entities, which allowed the defendants and their co-conspirators to solicit, launder, and misappropriate victim funds,” the indictment summary would read. All that money went into Guo’s pockets, and he seemingly loved to live and spend it lavishly, including a 50,000-square-foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and a $37 million luxury yacht, as the indictment states. As of this writing, Guo is still in jail; a judge has denied his $25 million bail offer. It will be a long and complicated ordeal to bring him to justice because he can afford the best lawyers money can buy and has political connections to the highest offices. When his unindicted co-conspirator Steve Bannon was arrested—coincidentally on Guo’s yacht—after he stole money MAGA acolytes donated to his fraudulent “We Build the Wall” fundraiser, President Trump simply pardoned him. Justice tends to work quite differently in the US when one has money and connections, but that is a different story.What type of figures Guo or Bannon were was never a mystery to me. In my opinion, they were shameless and self-important grifters fleecing their marks. What baffled me was the question of why some people would pay so much money to them in the first place and how Scarlett and the bioweapon myth fit into that picture.The answer, as best I can tell, might lie with another dirty secret for profiteering in the attention economy: targeting specific audiences to fleece. “In the video game industry, the most lucrative monetization schemes are microtransactions coupled with some psychologically rewarding in-game mechanics,” my brother elaborated. Traditionally, companies would charge for games up front, 50 to 100 dollars nowadays, and when the game did well, the profit margins increased. However, with the arrival of mobile phones, a new model has taken over the market: so-called “free to play” mobile games, which people can download and play with no upfront cost on their smartphones. Monetization then happens through the back door via microtransactions—completely voluntary small purchases of digital products—within the game itself. “However, statistics show most players give video game businesses very little for these free games through in-game transactions, maybe 1–5 dollars. That is peanuts and would not cover the development cost nor be profitable,” according to my brother. Sure, free games reach a bit more people, he admitted, but they do not reach ten or even fifty times more gamers to break even with traditional sales. So why do all those mobile companies still do it?“They are fishing for whales,” he said, demystifying the matter. Whales are players who spend an extraordinary amount of money on video games because they get so invested in them that they become psychologically hooked on them one way or another. The term “whale” originally referred to big spenders in casinos. If the monetization is via some backhanded casino-style mechanics, addicted gamblers tend to fall prey to them, even in the safety of their own homes. Online gambling is an unregulated space in many countries today, and for mobile games, it is even more so. The unethical targeting of addicts needs no further elaboration. However, this targeting is not limited to gamblers. There are also more subtle mechanisms for fishing and hooking a whale. For example, in-game purchases are often shiny cosmetic items that make the whale’s character stand out. Or they can buy upgrades to their online avatars that allow them to be more powerful than others. Sometimes, whales also spend real money for in-game “cash” or items, which they then distribute to others for a sense of social status validation, community, or purpose. All these human desires can quickly turn whales into victims exploited by gaming companies. Many whales spend until they are bankrupt, often tens of thousands of dollars. A Forbes investigation revealed that just 0.15% of all mobile gamers were shown to account for over 50% of all mobile game revenues. For this reason, fishing for whales - i.e. manipulating people using these psychological “dark patterns”, as my brother and others call it - is an extremely unethical but highly lucrative strategy. The difficult part of this type of monetization is finding these whales in the first place, as they are extremely rare in the general population, and keeping them hooked them for as long as possible.This is where Scarlett and the bioweapon myth come back in. Very few people are naturally so gullible as to invest their money in influencers or “get rich quick” schemes online. They must truly believe in the cause or trust that the person they give money to is benevolent and will take care of them. They might feel socially isolated and want to belong or confused and looking for guidance. Many have fallen into hardship, either financial or existential, and desperately seek a way out. All these factors make normal citizens susceptible to conspiratorial ideation and an easier mark for manipulators. But while finding those susceptible people was difficult before the information age, today, with enough attention, algorithms deliver them directly into the hands of manipulators.The strongest predictor of believing any new conspiracy theory is already believing in others. There is a reason why the YouTube ranking algorithm funnels conspiracy theorists down the rabbit hole: It learned what it needed to show them to keep them engaged. Conspiracy myths are a neat targeting device to find people with certain unmet psychological needs. People who might be susceptible to tailored and specific messages that seem to address their grievances or give them a scapegoat for their problems. People who might find community or purpose within extremist movements and hate groups. Targeting conspiratorial-belief-prone citizens has been a political strategy Bannon deployed successfully before and during the pandemic; it made propaganda outlets a fortune. Scarlett's purpose was to serve as a gateway into a different media ecosystem, the Guo-verse. She was a funnel, if one were to use the marketing term. “More and more, especially for the right-wing populists around the world, people approach truth and reality from the demand side,” Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, described in an interview about the rise of conspiratorial media outlets.“When there is the demand for something to be true, these media properties go out and meet it.”For any outsider, the Guo-verse was weird to observe. Full of anti-CCP and anti-government propaganda, it created a cult around Miles Guo as this remarkable dissident supposedly fighting the CCP. They encouraged others to get ready to replace the Chinese government, together with them. The Guo-verse provided a niche community for the Chinese-speaking diaspora and, increasingly, the right-wing MAGA acolytes. Both hated communism and the same “soft on China” people—communist sympathizers, as MAGA Republicans would come to falsely label all their democratic opponents—and distrusted big government. They were driven by a desire for fame, success, and financial independence. Many were seeking a higher meaning or purpose in life, and they trusted the charismatic and insanely rich Guo with his mansion, his yacht, his luxury cars, and his cigars. Guo knew how to mobilize them; for example, he made them buy his cringe-worthy song “Taking Down the CCP” with such fervor that it would rank #1 on the Apple charts for a day. Pretty wild. Is it any surprise that followers so enthralled with Guo might have thought it would be a good idea to invest in Himalaya Coin—a quarter-billion-dollar cryptocurrency fraud from Guo—that promised them to get rich quickly? Or that they would buy into artificially inflated shares of GuoTV? Or spend lavishly on special “G|CLUBS platinum membership” programs? No matter how preposterous the schemes or grift, of the millions of people who got exposed to Guo’s disinformation, a minor fraction of a fraction of them were guaranteed to buy into it. The motivated few. The true converts and believers. Scarlett and Miles Guo were hunting precisely those whales, best I can tell. During the pandemic and visible fears in the Chinese Diaspora that a bioweapon was released to quell their pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, Scarlett was his most treasured bait, funneling in ever more susceptible citizens through a confluence of Gnews, Gettr, Fox News, social media platforms, and mainstream media. After she brought them in, Guo would offer a larger mission to defeat the CCP and an intricate set of “investment opportunities” for his whales, who would often spend tens of thousands of dollars until they went into bankruptcy. The end result? A billion-dollar fraud enabled by manipulation of the information ecosystem.The time we are most likely to be victimized and actually manipulated by influence operations is when we are most violently agreeing with something we’ve read online.Carl Miller, a research director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) who studies information warfare online, has explained some if its logic to me. Influencers are an important weapon in the arsenal of what he considers “information combatants”.“Influencers can harness attention, radiate trust, evoke emotion, and direct energy—all to great effect. They capitalize on atmospheric intuitions, giving people the right evidence to substantiate what they feel intuitively,” Renée DiResta would write in her book “Invisible rulers”. Influencers are influential, often without our conscious awareness. No matter how one views that development, they are a new power center in our midst, and we certainly lack checks and balances for them.Unfortunately, weaponized conspiracy myths such as the bioweapon saga harm not only the true believers but also those they target, as well as the wider society. Mobilizing online communities with hate and scapegoats—all too common for conspiracy myth entrepreneurs—sooner or later corrodes a democratic society. “The laboratory origin stories have taken on a new life as political propaganda, with wide-ranging, deeply harmful implications,” Prof. Rasmussen would write in an op-ed for the scientific journal Nature in January 2021. “Yan Li-Meng has personally attacked scientists engaged in combating this misinformation with evidence, including me. As a result, I’ve been threatened with violence and sexual assault.” This came at a time when social media platforms have increasingly abdicated any responsibility to moderate the discourse in favor of the harassed—often minorities—or basic human rights. This is a business decision. Study after study shows that platforms preferentially amplify emotionally charged and hateful content because it keeps people engaged. Platforms also cater to their biggest influencers, worrying about losing out to competitors if the most influential take their followers somewhere else. The bigger the influencer gets, the less likely they will face any pushback or scrutiny from the platforms. As a result, as Scarlett’s online popularity grew, so did her power to wage war on science and scientists.Believers in conspiracy myths tend to be very active online, very aggressive, and very motivated to engage. Renée describes this as “the asymmetry of passion,” where extremist groups will intentionally attempt to reinforce narratives to shape the reality of viewers. They also tend to swarm the comment sections and pile on targets of their ire. All they need is for “their team’s” influencers to highlight who the “bad guys” are, and they will make a sport out of insulting, discrediting, or harassing them. Often, their hate campaigns include attempts to get scientists fired, as well as make them toxic or damaged goods in the public’s eye. The bigger their target’s profile, the worse it gets. Academic experts who communicate on social media and find themselves on the wrong side of the conspiratorial mob face dire real-life consequences, including stalking, harassment, doxxing, character assassination, and violence. If the expert happens to be female, sexism and misogyny easily find their way into that toxic mix as well.Today, Angie has more poignant words for it. “Look, we are all getting harassed, intimidated, and threatened for our research. The only difference is that as a female scientist, they also call you a fat, ugly b***h that should be raped while doing so.” She is still convinced that citizens deserve good information, but attacks to discredit, insult, harass, or threaten her have certainly taken a toll. She has been advising others, including myself, to first and foremost take care of our mental and physical health because speaking up online as a scientist has become a risk to livelihood and personal safety. Surveys conducted by the journal Nature supported her notion; two out of three scientists from a sample of over three hundred health scientists reported harassment after communicating online, and about ten percent received death threats. Facing these issues with conspiratorial mobs, many scientists get effectively bullied off platforms and out of public discourse. Studies show that 30% of public health workers have left the profession entirely. Some are forced to disengage because they worry about the safety of their family, while others self-censor online to avoid being targeted. For the leftover, inconvenient scientists who dare speak up against popular myths—or face the ire of a large influencer—life can indeed become very unpleasant. Lawsuits, sabotage, and credible death threats have been following certain virologists ever since Scarlett’s rise to fame. It seems to me that our desire for influencers has made it harder for scientific or institutional voices on certain controversies to reach citizens.None of that is the platform's fault, somebody like Mark Zuckerberg would likely say. The platforms simply give people what they want, and if that turns out to be junk information and tribal infighting, well, that is just humans being humans. A convenient excuse. It’s also not the first time an industry has tried to lay responsibility on the individual for problems that are somehow strongly associated with their business model. For me, these explanations are unsatisfying and fail to grasp the larger picture. I believe our current conundrums and confusions are not inherent to us as individuals but are rather mostly rooted in a wider systemic problem.The arrival of the “winner takes all” attention economy has inadvertently changed the way information is valued in society. Our institutions and democratic society were once built on two assumptions. First, that information should flow freely between citizens. Second, citizens deserve and value good information, meaning content that is factual, timely, relevant, contextual, and truthful. The gatekeepers and guardians of shared information spheres and public discourse—journalists, reporters, and news outlets—would serve as the fourth estate to keep democratic citizens empowered against the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. “The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves,” former President Barack Obama said in a November 2009 town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders. It was an easy binary in a less complicated world; free information flow is always good, and censorship is always bad. Yet social media platforms and the attention economy fundamentally challenge these assumptions. Maybe they were naive in the first place. We went from information scarcity to information abundance and ubiquity. We went from being mostly information receivers to being constant broadcasters of it. We went from careful curation and gatekeeping to free-for-all cage fights for our attention. Clickbait, memes, hacktivism, virtue-signaling, community raids, micro-targeted persuasion campaigns, crypto scammers, conspiracy myth entrepreneurs, synthetic media, bot networks, astroturfing, unrepentant information warfare—these and more now happen and often define what most citizens get to see in their fragmented digital spaces. The merciless and bloody winner-take-all fight for our attention has somehow transformed the traditional role of information—its inherent beauty—within society. It was meant to inform and educate us about the world. This is what we used to value information for.In contrast, today, most influencers, information merchants, creators, and consumers (including many of us) treat information as a new type of digital product that we exchange for a variety of reasons. Entertainment, social status, community, profit, persuasion, or power—with information warfare, a lot is at stake. The informative merits—the accuracy, relevance, or truthfulness—of those new digital products became a secondary consideration at best. Is the current commodification of information really just humans being humans, as tech CEOs want us to believe? Or could it be that the information ecosystems we participate in primarily reward exploitation—of our attention, beliefs, and agency—over the traditional role of information as a tool for education, emancipation, and equality?Historically, technological disruption has been a motor for societal change. The systemic shift in how we treat information was not necessarily conscious but rather a byproduct of the technological disruption of information flows. We see it reflected today in our actions and choices. A viral “get rich” cat meme is more lucrative than an educational essay about poverty alleviation. A misleading video clip smearing a political opponent is more persuasive than an analysis of a policy plan. A false myth feels more emotionally satisfying than a dry scientific study. No matter where one looks, the systemic change in how society treats and values information has had a myriad of related but unforeseen consequences.“News stories,” whose traditional purpose was to inform us, have become weapons for information warfare online, for example. “Throughout the 2010s, activists, journalists, propagandists, politicos, white nationalists, and conspiracy theorists converged in these spaces, and the platforms curdled into battlegrounds where news stories were the primary ammunition.” The Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel would chronicle our descent into confusion about real-world events. News of a virus outbreak in China would be used by white nationalist influencers to incite racial hatred. Propaganda packaged into a scientific preprint would dominate the news cycle and mislead millions. A poorly-suppressed smirk from Anthony Fauci at a Trump news conference—rather than the facts of the pandemic itself—became what informed our attitude toward collective action or inaction. In this new information environment, science, institutional knowledge, and even notions of objective reality have taken a back seat.We’ve also adapted to the new reality. Instead of using information to better inform ourselves, we all seem increasingly inclined to use information for popularity, persuasion, profit, or power, like the influencers we came to admire. If our messages, posts, or hot takes got a lot of engagement, we felt validated in our worldview, became more engaged in the topic, and became increasingly radical in our expressions about it. The platforms, in turn, created the mechanisms for a hollow form of “keyboard activism” that makes us feel like we have participated in the causes we care about. Most of us channel this energy into fighting with people we will never meet; performative outrage, pile-ons, or even modern-day witch hunts might indeed be a bit more than just “humans being human.” Silicon Valley moved fast and broke things with no idea how to put the pieces back together. Everybody laments the polarization of society, but few can escape it. In the information age, it seems that digital natives have not become global democratic citizens like Internet 1.0 promised. Instead, we have gathered on social networks where we are nudged and encouraged to join new digital tribes, fighting for supremacy over contested digital territory and ideological worldviews. As a result, we have collectively polluted our shared digital ecosystems with mostly uninformative or misleading junk content that emotionally triggered us to engage. Even worse, we are increasingly drowning out informative content and relevant voices in the process. Today, scientists and institutions might still believe that citizens value and deserve information that is relevant, accurate, timely, contextual, and truthful, but they cannot reach us. Collectively, we have chosen to get our information filtered by influencers we trust.Unfortunately, influencers, as they currently exist, even with the best intentions, are a bad deal for society. There are few regulations and no enforcement on what can be said or shared online to gain attention and to make one’s digital product stand out from the crowd so one can profit from it. Unaccountable influencers, needy audiences that want to be entertained or find community and an oligopoly of profit-seeking big tech platforms define what type of information has value in society. Their complex interactions largely determine what and how information flows in our online environments. Their motivations, incentives, and competition are the largest forces that influence our shared public discourse and, with it, possibly our perceptions of what is real, good, or true.Today, the largest influencers share information for the sake of popularity, persuasion, profit, or power rather than the public good. They tell us what we want to hear and what keeps us engaged, but not necessarily what we need to know to make informed decisions. Notions of truth or scientific reality are often an obstacle to great stories, but fiction can be tailored and optimized for niche audiences. All influencers are incentivized to amplify information that furthers their ideological, strategic, or financial goals. Most influencers lack the training, will, or resources to produce fair, accurate, and thorough public-good journalism, and the few that do often lose out in the “winner takes all” competitive market for our attention. The most cynical or dishonest amplifiers might even abuse their newfound power to target, stratify, and manipulate us from within the supposed safety of our homes. Scarlett was not the exception; she was the norm for COVID-19 influencers during the pandemic and beyond. If we are not careful about whom we trust, our attention, money, and ultimately, our agency may all fall prey to the next influential charlatan who comes ambling along.The outlook is dire. We seem trapped in this new exploitation economy, where the loudest voices and the deepest pockets largely define what we should hear and who we should hear it from. Ordinary scientists cannot compete for our attention, even if they are not bullied out of the conversation by the new competition. Yet, without their insights and research, how can we tell intuition from fact?I believe that to truly understand where the pandemic came from, we have to stop getting manipulated by our own desires. We must demand and adopt a “weight-of-evidence”-based worldview, as well as equip ourselves to identify and elevate the most knowledgeable voices.And I know exactly where to start.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.Continue reading chapter 5 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well: Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.The hollow sound of our footsteps echoed through the boundless darkness; a solemn silence had befallen us, like in a temple. Our cave guide held up a single old gas lamp, the only source of light. The flickering flame instilled the unmoving stone walls and pillars with life. Salt crystal veins grew over some walls, pure white, like frozen spiderwebs on a frosty graveyard. Ducking down and crawling through a narrow passage, we entered an underground dome. The constrained light did its best to fight back the darkness, with shadows seemingly chasing, encircling, and reaching for us. Bizarre shapes and figures carved from rock, resembling dogs and cat-like canines, chased us along our way. Some other formations evoked memories of lush forests, candle wax, and mossy grass, petrified here for immortality. Who or what could have created these shapes that played a trick on my eyes? For centuries, these rock formations were subject to interpretation by the locals. Like us, they would see in them animals and plants, contemporary objects, even spirits or stories. Elephants, lotuses, passion fruit, a candle, and a hermit shooting fire out of his eyes were among the objects they perceived. Clearly, what our guide stated as a matter of fact, or whatever elements others had perceived in the past, would not necessarily be intuitive to us. These figments were haunting yet oddly bewitching; the scars in the rocks were the perfect vehicle for the scars in our minds: tortured figures, painful convolutions, death, and decay.A jovial mechanical skeleton that stood at the entrance to Chiang Dao Cave, shaking and waving hands at tourists, rushed back into my mind. “It’s a reminder that we should laugh at death,” Peter Daszak said, pointing out its purpose. He had seen similar things all over Thailand, especially at cave entries. There was, of course, a cultural history. Ajahn Mun, a monk credited with forming the Kammaṭṭhāna, or the Thai forest tradition of Buddhism that subsequently spread throughout Thailand, was known to seek out secluded places in the wilds to mediate. The reclusiveness of caves was meant to help eliminate the defilements in the mind, develop detachment from material things, and thus deepen Buddhist practice. He is said to have attained anāgāmi — the breakage of being reborn into the human world — after meditating for three years in the Sarika Cave in Ratchaburi, not too dissimilar from Chiang Dao. At first, the local villagers wouldn’t take Ajahn Mun to the cave because of a local legend. They believed a terrestrial deva (a spirit or deity) was occupying the cave and killing intruders. This was supported by serial accounts of monks stricken with fatal illnesses after residing in the cave. And indeed, on the fourth night of staying there, Ajahn Mun would fall sick to the point of passing blood. No herbal medication would help; only surrendering to the Buddhist path would save him, so the retelling goes. Many myths contain a kernel of truth, and the occurrence of a mysterious illness befalling humans in caves is certainly not unheard of. In fact, these stories are usually what motivate scientists like Peter Daszak and others to investigate caves in the first place. But not today. We were trying to understand a different enigma, one no less worthy of investigation.¨What is the reason we tend to perceive patterns that are not real? It is a question that has fascinated me for a long time, because much of our behavior comes down to our quick inferences, not careful analysis.§In early February 2020, a WeChat message appeared:The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits. I, Shi Zhengli, swear on my life that it has nothing to do with our laboratory. …I advise those who believe and spread rumors from harmful media sources, as well as those who believe the unreliable so-called academic analysis of Indian scholars, to shut their stinking mouths.The Chinese bat researcher Shi Zhengli, who I will get to know as a very kind and polite person, finally had enough. She was at the end of her wit. Not only had she become known as the “Batwoman,” she had also become the target of conspiracy theorists, hate mobs, foreigners, and fellow countrymen alike just a week prior to posting this message. Her instinct was to fight rumors. Her mistake? She was too honest at the wrong time. Both now and a week earlier.When the dramatic lockdown in Wuhan on January 23 drew worldwide attention to the outbreak, few outside of science realized another remarkable event on the same day. Zhengli and her team had uploaded a scientific publication to a preprint server. It was their own analysis of the new viral genome, compared to other SARS-related coronaviruses her lab had specialized in. Fifteen years of trying to figure out where SARS came from had yielded a sizable collection of bat samples for analysis. From thousands of samples, mostly bat saliva, urine, or poo, they would extract RNA — the less stable little brother of DNA — and send it to sequencing over the years. Their goal, like a DNA test we humans might do today, was to catalog the wider SARS-related viral family. With most samples, they could only look for a mere fingerprint of the degraded viral genomes, as most viral particles would be chewed up by enzymes, inactivated, or otherwise rendered dysfunctional in these samples. Naturally, they also wanted to have complete viruses. Shi Zhengli’s lab continuously attempted to isolate intact virus particles from some of these samples to grow and study them in the lab. But even after a decade of hard work, all they ever managed to isolate and grow were three bat viruses, all related to SARS. Virus isolation was incredibly challenging work. Other groups, in the US and elsewhere, had gone years without ever isolating bat viruses for cultivation. Cataloging these fingerprint sequences, even whole genomes, was much easier.That is why Zhengli had hundreds of cataloged samples in the lab database by the time she went to look for family members of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan. She found a cousin. Formerly annotated as Sample 4991, collected from an old copper mine shaft seven years prior, the sequences would be re-christened and given the proper virus name of RaTG13: Ra for the bat species, Rhinolophus affinis; TG for Tongguan, the town where it was found in Southern China; and the number 13 for the year of its discovery. Collected from bats in 2013, this cousin exhibited up to 96% similarity to the new virus, making a compelling case that SARS-CoV-2 came from bats. She rushed to get the results published, and by January 23, she would upload the manuscript on a preprint server to give the world early access to her findings. A preprint server — an online repository without peer review — provides an early view of new analyses before they are submitted to scientific journals for thorough quality control checks. This mostly ensures that trivial and basic mistakes, sloppy science, or unsound and unscientific ideas are challenged before final publication.During the pandemic, many researchers used preprint servers to quickly share new analyses with the wider community, but it also led to many half-baked ideas getting undue publicity. For example, on January 17th, a preprint implied that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from snakes, animals not really associated with CoVs in the first place. Zhengli’s paper, outlining a likely bat origin, was much more credible, and it was immediately taken up for peer review and published in the journal Nature on February 3rd. However, by the time it was published, Zhengli was already under fire.We mentioned last chapter that on January 30th, a group of Indian researchers used the RaTG13 sequence from Zhengli’s preprint to conduct a trivial peptide analysis, the equivalent of a Google search for amino acid motifs. They reported finding an “uncanny similarity” to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Their preprint — which was never peer-reviewed and later withdrawn for its mistakes — would explode into the info sphere mere hours after it was announced on social media.I was curious what made this innocuous preprint from Indian researchers, none of them with any expertise in coronaviruses or overall virology, go viral?One of the answers is timing; the other goes by the name of Eric Feigl-Ding and the social media dynamics of rumors. The first of many COVID-influencers, the Harvard-educated epidemiologist had a sense for the sensational — to “move fast and break things,” as McGill University would later characterize his modus operandi. He believes that many academics are too reluctant to speak out and wait too long for an abundance of evidence before making public statements. He is certainly cut from a different cloth. Opening his viral tweet in all caps, a tweet that would reach millions, he wrote:“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD — the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad — never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating…”But he was doing precisely that. The problem is not only that Feigl-Ding is “clickbaity”, but that he also communicates facts not always accurately. The R0 calculation he was referencing had already been estimated downward to 2–2.5 before he shouted it into the world. He also claimed the new virus was eight times more infectious than SARS, which was not accurate. Later, he would claim that kids had the same risk of dying as the elderly. Another blunder, unsupported by data. “I was just trying to get people to turn their heads, not necessarily to listen to me… I’m not a messiah. I do not have the perfect messaging. Clearly, my delivery was not perfect, but my point was for people to pay attention.” He would later defend his alarmism, some of which may have aged well given how terrible the pandemic turned out, but most of it was inappropriate given the data at the time. Science is rarely as fast with answers as we would like it to be.Following a crazy week of viral origin conspiracy theories about bioweapons, Feigl-Ding weighed in, stating on January 28th that, while he did not want to be seen promoting conspiracy theories, the “official” story of the Huanan market outbreak might not be the whole story. On January 31st, the announcement of an obscure preprint about HIV inserts caught his eye. Staying true to his sensationalist brand, he decided to highlight some of the author’s claims in a less-than-measured manner.“WHOA- the authors said the finding was ‘Unexpectedly’ related to genes from the HIV virus. Notably, there were four gene insertions… What a bold paper… I don’t know what to say.”The interesting thing about social media is that it is not necessarily what is being said but who says it. If a Harvard-educated epidemiologist with hundreds of thousands of followers amplifies a preprint, even critically questioning it and with appropriate caveats, it will garner attention. While Eric notably did say that the findings would need to be replicated as soon as possible, he still gave the preprint enough wind in its sails to be noticed by other scientists. While most of them critically dismissed it, the mere fact that reputable scientists had a public discussion about it amplified the preprint anyway. That is the attention economy.Of course, Feigl-Ding was not the only amplifier who spotted that alarming preprint. On the other side of the planet, another scientist, author, and media commentator named Anand Ranganathan got the jump on Eric, tweeting on the same day as the preprint was announced:“Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed [“not fortuitous’]. Scary if true.”He shared this with his hundreds of thousands of followers, and his message rippled far and wide, from the Chinese diaspora to the China-averse Indian social media sphere to Eric Feigl-Ding, who quoted the Indian influencer to bolster his own suspicions. Sense-making on Twitter often runs like this: a rumor spreads, and others in the network start cross-commenting, and the more people decide to talk about the rumor, the more credibility it seems to get.I think this is because our brain evolved to work with little data to provide a coherent picture of the world. Our biology constantly prompts our minds to connect the dots, to find similarities and relations we can leverage for our understanding, especially when information is scarce or the need to make sense is dire. Our brains are, to some abstraction, prediction machines that hate dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty. It is a cognitive strain that feels physiologically unpleasant, like a hand on a hot stove. The sooner we can make sense of our current circumstances and identify the relevant patterns, the quicker our metaphorical hand comes off the hot stove. Is it any surprise we got so good at finding patterns even with so few dots to connect?Yet, while astonishingly powerful, we know today that these pattern recognition algorithms are not always accurate. Seeing animals, spirits, and tortured figments in the cave’s rocky formations is one such example. Our minds tend to impose a meaningful interpretation on nebulous perceptions (pareidolia) that jive with our expectations and understanding of the world. This is why locals would see elephants, bamboo trees, or deities in the same ambiguous rocks when I’d see a bear with a stick or a broken-off mountain range. Although context matters, everyone saw more in these rock formations than there was because of the same cognitive mechanisms.Some researchers posit that there are good evolutionary reasons to perceive patterns beyond what is justified by the available information. It’s simply better for survival. Was it the wind that moved the tall grass, or could it be a lion’s stalk? Does the stranger hide a weapon, or is that something else in his hands? Those who waited for sufficient evidence to make the right call might not have had the same chances at procreation as their more suspicious peers. For most of human history, missing a pattern could’ve cost you your life. Seeing a pattern when there is none? Not so much. As a result, our brain’s neural networks would’ve been smart enough to trade at least some accuracy for speed. Especially when the survival stakes seem high, our ancestors might have benefited from false but actionable certainty (identifying predators or other threats) over action-impairing uncertainty. So at least the theory.Within half a day, the obscure HIV preprint from no-name researchers doing a trivial and flawed analysis had become one of the most shared and visited scientific manuscripts of the early pandemic, and it spelled misery for Shi Zhengli. Various rumors about her lab’s supposedly poor biosafety, about alleged military connections, and about close bat ancestors that could have been used to create the new virus had already reached too many people. Now, Zhengli had published RaTG13, a cousin of SARS-CoV-2 that was largely identical but for some suspicious “insertions” that looked like they came from the much-feared AIDS-causing HIV. Had she inadvertently given away a secret? Miles Guo and Steve Bannon had just spread an article about how officials would admit the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Could this be her confession?The internet abhors an information vacuum, and our brains are quick to connect dots. Whether we want it to or not. Just like the tortured faces in Chiang Dao Cave, a monster arose and took shape in the minds of many. An unholy experiment gone awry, a chimera emerging from behind the shadows of scientific ivory towers, and Chinese military ambition. How else could we explain what our digital eyes would show us? What about the unprecedented lockdown of 30 million people in China? The cancellation of pro-civil rights protests and hawkish restrictions in Hong Kong? The dramatic tone of breathless commentators all around the world? Was our life in danger too?Fear creates hate, and Shi Zhengli, previously outspoken on social media and having always stood her ground in discussions, could not deal with the irrationality and fact-free insults coming her way. She began to fight back, not realizing that feeding the online trolls would only increase their influence and drag her down into the mud with them. She exposed herself more, and it ended predictably: her vehement denial achieved the opposite effect of what she wanted people to hear and believe. Online agitators would highlight her tone, misrepresent what she said, decontextualize, selectively amplify, and fake being outraged. Why the harsh words? Why does she not answer legitimate questions? What is she hiding? Can the denials of a person who calls others uncivilized and wants them to “shut their stinking mouths” really be taken seriously? She certainly looks guilty to me. These “discussions” would go on and on.Scientists are not known for receiving media training, and few ever get into the hot seat of public outrage like Zhengli suddenly found herself in. Doxxing, harassment, hacking attempts, and even death threats, much of it had started with Miles Guo’s group of influencers but had now become a thousand times worse. From UK tabloids and the right-wing blogosphere to the Murdoch media empire, from overeager Indian scientists and the Chinese diaspora to the Falun-Gong propaganda outlet, The Epoch Times, everybody developed an interest in the Batwoman. Soon, anti-vaxx conspiratorial communities, self-proclaimed independent investigators, biosafety cranks, and fake bioweapon experts would join the chorus. Everybody seems to suddenly point the finger at Zhengli’s work and laboratory. She was not doing okay, and neither was her team. On an institutional level, nobody felt the need to come out in support of her either — not the Chinese Academy of Science, not the Chinese or international media, not even the usually censorious Chinese state. Why was nobody speaking up on her behalf?For good and bad, scientists have an allegiance to truth, not people. Somebody’s word counts for little; only verifiable evidence matters. Despite all the absurd conspiracy theories from Canadian spies to secret bioweapons using HIV inserts, a laboratory origin per se was not a scientifically unreasonable hypothesis. A novel coronavirus could have come from a lab studying bat coronaviruses.When uncertainty is large but data is sparse, it becomes easy to connect the dots, to assume an underlying pattern from the few impressions we get. Just like in a dark cave, every bit of information we get connects to a larger picture.The interesting thing for me is that as soon as we recognize a pattern, regardless of whether it is true or false, it becomes much more difficult to forget it again. Our brain finds it difficult to let go. In Chiang Dao Cave, there was one particular formation where I couldn’t stop seeing a human face in the tortured rock once my brain made that connection. Absolutely no one is immune to recognizing false patterns from time to time and having trouble shaking them off.As we will see, not even very accomplished scientists are immune to falling into this perception trap — especially if they already had a rough idea of the coronavirus work on the WIV in their heads.“Eddie, can I discuss something with you? I think I have seen something… I need to talk it through… to pull me back from the edge.”This is how Eddie Holmes would summarize the time when his friend Kristian Andersen approached him on January 31st, 2020. And when Kristian calls, Eddie listens.Kristian Andersen is a renowned evolutionary virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California. By 2023, our paths had intersected a few times over the last months, but this time, I did not want to talk science but history with him. While at a conference in Switzerland, he submitted himself to my friendly interrogation — certainly friendlier than the witch hunt the US Congress had in store for him (at the time of our interview, he was to be deposed in hearings soon). He still managed to carry the weary strain of repetition with patience, even three years in. A slight dimple graced his chin, a charming punctuation in his otherwise stern facade. When it comes to emerging disease outbreaks, he knows what he is talking about. However, his voice echoed with fatigue, an audible testament to the countless recollections of his early work he’d been compelled to recount. His early curiosity into the origin question would put a target on his back, lead to character assassinations mercilessly pursued by the highest halls of power and media… but more on that later.Like many, Kristian had first heard about the new outbreak via the proMED mail at the very end of 2019. When the first genome sequences became available to researchers, many emerging disease experts started taking a closer look, including him. Kristian had been working on emerging diseases like Ebola and Lassa fever in West Africa or Zika in South America previously, so when he heard about the outbreak in Wuhan, he and his colleagues immediately started with the basics of their craft. They tried to place 2019-nCoV among the wider viral family tree by comparing it to previously found viruses, including SARS, WIV1 — a SARS-related virus published by WIV — and, of course, the 2018 bat viruses from Zhoushan. “We basically took all available sequences from GenBank,” Kristian explained. When a few more samples of 2019-nCoV trickled in, he spent some time cleaning up the sequencing data for possible errors and contaminations, a necessary step when trying to do some precision work later before he created a phylogenetic tree of the outbreak. It would allow him to date back to the time of the outbreak, and of course, under many assumptions, he ballparked using SARS as a proxy. “That [dating] was the first focus. This is what I have done a lot,” he reiterated as he explained the timeline to me. Dating is crucial to get a sense of how quickly the numbers grow and when the outbreak started, which could be weeks, months, or even years in some cases. The records of his early thinking are still available online on Virological, a website that is a combination of message board, discussion forum, and preprint server for virologists. I double-checked his early entries. Coincidentally, he had estimated his time for the first human infection around November 2019, a date that still holds up today. It was good science and pretty standard for his line of work; by no means was it controversial.All that changed when, on January 30th, Kristian Andersen received an email from a colleague from his department: “Is there anything in the sequences you have done that could definitively rule out gain-of-function studies that have been carried out in labs as a source of 2019-nCoV? I won’t quote you; I am just interested,” it read. The circulating rumors had certainly not passed him by. However, the two scientists have a very jovial relationship, so Kristian replied a bit tongue-in-cheek: “You are a tinfoil hat, but sure, I’ll take a look.” He further inquired if there was a specific reason to look deeper, and his colleague replied, “As usual, the conspiracy theories… are going over the top on nCoV. It would be good to just focus on the science to see where it leads.” Kristian was in a favorable position to do so; he had already set up alignments — sequence-matched comparisons — of closely related virus genomes to figure out what genetic elements might make 2019-nCoV so unusual. Trying to understand new viruses is often done in relation to ones already known. Following his exchange with respected colleague, he decided to use a fine-tooth comb and go through all the genomic oddities he could find that might point to laboratory manipulation or unexplained genetic elements given related viruses.He noticed multiple oddities, and we have to indulge the technicalities a little bit. For instance, Kristian observed that there was a high rate of mutations at amino acid residues — specific positions within the larger spike protein — that would lie within the protein’s receptor-binding domain (RBD). This was the part that allowed the viral protein to target the human ACE2 receptor and enter our cells. These mutations could be a sign of selection pressure in a human host or an adaptation to our biology. He even discovered an amino acid residue in the 2019-nCoV receptor-binding domain that was similar to SARS but not RaTG13, which could be a natural reversion but also a possibly purposeful introduction. Maybe somebody wanted to make the receptor-binding domain more SARS-like because SARS is known to infect humans, whereas most bat viruses cannot? It’s a possibility he considered. Additionally, he found a common restriction site at the end of the spike protein sequence. This is a sequence motif that molecular biologists sometimes introduce to shuffle genetic elements in and out of larger sequences. This was followed by a drop in overall sequence diversity. Something subtle like this might indicate that the upstream diversity in the spike protein was spliced in artificially.Most dramatically, a comparison of nCOV-2019 with SARS and MERS showed that the new virus had acquired a short genetic element called a “furin cleavage site” (FCS) at the S1/S2 position. This where the spike protein gets cut in order to open up and harpoon itself into a host cell membrane. It was suspicious because RaTG13 and other related bat viruses lacked that short amino acid motif in that position, and it was a functional element that possibly implicated transmission dynamics. In his sequence comparisons, imagine the FCS standing out like a llama in a flock of sheep.None of these oddities was a smoking gun, but on that day, it was enough to get Kristian worried. He was roughly aware of the work conducted at WIV and the biosafety level at which they operated with bat viruses. He would frantically rush through all their publications to get up to speed on their research, and by that evening, he had reached out to Eddie Holmes. “Can I discuss something with you? I think I have seen something… I need to talk it through… to pull me back from the edge.”Kristian was unaware that Eddie was already primed for suspicion. He had chatted just before with his longtime friend Jeremy Farrar, then head of the UK Wellcome Trust, a powerful funding organization. He was independently wondering if this virus could have escaped from a lab, given the conspiracy theories and chatter online, as well as the fact that Shi Zhengli had just released RaTG13, the closest known cousin of this new virus. Nobody could escape connecting the dots given the news cycle. At Jeremy’s request, Eddie had looked at Zhengli’s publication but did not find anything suspicious. However, when Kristian called and showed him all the oddities he had discovered from his sequence comparisons, including the acquisition of a furin cleavage site that looked like it was inserted, Eddie became agitated. “Call me now,” he wrote to his friend, Jeremy Farrar. For Jeremy, it was late, and he replied, “What? Now…?” to which Eddie responded, “NOW.” When Jeremy called, Eddie explained what Kristian had told him, and Jeremy went “from 0 to 100 in like two seconds,” Eddie recalled from their exchange. Everything just seemed to be coming together: the closest viral relative from the WIV lab, the explosive growth in cases in Wuhan requiring a city-wide lockdown, Kristian Andersen reaching out with some odd features that look potentially engineered, and a possible furin cleavage site insertion not found in related viruses.After discussing the situation with Kristian, Jeremy contacted Eddie again. He and Eddie were thunderstruck, wondering what the next steps were. They wanted to assemble a group of people who could discuss this clearly, and they started spitballing names. Experts like Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, and Marion Koopmans came to mind. They didn’t invite Ralph Baric, a pioneer in CoV research who collaborated with Zhengli, because he was too close to WIV. “Let me tell you now, Ralph did nothing wrong. But we wanted to make this a proper investigation and felt he was too close to the work,” Eddie explained their reasoning. Jeremy contacted Anthony Fauci. Jeremy also told Eddie that he needed to reach out to the Australian intelligence services, while Jeremy contacted the British intelligence services and Kristian, the American officials. Within three hours, Eddie was on the phone with the Australian spy chief. “How the hell did you manage that?” I asked him. His idea was to reach out to the then Chief Medical Officer of the Government, Brendan Murphy, via a colleague at the University of Sydney who knew him. “I told them it was urgent, and Brendan called me within the hour, which is impressive for Saturday morning.” After they hung up, less than an hour later, his phone rang again. It was Nick Warner, then head of the Office of National Intelligence. They went over the possibilities of a lab-created virus. Eddie felt that it had been a nerve-wracking Saturday in Australia, but he felt that he had told “everyone that needs to know within a few hours of finding out.”It was Friday night in the UK. Jeremy Farrar, who had been in meetings all week with the American CDC under Robert Redfield, the NIH/NIAID under Anthony Fauci, and the WHO to hear updates from George Gao on the situation in Wuhan, reached out to Dr. Fauci. “Tony… I would really like to speak with you this evening. It is 10 pm now in the UK. Can you phone me?” Soon after, the two would talk, and Jeremy advised Anthony to contact Kristian as well. Exhausted, Jeremy went to bed. Not long after waking up on Saturday, he would find an email from Dr. Fauci in his inbox:Jeremy:I just got off the phone with Kristian Anderson and he related to me his concern about the Furine site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV. I told him that as soon as possible, he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to carefully examine the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly, and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA, this would be the FBI, and in the UK, it would be MI5. It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern from experts in the field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology. In the meantime, I will alert my US government official colleagues of my conversation with you and Kristian and determine what further investigation they recommend. Let us stay in touch.Best regards,TonyFollowing Eddie and Kristian’s recommendation, Jeremy sent out the invitations for the first conference call. Among those invited were Christian Drosten, a renowned CoV virologist and SARS-1 veteran from Germany; Mike Ferguson from the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research in the UK; the Dutch virologist and gain-of-function expert Ron Fouchier; emergent disease veterinarian and MERS veteran Marion Koopmans; evolutionary virologist and phylogenetics expert Andrew Rambaut; virologist Robert “Bob” Garry from Tulane University; Stefan Pöhlmann, a virologist at the German Primate Centre in Göttingen; and a range of institutional leaders such as Tony Fauci from NIAID, Francis Collins from NIH, and Paul Schreier and Josie Golding from the Wellcome Trust in the UK. By 2 p.m. Washington time, the group would convene.The content of this teleconference on February 1, 2020, has subsequently become a staple in man-made mythology as the “place where it happened,” so to speak. This was an international cover-up by high-ranking public officials and key virologists if one were to believe the many false fictions told today. I guess experts discussing important topics in small circles are known to invite the public’s imagination. How come Kristian Andersen and other scientists, once so alarmed, came to change their minds? Why did he, together with Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and another author, publish a paper a few weeks later stating, “…[W]e do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”? Was there foul play? Did grant money change hands?By all indications, what really happened was much more mundane. We know this inside story quite well because all their communications have since been leaked, released, or made public via FOIA requests. I have also heard about the event multiple times from different scientists, and I saw their communications and emails from the time. To me, there is no big mystery about what happened. Here is my reconstruction:They had some technical troubles trying to get everybody connected at first. Jeremy Farrar would give an introduction about the meeting; Kristian would deliver a PowerPoint presentation showing the oddities he had found, and then they would discuss what they thought of it. The coronavirus experts were more skeptical about Kristian’s suggestion, having seen very similar things in other viruses. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were mostly silent, letting the experts raise points. The supposed HIV-like insert analysis that the Indian preprint had laid out was discussed and discarded as flawed rather quickly. They also tackled Kristian’s oddities one by one.Andrew Rambaut compared the level of mutations between the original SARS virus and its closest bat relative, as well as SARS-CoV-2 with RaTG13; they were in the same range, so the diversity was certainly possible to come about through natural processes. He was, however, unsure about the furin-cleavage site. Ron Fouchier noted that bat coronaviruses generally do not have furin cleavage sites, but human coronaviruses do. These viruses entered human populations decades, if not centuries ago, so they certainly were not engineered or tinkered with. As a result, natural evolution could not be ruled out. Ron also noted that the single amino acid substitution in the receptor binding domain, a likely reversion from RaTG13 but identical to SARS virus, is generally absent in bats and could be a sign of adaptation to a host, for example, in mice. However, for lab experiments, it would not make much sense, as one would work with a characterized virus to test these adaptations, not an unknown bat virus. Christian Drosten was more dismissive, viewing the oddities as some cherry-picked coincidences that were not inconsistent with anything he knew about coronaviruses.Kristian and Eddie maintained that 5 out of 6 amino acids in the receptor binding domain — shown to be critical in SARS virus binding to humans — were altered between bat virus RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2. This apparent adaptation to bind to human ACE2 required an explanation. Additionally, the insertion of a furin cleavage site still looked very suspicious to them, and others agreed. They were also not satisfied with the coronavirus experts dismissing the predicted O-linked glycosylation (sometimes, specific amino acids in proteins have exposed sites where complex sugar molecules can get attached to by the cellular machinery) surrounding the furin cleavage site because Kristian and Eddie believed it might be significant. Glycosylation on virion particles can contribute to a variety of things, from immune system evasion to facilitated cell entry, and it sure seemed like the inserted furin cleavage site was opening up the protein for glycosylation in three nearby places. Isn’t that relevant?Kristian confided in me that he became a bit obsessed. He was quite convinced of a laboratory origin, and he thought if he would just go through old publications and databases containing sequence information, he would certainly find proof. “All I needed to do is basically find genetic pieces of this virus before the pandemic.” He has also discussed this topic with his fellow Scripps Research professor Mike Farzan, who spawned the idea in Kristian that serial passage — the consecutive infection of cells or animal models with the virus to study how it mutates and adapts to a host — of viruses can select for furin cleavage sites. This is because trypsin, a protease similar to furin, is required for passaging in cell cultures to allow the infected cells to be harvested from the dish by breaking away their connection to the culture dish. “Maybe using trypsin facilitates selection for such cleavage sites in viruses?” Kristian speculated. He could laugh about it today. It turns out that the whole thing wasn’t true. Maybe he misunderstood Mike; he wasted days looking for papers that reported on this phenomenon, but he found no evidence to support it.Rummaging through their old private emails, I was reminded of the dark Chiang Dao cave a bit. Clearly, Kristian, Eddie, and Jeremy could not unsee the figments they thought they had recognized. Even Bob Garry could not explain how the furin cleavage site came about through natural processes. Just like in the cave, when the data is just too limited, and the need to understand is dire, our expectations shape our perceptions. In a way, trying to make sense of a novel genome is not too different from wandering along a sparsely lit cave, clinging to what is familiar and wary of the ambiguous. Some scientists, in the haste of the moment, might see a man with a pipette in those rock formations of genetic letters or even perceive fragments of an entirely different beast, like the Indian researchers did with their uncanny HIV/AIDS similarities. The coronavirus veterans, Ron and Christian, coming from different backgrounds with different expectations, would be more of the “looks like another mirage to me” persuasion.“Everything that seems counterintuitive with CoVs is actually logical when you work with them a few times.” Jasnah Kholin’s words rang in my ear. She had been amused by the false shadows Kristian had been chasing, but this was, of course, with the power of hindsight. At a hastily arranged teleconference, our perceptions and intuitions can mislead us, and in the fever of the situation, who would turn out correct was not a given. “I am honestly 50:50 on this,” Jeremy Farrar would write after the conference, “and Eddie is like 60:40 for a lab origin.”While the overall feeling from the experts was that deliberate engineering could likely be ruled out, the idea that serial passage in a lab could bring forth such strong adaptation to human ACE2 was compelling. Even Tony Fauci asked about serial passage in hACE2 mice, lab animals where the mouse gene encoding the ACE2 receptor had been exchanged for its human version. Could this have been what was done? Adaptations during serial passage are likely indistinguishable from natural selection, at least on a superficial level. Without more time for science to sort out the kinks, especially without more data coming from an increasingly reluctant China, this was the best they could do.Science is much slower than our imagination. In the meantime, Indian newspapers would report excessively about “HIV” similarities, and the press in Israel would quote dubious Israeli and US intelligence experts about supposed biological warfare. Soon, US Senator Tom Cotton would openly implicate WIV and get into a public spat with the Chinese ambassador. At this point, social media was like a zoo. Every amateur sleuth, every wannabe scientist, every crank, contrarian, and conspiracy theorist would write long Twitter threads, Facebook posts, or Medium blogs reporting about the evidence they had “unearthed,” usually via a Google search or Google Translate, to a hungry and enthusiastic audience. For many trained and even more untrained eyes, everything seemed to coalesce around a common theme: something was not natural about this new virus.That’s how our brains work in the information age. The more we search for suspicious connections, the more spurious connections the search engines will deliver to us. The internet abhors an information vacuum, and our brains can’t help but connect the dots we are shown. Like we’ve seen with the blogger Zerohedge, a chimera of various overlapping ideas — from weak biosafety and secret military ambitions for coronavirus research to bat researchers at WIV making hybrid viruses with HIV — would eventually rise out of the sensemaking wetware we call our pattern-recognizing brains. Once we believe we have spotted a worrisome pattern, it becomes difficult to unsee it. We seem to be wired this way. For most of human history, missing a predator could’ve cost our lives. Seeing a pattern when there is none? Where is the harm? Under threat, we are especially prone to trade accuracy for speed, and in 2020, there was a virus exploding like nothing we have ever witnessed before. Is it really surprising that many saw man-made malice behind the ravaging beast?Yet one important thing I learned in Chiang Dao Cave was that even the most convincing faces lurking in the shadows might just turn out to be a weirdly shaped rock when visited closer. We humans are not hopelessly irrational; our overoptimized primate brains sometimes just need a little more light to get it right. This illuminative act, in essence, is the role of the scientific process: to gradually close in on a murky problem until we see it in full, to offer a new perspective or vantage point. The only drawback is that the scientific process is too slow to be of immediate relevance. At least usually.Eddie Holmes had mentored a lot of great students and postdocs over his career, and one of them had just reached out on his most stressful weekend. “Hey Eddie, I got some wildlife samples that seem to be really cool for SARS-CoV-2… they are from a coronavirus in pangolins…” Tommy Lam, a bioinformatician and computational virologist at the University of Hong Kong, would ask, “Can we have a chat about this?” His specialty is developing new tools for sequence databases to allow better genomic analysis, and these tools came in handy for finding and analyzing some intriguing sequencing samples with high similarity to parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. They originated from the Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center, which had received 21 live Malayan pangolins (protected animals resembling walking pine cones with hard scales often used in Chinese medicine) from the Anti-Smuggling Customs Bureau. Most were in dire health, their bodies covered with skin eruptions. Sixteen died even after extensive rescue efforts by caretakers, their lungs swollen with a frothy liquid. Researchers from the Guangdong Key Laboratory of Animal Conservation had taken samples for metagenomic sequencing and published a paper finding an infection with an unspecified coronavirus. Tommy Lam had written to the data repository SRA archive to make those sequences public, and after checking them out, he found they resembled, in part, 2019-nCoV.He immediately reached out to his former mentor, Eddie, so they could take a look together. Independently, a US bioinformatician named Matt Wong had also found the sequences and put a quick post about them on the Virological website. After a hectic weekend of phone calls and teleconferences, Eddie finally had time to look at the Virological post and talk to Tommy about the pangolin sequences. He almost fell out of his chair. The pangolin coronavirus had a receptor-binding domain that was almost identical to the one of SARS-CoV-2. And those mysteriously adapted amino acids that are so relevant for human ACE2 binding? The pangolin virus had all six of them, while the closest bat relative, RaTG13, did not. How the hell did a divergent pangolin coronavirus come up with an almost perfectly matched genetic puzzle piece shared by SARS-CoV-2?Kristian had been obsessed with finding any genetic piece of SARS-CoV-2 used by any lab to prove that the virus might have escaped from one. Suddenly, one of those pieces appeared — not in a lab, but in one of the most smuggled animals on the entire planet. This discovery dramatically changed the opinion of scientists, and a week later, by February 8th, Eddie Holmes and most others had already come to see that a natural origin was much more likely given these developments. Kristian needed a few more days to digest. He was still searching more in the literature, trying a few ideas, and following up on the weird glycans surrounding the furin cleavage site. In the weeks after the teleconference, Kristian, Eddie, Bob Garry, Andrew Rambaut, and emergent disease immunologist and SARS and MERS veteran Ian Lipkin continued working on the viral genome and origin question as a team. Eventually, Kristian, the last lab origin hold-out, could not justify keeping his obsession alive, given that the scientific evidence told a very different story.And that is a good thing. In times of existential threat or uncertainty, our brains tend to overfit patterns to speed up our sensemaking. It becomes hard to unsee something we think we have recognized, and once our beliefs harden, we rarely ever revisit them but rather opt to justify and defend what we hold true. The scientific method is antithetical to this aspect of our human nature. It prompts us to constantly seek to overcome the pitfalls of our intuitions, the fervor of our beliefs, the unholy pull of our fears, or the sweet biases of our wishful thinking.The newly discovered pangolin sequences were an opportunity to challenge intuitions, and as a trained scientist, Kristian overcame seeing the false figments he once believed true. The same was true for Eddie Holmes and the others. Shared deliberation about what the evidence truly suggests, varied expertise and backgrounds, time to work on a problem, and the opportunity to go on wild goose chases are all part of that process. Science is not about having the perfect proof to answer every question; it is about using evidence to better approximate the boundaries of our knowledge and dispel the myths of our preconceived notions. There is rarely perfect certainty or evidence. We still don’t know how the hell these pangolin viruses came to share a hitherto unseen key genetic element with SARS-CoV-2. Just as the appearance of these genetic pieces would have been a smoking gun for a lab origin had they appeared in some previous coronavirus work, their appearance in trafficked pangolins meant there was a much larger laboratory somewhere out there that we know all too little about. But we will get there in due time.Kristian Andersen and the others ended up collecting their deliberations and findings into a scientific publication, the seminal paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” In normal times, it would have been a cure for our societal pareidolia of a man-made virus. Instead, after its publication, all hell would break loose.While the scientists were investigating the virus, American President Donald Trump was doing his damnedest to ignore it. First, he praised Xi Jinping for his pandemic response and downplayed the pandemic risk at home. Maybe he was hoping, despite the mounting evidence, that he would not need to act; after all, just a handful of nCoV cases were officially confirmed. The bitter reality of his misjudgment quickly came crashing in. The US was flying blind. The CDC, under Robert Redfield, could not keep track of cases. Surprisingly, they failed to produce a simple diagnostic PCR test after a month of trying, while the Chinese CDC, researchers in Hong Kong, Germany, Korea, Japan, and the WHO all managed to do so in the first weeks of January. The US administration, maybe too proud or too shortsighted, did not want to import tests from other nations. Incompetence soon led to finger-pointing. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of problems the US would face. Nobody needs me to recount the many failings and falsehoods of President Trump, which were obvious to anyone paying attention at the time.I think it is more fascinating to investigate what pull President Trump exerted on our various media ecosystems, especially Twitter, where he still dominated in 2020. Over the next few months, to distract from domestic problems and deflect from the often-malicious incompetence of an erratic leader in the president’s office, many right-wing pundits, sycophantic partisan politicians, and even the State Department and White House opted into a strategy of blaming China for releasing a so-called man-made virus. In February, the hashtags #CCPvirus or #chinesevirus gained more and more popularity despite the WHO’s warning that they were stigmatizing. Anti-Asian hate was on the rise. One study analyzing almost 800,000 tweets with the #chinesevirus hashtag found that more than half contained anti-Asian sentiment. Things had gotten out of hand quickly, as they tend to do when public officials instigate fear and hate. Subsequently, anti-Asian hate crime events reported to the DOJ more than doubled, most occurring in March and April 2020, following COVID prevention measure announcements. It was a traumatic time for public health scientists in many countries. Remarks from the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lamented, “At WHO, we’re not just battling the virus; we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response.”“We condemn conspiracy theories that the novel coronavirus could have come from a lab” Peter Daszak had written in a draft of an open letter in early February 2020. He had a front-row seat to the rise of anti-Asian hatred because of his collaborators in China. “The original idea was to do a petition and put it on the web,” the British zoologist said as he showed me an early draft version. “Looking back at it, it was so naive politically.” Using his diary and email records, we tried to reconstruct what had happened in those weeks that prompted him to write the now controversial document. He had reached out to Shi Zhengli’s group after she published RaTG13 because he had a very academic worry: did the NIH provide funding for the discovery of the closest ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 but not receive credit for it? Zhengli’s discovery was a major paper bound to be highly cited, as he assumed at the time. However, the virus from Mojiang was collected in unrelated projects that were not sponsored by the NIH, so there was not much to be done.It was during that call at the end of January that his diary shows he first heard about the attacks on Zhengli by conspiracy theorists from a collaborating junior researcher. It would only get worse in the days that followed. When Shi Zhengli told him a week later that she received death threats and that people claimed she created a bioweapon, he was outraged. Zhengli and her team were being maligned publicly despite being completely innocent, as best he could tell from years of working with them. Scientists are a minority in every country they are in, and Zhengli had no institutional help. Nobody was on her side or felt the need to defend her. Peter had been outraged, he explained to me, and he wanted to do something to bring the discussion back to facts, so a petition from scientists seemed to make sense.By coincidence, as Peter was searching to find signatories for his statement of support, he found himself on a plane right next to Jeremy Farrar on the 12th of February. They had both been at the WHO in Geneva. They started chatting about the harassment of Chinese scientists and how unbelievably bad it has gotten with conspiracy theories around this topic. Jeremy, in turn, explained to Peter that Eddie Holmes and others had looked deeper at the genome, and they would soon publish an analysis showing that this virus was most likely not engineered. Peter, who had a decent familiarity with Zhengli’s work, was not surprised. They both realized the need for scientists to speak out publicly, given the lack of political leadership in too many countries that had let hate rise. “It was to show solidarity with our colleagues in China,” he explained to me. He had circulated the petition draft among emergent disease experts he knew and tried to get renowned colleagues from all over the world to sign it, including collaborators in Asia and Europe, members of the WHO, and basically anybody he could reach. After their conversation, Jeremy happily signed Peter’s statement of support, as did two dozen other emergent disease experts.On February 19th, the loose statement draft turned into a letter of support for Chinese scientists, and it was published by 27 leading public health scientists in the journal The Lancet. It expressed that, during a crisis, Chinese scientists working on the frontlines of the pandemic response had found themselves unjustly under attack, and scientists worldwide should support them. “We have a choice whether to stand up and support colleagues who are being attacked and threatened daily by conspiracy theorists or to just turn a blind eye,” Peter Daszak told journalist Jon Cohen at the time. The Lancet authors also stated that they “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Little did Peter expect in those early days that his actions to defend his collaborators and Chinese scientists in general against abuse — to do all he could to find signatories and condemn baseless conspiracy theories — would later be interpreted as an attempt to stifle debate or even organize a scientific cover-up.Despite popular narratives to the contrary today, best I can tell, all of his efforts made little difference either way. With online signing, the letter garnered somewhat over 20,000 signatures but failed to make a dent in the prevailing wave of hate. It barely got any media coverage at all; the only thing it truly achieved was the ire of conspiracy theorists, who would now turn their attention to Peter Daszak. Soon, they would find mighty allies against him in the press, anti-science pressure groups, and even the White House. Within two months, Peter would find his organization defunded by the most powerful man in office. Despite the best efforts of the WHO’s director general and the Lancet letter from the experts, the media discourse about a man-made virus continued unabated. Geopolitically, it had reached the highest offices.After senator Tom Cotton claimed that a bioweapon from China could not be ruled out (a claim some still cling to), the US State Department, led by Mike Pompeo, trotted the same line, directly pointing the finger at Beijing. Soon they would be claiming that there was “tremendous evidence” that the virus came from the lab. China hit back. On March 12, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of China, used CDC director Robert Redfield’s public admittance of failure to do proper PCR tests and tracing virus deaths to go on the offensive with deflective falsehoods:When did patient zero begin in the US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!While the political representatives were spitting out falsehoods for their domestic audiences, the virus spread uninhibitedly.Eventually, public health scientists had to step up to fill the political vacuum. They had to stick their necks out to offer painful advice to reluctant local decision-makers. Flatten the curve at almost any cost, or face chaos and death, like in Wuhan or Northern Italy. On March 16, New York City was reporting over 10,000 infections, and schools across the US were closing down. Citizens were scared. In response, President Donald Trump started calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” in press conferences. The implication was that if American bodies piled up, that was on China, not him, flying in the face of WHO reports about stigmatization and to the outrage of many. Citizens felt, justifiably, that the president had been asleep at the wheel. Many wanted to hold him accountable — a heated environment in an already tense election year.On March 17, during this fever of finger-pointing, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the peer-reviewed analysis and work of Kristian Andersen and his co-authors. It contained a dramatic conclusion for the current media environment and #Chinavirus panic:Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.This scientific assessment hit the circulating origin suspicions like a bombshell. The “proximal origin” paper offered some hard evidence against the popular man-made theories, leading to wide media coverage. Yet the attention it received within the scientific literature paled compared to what was happening outside of it. It went viral. I believe this amplification was not a reflection of the explosivity of the scientific findings but rather of the polarized and politicized environment. After all, reporting on this paper would not just be interesting on its own; it also served as a timely and arguably necessary slap in the face of the Trump administration, which acted so detached from reality.The administration, paralyzed by ineptitude and make-belief, seemingly devoted all their energy to a #CCPvirus blame game as the pandemic went out of control in the US and the first bodies started piling up in New York City. Even media outlets that never cover science would pick up the scientific study as a kind of receipt for having caught Trump and his crew of opportunistic misfits in yet another lie. Snappy headlines followed, from niche to mainstream media alike. ABC News even ran an article titled, “Sorry conspiracy theorists. The study concludes COVID-19 is ‘not a laboratory construct.’” Using “proximal origins” as a tool for political accountability against a lying administration, journalists and news outlets awarded dramatic amplification and visibility to the paper. Within days, it has garnered tens of thousands of downloads — almost unheard of for any scientific paper — and way more coverage than that regarding its conclusions in the news cycle. The message of “proximal origins” reached many millions. But all this media attention and instrumentalization of science to attack Trump also elicited reactions and malice towards science in some corners of the political electorate.For some, virologists had made their president look stupid. For others, “proximal origin” sabotaged the higher goal of being hawkish about China and biological warfare. For the majority of conspiratorially-minded people, the science did not square with all the op-eds, blogs, and articles they have been reading the last few weeks about all the suspicious connections this virus allegedly had with the lab, with the Chinese military and with HIV. “Given the amount of completely nutso emails I received today, I am not sure we convinced all the conspiracy theorists out there,” Kristian noted dryly to his coauthors on March 19. The agitation was palpable; the virologists had stirred the hornet’s nest, and politicians do not like being stung.It was a bit of a watershed moment. From this point forward, the man-made idea, which had its roots in crowd-sourced myths by influencers, our own intuitive biases, and the political calculations of various anti-China activists, soon became a lightning rod for conspiratorial ideation and signaling political affiliation alike. An ordinary, albeit inconvenient, scientific paper had put all virologists, as well as science in general, in the crosshairs of motivated actors, influencers, and true believers who did not take “no” for an answer. Revenge plans were put into action, and many scientists would be sent on a torturous journey.Subsequently, the authors of the “proximal origin” paper, the authors of Peter Daszak’s Lancet letter supporting Chinese scientists, and, of course, scientific leaders such as presidential advisor Dr. Fauci or Dr. Tedros and the whole of the WHO were seen as either shills for China, part of a scientific cabal, or both, and that they were engaged in a cover-up trying to stifle or shut down scientific inquiry into the virus. Their early actions put a target on their back, with sleuths and activists digging deeper into the history, motivation, and connections of these scientists. Eddie and Jeremy reaching out to the intelligence services, sharing Kristian’s initial suspicions, and their teleconference call with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins from NIAID and NIH would later be discovered by FOIA requests and portrayed as the “place where it happened.” The moment when international scientists got instructions from the “higher-ups” to allegedly suppress the idea of a man-made virus.For me, these were not plausible suppositions, regardless of whether the scientists in question were motivated to disprove Trump, mistaken on the science, or even guilty as charged (for the record, they were neither of those things). The simple reality is that nobody has the power to orchestrate a scientific cover-up on any larger issue. The scientific community is not a monolithic society; they do not take marching orders, and they certainly do not let anybody tell them what they can and cannot study. Academic scientists are not part of some big company or secret cabal; they don’t profit from upholding any status quo, and there is no “big virology” organization either. The NIH might award grants to US scientists, but overall and especially globally, virology all largely decentralized: small-scale, spaced out over 100 different nations, and thousands of universities with various cultural and political backgrounds. It is hard to imagine who or what could pull the strings behind such a setup, even theoretically.On a more personal note, I believe most scientists, certainly those virologists, their students, and collaborators I met, tend to be quite fiercely idealistic and inquisitive. Scientists encourage criticism, skepticism, and dissent, and professors reward their own students for out-of-the-box thinking. Any PhD student could potentially blow off the roof on any scientific opinion if they find compelling evidence, and usually this would be celebrated by their peers. That has, at least, been my experience. That doesn’t mean scientists are flawless; far from it. We are only humans after all, shaped and driven by our own ambitions, morals, egos, and idiosyncrasies like everybody else. The only difference, if any, is that most scientists, most of the time, feel bound by the idea of approximating ever closer truth through the scientific method of open inquiry and evidence-based reasoning. That is what is sacred to us, if I dare offer this loaded term.§Before we left Chiang Dao Cave with Peter Daszak, I couldn’t help but notice that all the shrines and statues were chock-full of figurines and little gifts that visitors left as offerings to whatever they felt were the spirit of the cave. Remarkable places in our natural world have always inspired a sense of sacredness. Whether you are a traveling monk, a visiting tourist, or an Indigenous local, few seem to leave the experience unmarked.I guess our predilection to mysticism comes from a desire to understand: who or what built this sanctuary of stone and its many eerily familiar forms? Humans have visited and worshiped here for more than two thousand years. An untold number of contemporary stories and beliefs must have come and gone. They all might, however, have suspected larger forces at play; how else could we explain what our senses picked up in the cave? Who could carve the tormented figures out of the stone if not someone powerful?Especially when a nightmarish figure stares us in the face, natural processes, paired with our overzealous pattern recognition, is not an emotionally satisfying explanation. An evil agent is more intuitive to us. I believe an outbreak of a novel pandemic virus that would bring sickness, death, and despair, supposedly right next to a laboratory studying such ugly invisible creatures, will for many seem like a pattern too obvious to unsee. It is true; there is a question to be asked, and we need to get to the bottom of it.I just believe we have to keep an open mind for explanations that go beyond our intuition and are based on meticulous research and scientific knowledge about our world. To give ourselves, and science, a bit of time. After all, today, we understand that only water and time, not some ephemeral agent, have acted together to shape the rock layers and carve out the mountain cathedrals.Does this realization mean science has made Chiang Dao Cave less sacred or precious just by giving us an answer? Did science take away the solace of our beliefs in higher forces and a grander hidden world? For some, maybe it does. There is the opposite effect; I find more satisfaction and beauty in knowing the real, unintuitive answer. A drop of water might appear powerless, insignificant, or useless. And yet, with time, a sacred monument is built from its steady drip that conscious beings like us come to worship. Without science, how could we ever hope to gain an appreciation for something so unfitting to our human intuition? How else could we experience a true sense of the grandiose vastness of time and the cumulative impact of a little force applied over eons? Aren’t we truly worshiping the unyielding persistence of the water droplets in those cathedrals birthed from rock layers? Did we gain something more by having to imagine an intermediary deity, agent, or spirit in between? And if so, what does that tell us about our human predisposition and, ultimately, the human condition?For me, the scientific process is a lot like that relentless water droplet. Each study, any nugget of insight, and every experiment that failed or succeeded has a small, almost imperceptible, impact on our understanding of our complex universe. A growing body of knowledge that propagates forward over time. The patterns it finds, the blurry images it develops, and the cathedrals of knowledge it eventually builds offer us a new perspective, not only into the world but also into ourselves and our role in it. Science may not always have a quick or satisfying answer that is as compelling or emotionally satisfying as the stories of good and evil, of bioweapons and killer viruses and Chinese secrecy. Nor can science hope to offer the misleading comfort of easy answers, magical explanations and grand narratives. Yet science offers an invitation to truly partake in the wonder and vastness of the world that we are privileged to inhabit together. A chance to observe the exquisite patterns of existence that surround us. An opportunity to connect with the most likely reality of our circumstances. Without the scientific method to make sense of it all, are we not forever doomed to helplessly chase the false myths and frantic mirages of popular zeitgeist or our needy imaginations?Especially when some information combatants have learned to abuse our very intuitions and overfitting pattern recognition for ruthless personal gain?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.Continue reading chapter 4 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.“Without a harmonious and stable environment, how can there be a home where people can live and work happily?” Xi Jinping's words on New Year’s Eve in 2019 were intended to reign in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. For months, the city has been in a renewed battle for its soul against the oppressive and subversive influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, were expected to march again on January 1, 2020. The goal was to maintain political pressure after a landslide victory of pro-democracy candidates in district court elections weeks prior. Six thousand police officers were deployed to deal with potential unrest—the wrong signal to send, given previous escalations and excessive police brutality. “Safety concerns” led to the cancellation of the midnight fireworks despite months of planning. The next day, a peaceful protest with families, kids, and the elderly, often dressed up in costumes, quickly escalated into violence, tear gas, and mass arrests. The police blamed some radical student agitators who had hijacked the march. Maybe it was inevitable; tensions had been high for months. ​​Universities and their students were front and center of the recent civil rights movement, and the police claimed these institutions had become “weapon factories.” As a result, sieges and raids on universities have become part of campus life over the last few months.The last thing the exasperated Jasnah Kholin (pseudonym) needed at the time was “one more f*****g thing to worry” about. The unfiltered coronavirus researcher (who swore like a sailor) now uses a pseudonym to hide her real identity for safety reasons (I promised her that I would omit any details that she felt would compromise her safety). She, like many others, had been at these protests for civil rights and experienced firsthand how they were squashed by the police, often with force. Once, the young academic had a pepper ball barely miss her face that would certainly have knocked her out. Another time, the police came to pick her up, and she was in prison for weeks before they let her go. Wrongfully suspected or not, she was among the lucky few who got out uncharged because there was no evidence to place her at the scene. It’s not surprising she had an innate distrust of the Chinese authorities, who were more and more entrenched in Hong Kong, her only home.When she heard about the pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan around New Year's on ProMED-mail, an internet service supported by volunteers that tracks unusual health events, she immediately started screenshotting and saving every bit of information that was coming out of Wuhan: every pdf, every Weibo message, every picture, all kinds of vital info. Because of Chinese censorship, information can sometimes be lost within minutes of appearing online. What foresight! “Oh, I am very familiar with how information works in China,” she would later explain to me. In any crisis, Chinese authorities shut down the information flow to try to control the narrative. This is not unusual; it happens for things big and small, important or insignificant. This approach might even help to contain false and harmful rumors during a crisis. However, it also creates a layer of obfuscation and political spin that can make it challenging to assert pertinent facts with any confidence. For example, consider how dangerous the virus was and how it spread. In the very beginning, the Chinese authorities claimed that the virus ​​was barely, or not at all, transmissible human-to-human in an attempt to not cause panic, a claim that was still being repeated by the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 14th.Jasnah Kholin and her academic colleagues in Hong Kong did not believe any of it. They had been burned before. On January 4th, Jasnah caught wind of a concerning story on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) about an infected father who had not gone to the Huanan market. Chinese censors deleted it within the hour. Yet for her, already gathering as much from rumors, the specifics of this story were the final indication of human-to-human transmission, vehemently denied by Chinese authorities until weeks later. Many other coronavirus experts were just as suspicious as her, including SARS-veterans Yuen Kwok-Yung, a giant among Hong Kong's infectious disease experts, and Leo Poon, who developed the first PCR diagnostic for SARS in 2003. They all independently read the signs on the wall and raised the alarm in Hong Kong about the human spread. “SARS was a generational trauma for Hong Kong; this was not our first f*****g rodeo,” Jasnah kept cursing. According to her, SARS-1 had also been much closer to a pandemic than people commonly realize. However, all of them knew this and did everything they could to make the rest of Hong Kong take this seriously.Most likely, their actions at the time helped the city avoid the worst. By any measure, Hong Kong's early and harsh response has been a success story. With the high uncertainty and unclear messaging from mainland China, it fell mostly to outbreak professionals and coronavirus academics like Jasnah to exert caution and inform society. Speed is everything in emerging outbreaks; the longer it takes to mount collective action, the worse it usually gets. Because of their warnings, both the population and Hong Kong’s chief executive would take the threat seriously and implement strict pandemic prevention protocols. From the first to the fourth wave, Hong Kongers succeeded where most of the world would fail; they suppressed community transmission of the virus.Yet not everybody was happy. Pro-democracy protests saw their momentum decline under new restrictions. They were especially concerned about the ubiquitous use of contact tracing and digital surveillance, which they feared would be a new and powerful tool in the hands of the police. In the following months, civil rights protests were canceled, and the CCP exerted even more political pressure on Hong Kong. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Jasnah, like many in the wider Chinese diaspora, wished that somebody would blow the lid off this thing in those early days. Why did the CCP initially deny the obvious human-to-human spread? Why the silencing of doctors? Did the communist party really think they could hush up the severity of the outbreak? When will the world wake up about the Chinese government? Somewhat ironically, the tumultuous cultural and political moment, along with this appropriately placed mistrust, made the Chinese diaspora, especially Hong Kong, very susceptible to a different type of viral spread.Since December 30, when the outbreak of pneumonia of unknown etiology became official, sporadic voices both on Chinese and Western social media have put the connection of WIV’s biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory into public spaces, albeit in the context that they had the capacity and expertise there to handle the outbreak. The positive connotation did not last long. Within five days, this information would be presented by a pro-civil rights protester in Hong Kong to suggest quite a different connection. A tweet from the time, still visible today, reads:My guess is China has ordered an attack on Hong Kong with bio-weapons to stop the continuous protests. Like in 2003, the CCP assisted the outbreak of SARS in HK to pave the way for #CEPA. You can't underestimate how evil this regime is. #BioweaponOthers echoed the idea, highlighting the particular timing right after the New Year’s protests that ended in violence. While none of these rumors gained any wide-reaching traction, they symbolized both fear and suspicion about the CCP and what they would or would not do. Suspicion was warranted. Independent information from Wuhan was hard to come by. And ordinary people would never get the full story.Many of the early outbreak threads come together in one person, Dr. Gao Fu, known in the West as Dr. George Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC). Within China, public health authorities like the CCDC had mostly independent community-level, state-level, and federal offices, and George was sitting at the top node where all data would cascade towards, in many ways, the highest public health position in the land, only below the communist party’s National Health Commission. Dr. Gao rarely gave interviews, and every time he did, he would be investigated by authorities. The Associated Press learned of three such instances. When I managed to get an interview, it was a random Sunday afternoon. He was still in the office, working alongside his personal assistant. He kept running out of our interview on and off, dictating instructions in Chinese under his breath, sometimes even while I was directly talking to him.​​​Originally a veterinarian, George went to Oxford for a PhD and postdoc in Virology. After that, he went to Harvard for a few years, then back to Oxford as a group leader, before returning to China and starting his meteoric rise. From the Chinese Academy of Science to heading National Key Laboratories, working on the ground in the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone (his role was described as “heroic” by the US National Academy of Science), and all the way to becoming the Director of the Chinese CDC. By any measure, Dr. Gao is an incredibly successful scientist and possibly an equally skilled political tactician.Most of our conversation was not about the questions I asked but a mixture of highlighting the work he has done, the papers he has published, the awards he has achieved, and overall, how great China did. “I have been on the frontline from the very beginning for the vaccine development in China, and also, I have some original publications for antibody development,” he said as he rattled off a long list of things I did not ask about and that went quite beyond the scope, but soon I would figure out why. He used it as a preamble to say that writers like me should really write for the general public about his and China’s amazing achievements. He jumped up from his chair to show me popular science books he had written in Chinese, and if I was interested in writing about these topics, we could write something together. I was torn between rolling my eyes and staying diplomatic. What a start, I thought, not even five minutes into our conversation. It went a bit better when I prompted him to put down a timeline for the early outbreak.By the end of December, there were already rumors of another SARS outbreak on the Chinese internet. People were getting sick, and some doctors discovered that their patients had an association with the Huanan seafood market. Perhaps even market visitors or vendors noticed something unusual and spoke up as well; reconstruction has been difficult. As far as anybody can tell, these speculations started only around the last week of December but would soon harden into alarming action.On December 30th, the municipal government issued a “red head” letter—an official document—noting they had a PUE (pneumonia of unknown etiology). The letter asked that if any other hospital notices similar cases, take them seriously and report them to the Bureau of Health. When Dr. Gao read that, he sent his staff and second-in-command to Wuhan. On December 31st, they collected samples from hospital patients.On January 3rd, they got the first sequences confirming it was a coronavirus. In parallel, they quickly developed PCR primers and sent them to the local CCDC in Wuhan so they could start testing and screening patients. He could not stop himself from mentioning how China did well in contrast to the United States, where officials struggled with developing their own PCR test, which was a bit of a scandal at the time under Robert Redfield’s CDC. On the 5th, Gao and his team were trying to isolate and culture the virus in all the cell lines they had. They even took lung tissue samples from acute patients. “We were prepared to try everything, but in the end, this particular coronavirus was so easy to grow,” he admitted. On the evening of the 6th, they saw the canonical picture of the coronavirus (the spikes around the viral particle that look like a crown) under the electron microscope. This would famously be published in The Lancet, a renowned medical journal, a few weeks later.On January 10th, Dr. Gao would personally visit Wuhan. They would report the first fatal case a day later, on the 11th. The following day, Gao’s team had been taking environmental swabs from the Huanan market multiple times, a place epidemiologically linked to most early patients in the hospital. However, the municipal CCDC in Wuhan had discussed shutting down the market on December 31st late into the night, and on January 1st at 8:00 a.m., fully geared CCDC workers would disinfect it. “So, there was not much to see anymore,” George told me. Yet neither official source acknowledged human-to-human transmission.Dr. Gao traveled back to Beijing only to return to Wuhan again a week later, on the 17th, with another expert committee to assess the worsening outbreak. By then, he told me, they all felt that this outbreak was very serious. Many healthcare workers were getting sick, too. In full PPE gear, Gao’s team would interview patients and doctors, whereas he would personally interrogate the directors of the various hospitals with coronavirus cases. They had to make an announcement. “We were always discussing when we should make this official announcement. We didn't want to create a big panic; we wanted a chance to get the disease done.” It was a difficult balance to strike, given the rumors at the time. “I never spoke to the media before the 20th; because I am the director of the CDC, I cannot speak out without evidence… But we felt and we thought it was human-to-human transmission, but we need evidence [sic].” He was right; no matter if it is the Chinese CDC, WHO, or any other organization, scientific evidence is always much slower to come forward than speculations and rumors. When I asked him how he felt about this asymmetry, he finally dropped some of the self-promotion and got angry. “With all these conspiracy theories, what can you do as a scientist? You cannot do anything. All you can do is keep yourself quiet. Can you argue? You wanna quarrel with them? Fight with them? In the media? You’ll never have the end.”In the months following January, Dr. Gao had been fiercely criticized for not announcing human-to-human transmission earlier, so I guess he felt the need to keep reiterating how he had always considered that there was human-to-human spread. It was a coronavirus, after all. That it would spread between humans was never in question. But how much? “MERS did not spread well between humans,” he offered as another example. One really needs evidence to substantiate and classify claims. “I tried really hard to never say anything wrong,” he defended himself. After that, he went on another round of deflection— “Americans and Europeans would not even wear masks” —and more self-promotion.I asked him how he dealt with the pressure and never-ending criticism. “I don’t want to be in the spotlight, but it comes with the position; people put you in this position. If I did something wrong in the last three years, I cannot change history. If you tell me, ‘George, you did this or that wrong in 2020,’ … I know we have some lessons to learn, but that is not our Chinese culture to say. We only say we learn experiences [sic], not learn lessons.” He pointed out how the Germans officially admitted to the mistakes of the Second World War, but the Japanese never did. Any admission of failure comes with the threat of losing face. Being silent was a way to preserve it. “We never use the word ‘lesson’; you guys can use lesson.” He chuckled a bit at this cultural idiosyncrasy—maybe the one thing that was truly coming from him as a person, not him as a political tactician. He spent fifteen years living outside of China and was trained at Oxford and Harvard, he reminded me. He believed that he understood both cultures and that understanding had equipped him for his position. “If it were not me, with such a big pressure, the world would be different.” He reiterated this last point twice. I think he was correct, but whether it would have been better or worse if a less skilled politician had been in his influential role remains ​​open to interpretation.The simple fact is that while Chinese scientists were well positioned, Chinese authorities had failed to learn some crucial lessons from the original SARS outbreak. They tried to control the message before the outbreak overwhelmed them. On January 3, 2020, after a week of rumors about a new SARS outbreak appeared on social media, a memo from the National Health Commission, one of China’s executive departments of the State Council, ordered the shutdown of all outbreak communication. Digital censors would filter and delete messages talking about the outbreak from Weibo, websites, and anywhere else online. In a situation where speed of communication is everything, artificial barriers to information flow can be a poisonous thorn. Even Chinese scientists were not allowed to talk to the press or release any data in an effort by authorities to keep a lid on this thing until they could figure out how to spin it. The authorities muzzled them and prohibited them from speaking with outsiders, at least in theory. Is it really any surprise that the rest of the world was suspicious?There were rays of hope, though. I believe one has to understand that science is not only an engine for innovation or a way to get fancy new gadgets but has always functioned as a tool of global diplomacy. Even during the Cold War, scientific collaborations and trust built between researchers would often circumnavigate political nonsense. The Wuhan outbreak was no different. Despite the muzzle, information would be disclosed to academic collaborators. That is why many scientists in authoritarian countries will always be viewed with distrust by their own governments. They fear that a scientist's loyalty to the truth is higher than their loyalty to the state. For Chinese scientists, working under these conditions was, and certainly still is, a difficult line to walk.Few understand this better than evolutionary virologist Edward Holmes. The British-born scientist, who prefers to go by Eddie, holds a position at the University of Sydney in Australia, where studying viral emergence has been his career and life. In 2012, he became interested in working on emergent diseases in China and struck up several collaborations all over the country, including in Wuhan. One of these collaborators was Professor Zhang Yongzhen from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, formerly of the CCDC as well. The two shared many common interests, including discovering novel RNA viruses and studying their evolution. Both saw the potential and power of metagenomic sequencing, a technique where all DNA or RNA sequences from within an environmental sample are amplified without bias. Metagenomic sequencing creates terabytes of data, and filtering through billions of genetic puzzle pieces while trying to stitch them together into novel and unknown genomes is a computationally challenging task that requires expertise, resources, and, of course, local collaboration to get relevant samples.This hunt for relevant samples brought the two of them to Wuhan in 2014, where researchers from the municipal CCDC took them to the Huanan market as an example of where spillovers might happen. It was no secret that wildlife was sold there, often without the right permissions. Eddie snapped photos of caged raccoon dogs, potentially sick and held in cages in the corner of the western side of the market in unsanitary conditions, with other wildlife stacked below and above them. Eddie had always been interested in the animal-human interface, whereas Zhang was more focused on human pathogen surveillance. That is why the two also visited local hospitals. Zhang had an ambitious vision. He wanted to build a network of hospitals all over China that would collect samples from patients with respiratory symptoms and send them to him to search for new viral pathogens. Where better to find novel RNA viruses of relevance than in the obscure pneumonia cases all larger hospitals see but rarely resolve?In the end, Zhang would manifest his human-centric vision of an alarm system for pneumonia cases. A system that would now deliver the first patient samples from Wuhan on January 3, 2020, to him. By January 5th, reportedly after 40 hours of straight-up work, team member Chen Yan-Mei had produced the first full genome sequence from these patient samples in his lab. It was a new SARS-related virus. Zhang raised the alarm with his contacts in Shanghai’s Health Authority and uploaded the new viral genome to Genbank under an embargo. “We wrote the paper in two days,” Eddie would later explain to me. On January 7th, they submitted a paper to the scientific journal Nature.There was incredible urgency to be quick from a public health perspective, but we would be remiss not to note the prestige that comes with publishing. Zhang wanted to get the sequence out, but other Chinese groups, including George Gao’s CCDC and Shi Zhengli from WIV, were also trying to do so, and they had their genomes ready around the same time. The problem was the National Health Commission’s ban on releasing any data. For days, Eddie was urging Zhang for permission to release the genome, but the rules were clear. Zhang was likely torn from what I could gather. It seems to me that when Zhang visited Wuhan in person that week and saw the full scope of the emerging outbreak starting to overwhelm hospitals, he believe word needed to get out. An editor at the journal was pushing him to release the genome, and when Eddie called him when he was on his flight to Beijing, urging him once again to release the genome, he agreed. Zhang’s day had been as eye-opening as it was grim. “Eddie, I authorize you to release the data,” Eddie recalled their exchange. Fifty-two minutes after Eddie received the FASTA file containing the genome sequence, he released it on Zhang’s behalf to a virological website. It would become the global reference genome named Wuhan-Hu-1, the wild-type original SARS-CoV-2. The world would finally get to see the new virus.And not a second too soon because just two days later, Thailand would report the first infected patient, identified by none other than Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, the Thai virus huntress I met in Chonburi. This alarm from the international spread put pressure and attention on the Chinese authorities to acknowledge human-to-human transmission, which they still had not confirmed with WHO.Because of his decision to share data transparently, Zhang was named the “saving grace” of the pandemic by Time magazine, and the scientific journal Nature featured him in an article titled “Ten people who shaped science in 2020.” However, his actions were met with scorn and punishment inside China. The National Health Commission had previously reprimanded him with a “rectification” order, temporarily disallowing his team to study the virus. Officials came to “inspect” his lab based on bogus claims about biosafety protocols. They were there to put him on a leash. Silence would fall around him.Since then, Zhang has consistently denied being reprimanded, reportedly arguing that he did not believe China was controlling information and that their response was simply based on caution due to false statements made by scientists about the first SARS outbreak. “Zhang is now not the same person as I knew him before,” Eddie shared with me. Years later, the ongoing conflict escalated publicly again, leading to Zhang and his team's sudden eviction, which caused him to stage a protest. Dramatic pictures showed him sleeping in front of his office door with policemen surrounding him while students spoke up on his behalf, to no avail. In Eddie’s opinion, the authorities had long punished Zhang for disobeying the muzzle order; his eviction marked the end point of a four-year prosecution, even though he was not privy to the details.There was also friction with Zhang's release of the virus genome from other sources outside the health commission. In particular, Dr. George Gao from the CCDC felt someone had stolen his prestige. He had uploaded the first genome sequences from his patient samples to GISAID on January 9th (although Gao told me it was the 8th), and they were released by the 12th, a good day and a half after Eddie posted Zhang’s work. Zhang was the first, not him, because he broke the rules. Since then, Gao has used his power and influence to try to rewrite history, striking up a deal with the now controversial Peter Bogner and the database GISAID to retrospectively change the release date to January 10th so he would be first. Others also reported how GISAID bullied scientists into citing the bogus date on the GISAID genomes and removing citations from Zhang’s genome. Everything to create a thin paper trail to make it look like Gao and GISAID were the first.In reality, neither Gao nor Zhang were truly the first.On December 25th, the private sequencing company Vision Medicals, a sequencing service provider working with hospitals, had sequenced samples from a retired 65-year-old deliveryman who used to work at the Huanan seafood market and still spent a lot of time there. He was first admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital on December 18th. When a technician by the name of 小山狗 (Xiǎoshān Gǒu, or “Little Mountain Dog”) came to work on the morning of December 26th, she found that her software had flagged a few sequencing reads as belonging to a “sensitive pathogen,” something that seemed like a SARS coronavirus. “Feeling anxious, I quickly checked the detailed analysis data in the background and found that the similarity was not very high,” she would later write in her blog. She initiated a more detailed analysis, finding an 87% similarity to a bat SARS-related virus. But bat SARS are still classified under SARS, so she was worried and compared it to all published SARS-related genomes. She found the closest two—bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC2—sampled in 2018 in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province. They would not remain the closest known relatives for long.Dr. Shi Zhengli, now better known as “The Batwoman,” had been contacted by her boss at WIV around ten on the night of December 30th while she was in Shanghai for a meeting. Doctors from the Jinyintan hospital had reached out to WIV because they had nine patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology; the suspicion was SARS. Zhengli contacted students in her lab that same night; luckily, three of them were still working. She asked them to stay the night and test the samples. They ran a pan-PCR test for general coronaviruses, as well as a few qRT-PCR probes more specifically for SARS-related coronaviruses. Four and five patient samples tested positive, respectively. “We believed the results. But I could not believe the results, you know?” she recalled for me. “That was not possible. We always said, ‘Oh, one day it will come,’ and it really came.” Her lab was working with coronaviruses; could this be one of the viruses they were working with? She described to me how she felt upset, her hand waving up and down in front of her body. At first, they could not get the full genome sequence, so they could not compare it with what they had in the lab. Only by lunchtime could one of her colleagues get a hold of the virus sequence that Little Mountain Dog had assembled via a hospital sample. The new virus was nothing they had ever seen, isolated, or worked on. “So I feel relieved,” she admitted. No scientist takes lab safety lightly, and Zhengli, who was trained in the West, was no different. But she, like everybody else, has never encountered this novel virus before.That being said, her extensive work on collecting bat samples ​​paid off. Within her database, there was a pretty close match to a bat coronavirus her team had collected in Yunnan, Southern China. It was a big deal, pointing to the origin of the new virus being bats again. Soon, she would publish the genome sequence extracted from that bat fecal swab, named RaTG13, and with its publication, her troubles would begin (more on that later). Back in the first days of January, her team also managed to sequence the full-length genome of the novel virus from the patient samples the hospital sent them. Zhengli was very proud of her team because they got the full genome, even with the very last base pairs at the end—the trickiest part of the assembly. Her genome sequence was the cleanest with lots of read support; a fact she would be really proud of.To sum up, within a week of clinicians raising the alarm, three different labs and one sequencing company had identified and sequenced the novel virus causing sickness, which I personally find rather impressive. Even today, there is a broad agreement that nobody had ever seen this novel virus before, and there was a collective effort to identify, sequence, and understand what was happening to patients in Wuhan hospitals. Most Chinese doctors and scientists did their part to quickly help decision-makers have good information for dealing with the outbreak. And yet, upholding appearances and hierarchical politics seemed to somehow have thrown sand into some of those efficient gears. Limiting the free flow of information, muzzling what scientists can say and to whom, and trying to downplay rumors and control narratives slowed down our collective understanding. Much of that continues to this day. Some Chinese scientists get punished for breaking these rules; some do the best they can within the system, and others try to navigate it to their advantage.In my interview with the accomplished Dr. Gao, getting all the credit for “being first to publish the genome” counted more than sharing pesky details and messy efforts from many scientists to identify and understand this new virus. After his shenanigans with the GISAID database, today he would turn around and claim that because a journal (The Lancet in this case) quoted his GISAID genomes as being the first, it proved that he was indeed the first. After a tedious interview, I felt very little desire to stroke his ego, so our conversation dried up. Either way, he was a good reminder of how personal ambition and politics can tempt even very accomplished scientists down the wrong path of fiction and falsehood. In the larger picture, Dr. Gao’s petty attempts to rewrite his role were a rather mundane quibble left for the history books, inconsequential to how we understood the novel threat. Few citizens of the world had any idea what a way-less accomplished scientist might do when faced with the tragic outbreak of a novel virus and the opportunity to become famous.Dr. Li-Meng Yan is our first example of one such scientist. Scarlett—as Jasnah Kholin would call her former acquaintance from Hong Kong University by her Western name—was a rather unremarkable postdoc. Yet, in just a few months, the black-haired woman with the square glasses and monotonous, almost robotic voice would leverage her scientific affiliations into stardom. Dr. Leo Poon, a viral disease expert whose excellent lab develops diagnostic tools, hired her in 2015 to conduct experiments with a hamster animal model system to evaluate some of the diagnostic tests the lab was investigating. I tracked down the soft-spoken professor because I wanted to know who Scarlett was before she became a media sensation. Leo explained his lab's focus and that Scarlett had been a hard worker. At the time, her experimental work was focused on studying influenza virus transmission and testing attenuated influenza vaccines in mice. Until January 2020, Scarlett had never even worked with coronaviruses, according to Leo.“I had no idea what she was up to,” he would tell me. Leo Poon, like other Hong Kong academics, had been preparing for the worst early on. In 2003, he and his colleague Malik Peiris first isolated a coronavirus from samples of 50 pneumonic patients in Hong Kong and identified this as the infectious agent causing SARS. Their findings and groundbreaking paper on the novel virus would make them famous among academics. Back then, Leo had developed the diagnostic PCR test for SARS, and when he saw the official “red-head” notice from the Wuhan authorities in late December, he began preparing himself mentally to do the same again with the new virus. With a grim sense of foreboding, he pulled genomic sequences of SARS-related viruses from databases and started constructing various primers from consensus regions—genomic regions that had high similarity—to test specificity even before the first genome would be published. He wanted to be ready and have the system up and running for when the genome of the new virus would be released. Speed is critical.Scarlett might have felt bored about her influenza vaccine work, and she had not been very happy over the years with how little impact and recognition her work entailed. Leo remembered how she always wanted “to be more,” attempted to request first authorship on a paper to which her contribution was not substantial enough to warrant such a demand, and sought to work on projects that were outside the scope of his lab. She pushed him to let her speak at seminars for more exposure or invite guests to the lab by leveraging his name. But science can be very frustrating in that way. Except for some extremely lucky or extraordinary circumstances, scientific work and recognition are slow, gradual, and almost never reach the wider public.From my perspective and that of people who knew her, it seemed that even after years in a great lab, success did not come fast enough for Scarlett. Like many junior academics hungry for impact, maybe she also desired to be the one to find something that would make her famous.On January 13th, a bit more than a day after Zhang’s SARS-CoV-2 genome was published online, SARS-veteran Professor Yuen Kwok-Yung gave an interview to a local Hong Kong newspaper that most likely caught Scarlett’s attention. By comparing the genome sequences to published coronaviruses and placing them into a basic phylogenetic family tree like Little Mountain Dog did a few weeks prior, he explained that, while the new virus is genetically distant from the SARS of 2003, the original source might have been bats. He also highlighted that two bat viruses with around 90% similarity, sampled in 2018 in Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province, were the closest relatives of the new virus. The archipelago south of Shanghai in the East China Sea was over 1000 kilometers away from Wuhan. “However, the reason for the similarity of the coronaviruses in the two places is not yet known,” he was quoted as saying. Little did he know that his words would contribute to setting a course of action in motion that would shake the world. Scientific mysteries invite speculation, and Scarlett possibly saw an opportunity to solve that particular mystery of why these geographically distant viruses were so similar.She looked up the 2018 study he was referencing. It had the apt title, “Genomic characterization and infectivity of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in Chinese bats.” A basic internet search highlighted that the scientists who discovered these bat viruses were affiliated with a military medical university. Jasnah had explained to me how Scarlett was deeply distrustful of the CCP, so it did not take much for her to believe that maybe there was a hidden human connection between the Wuhan outbreak and these bat viruses named ZC45 and ZXC21. After all, why were the two closest viral relatives to the novel virus both discovered by scientists affiliated with the Chinese military? How could a new virus emerge 1,000 kilometers away in a city with one of China’s two high-security BSL-4 labs? Maybe there was a deeper reason why Chinese authorities have not been transparent about the outbreak and lied about human-to-human transmission. It likely seemed to be too much of a coincidence for her, but we can only speculate about the full scope of her motives.She certainly was not the only one in Hong Kong who distrusted anything and everything coming from China. “Honestly, it doesn’t take much for certain people. Moving outside of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] for any reason and realizing that you have basically been fed a carefully crafted lie your entire life is not exactly a comforting experience,” Jasnah elaborated. She had seen this many times before when Chinese students were moving to Hong Kong. The change in the information environment often leads to a change in their worldview. As for Scarlett, Jasnah told me she had been “a regular watcher” of YouTuber and supposed Chinese dissident Wang Dinggang, who broadcasts under the name of Lu De. For years, he has built a name for himself by attacking the CCP on YouTube. He railed against China’s crackdown on Muslims and pontificated on the US trade war. Scarlett possibly saw an opportunity for recognition, or maybe just a need to share, so she reached out to him and offered her suspicions about the new virus.It is unclear whether she knew—or even cared about—how much her suspicions would be capitalized on by bad actors at the time. When a group of US-based Chinese influencers suddenly started distributing the first social media posts, videos, and articles in Chinese on January 18th that highlighted these spurious connections to ZC45, ZXC21, and the Chinese military, few consumers within the Chinese-speaking community were aware that the information flooding their news feeds was inauthentic. They had no idea that the information being released was made up for a specific purpose: to manipulate them. “The media outlets that cater to the Chinese diaspora—a jumble of independent websites, YouTube channels, and Twitter accounts with anti-Beijing leanings—have formed a fast-growing echo chamber for misinformation. With few reliable Chinese-language news sources to fact-check them, rumors can quickly harden into a distorted reality,” The New York Times would later report about this ecosystem. Only with some hindsight can we reconstruct where all the activity was coming from at the time.The ringleader behind these sets of rumors was Ho Wan Kwok (also known as Guo Wengui or Miles Kwok), better known as Miles Guo. He was a reportedly corrupt billionaire and self-proclaimed dissident who fled China in 2014 after sniffing out that he was going to be arrested under allegations of bribery, money laundering, fraud, and rape. Profiting from shady construction deals and political maneuvering for decades, Guo was, at the time, the 73rd richest person in China when his political network was slowly being dismantled by Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign. He was losing influence. Before investigators could reach him, he took his money and ran.Ever since, the exiled tycoon has lived lavishly in the US and found a new political home within the Trump-associated MAGA movement in the US, being a frequent guest at ​​Mar-a-Lago and a close collaborator of then-President Trump’s advisor and Breitbart founder Steve Bannon. In 2018, Guo, with the help of Bannon, entered the media game and trademarked Guo Media, a social media video and broadcasting service owned as a foreign business corporation by a shell company in Delaware. He would later also be the funding source behind Gettr, a Twitter clone and alt-tech social media platform targeting American conservatives that was founded by Jason Miller, a former Donald Trump aide. Miles Guo and Trump’s inner circle had a shared interest in undermining the Chinese government, and Bannon received over a million dollars in consulting fees from Guo, according to investigative reports. With their near-daily video commentary, Guo and Bannon’s opinion pieces would flood GNews, and they accumulated a decent following, especially among the Chinese-speaking diaspora, who saw Guo as some kind of anti-CCP warrior and hero, a false image he crafted for himself.The billionaire has also cultivated a set of popular influencers and dissidents to boost his profile, including John Pan, who was among Mr. Guo's inner circle until December 2019. A dissident, Mr. Pan would later explain to ABC News Australia how he became trapped in Guo’s anti-CCP activism and how he and the initial 18 members of the inner circle discussed how to orchestrate viral media campaigns against the CCP. "We're talking about how we would promote the information that Guo was leaking out, how we spread that information to the world. No matter [if it was] true or false," Mr. Pan was quoted as saying by the news organization. He explained, as an example, how Guo once encouraged his key followers during the 2019 Hong Kong democracy protests to spread a rumor that martial law was imminent in the territory. People predisposed to this kind of messaging in times of crisis ate it up uncritically, and Guo’s followership and influence grew, especially in Hong Kong, where there was a massive hunger for CCP-independent information in Chinese, and he was pumping out propaganda content daily.When the outbreak in Wuhan emerged in early 2020, it presented a tremendous opportunity for Guo’s operation. On January 18th, Miles Guo created the marching orders and, in a live stream, passed them to his followers. Together with Lu De, his “chief propagandist,” he used Scarlett’s suspicions and persona to concoct a bioweapon myth based on the spurious connections to the 2018 bat viruses. Some of Guo’s sock puppet accounts (fictitious social media accounts controlled by somebody else) are still visible today. They would all blast out the same copy-pasted message:武汉的类SARS冠状病毒就是来源于中共军方2018年从舟山蝙蝠身上发现并分离的新型冠状病毒。如图改病毒序列可以在美国国立卫生研究院的基因数据库找到（NIH的GenBank)，由南京军区军事医学科学研究所递交。并且通过技术故意更改舟山蝙蝠病毒，适于人类传播的新病毒.Translation: The SARS-like coronavirus in Wuhan originated from a new type of coronavirus discovered and isolated from bats in Zhoushan by the Chinese military in 2018. The virus sequence shown in the picture can be found in the gene database of the National Institutes of Health (NIH's GenBank), and submitted by the Institute of Military Medical Sciences of the Nanjing Military Region. And the Zhoushan bat virus was intentionally changed through technology, a new virus suitable for human transmission.These identical messages contained the same images: one was a screenshot of the GenBank (the US National Institute of Health’s sequence repository) website showing the 2018 bat virus entries, and the second was of the 2018 publication with the military hospital affiliation of the last author highlighted separately. Disinformation often uses real but decontextualized information as the supposed “source” for its false or manipulative claims. There was no question that all of these identical posts came from the same originator. It was low-effort but effective. Dozens, if not hundreds, of sock puppet accounts and bots would amplify this message on Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, Weibo, and other social media platforms. Lu De and other influencers in Guo’s network would do the same. The groundwork had been laid, and audiences were primed.On January 19th, the influencer Lu De would put on a suit and get ready for his show. In his 80-minute episode devoted to an “unnamed whistle-blower” (later revealed to be Scarlett), Lu De boasted that he had heard from “the world’s absolute top coronavirus expert” some troubling news that China was not being transparent. The Chinese military had actually created the virus. “I think this is very believable and very scary,” he said. Broadcast on GNews, Vimeo, and YouTube and then amplified by his tens of thousands of followers, his show hit like a bomb, with hundreds of thousands of clicks and engagements. The other influencers in Guo’s network followed suit, with the inner group alone reaching around 143 million views in the following weeks, according to an investigation by the Digital Forensics Research Lab, an organization that tracks disinformation.Yet this first media blitz would only be the beginning of their success story. Guo’s biggest move was still a few months out. Scarlett was to assume a much bigger and way more controversial role, maybe the one she always wanted. Leo Poon warned me that he might not want to answer any more questions about her because “I am sure she will use all my comments on her to promote herself and to discredit science. I personally do not want to give her any chance to make up new stories. Of this reason [sic], I might refuse to answer questions about her.” Jasnah was equally dismayed. “I swear, if that whole f*****g thing comes back to Miles f*****g Guo, I don’t know what I would do,” was her response when I laid out how I viewed this particular origin of the bioweapon myth. We humans like to believe that if circumstances had just been a bit more favorable, maybe events could have played out quite differently. Unfortunately, the reality was not that simple.I have been sifting through early reporting to investigate where the different “man-made” conspiracy theories originated. Reconstruction is a tedious task, eating away hours after hours; sitting many late nights chasing down outdated links and articles and deleted social media posts in the internet archive with tools like the Wayback Machine. However, when taken together with first-hand accounts from people on the ground who lived through it, a fuller picture emerges. Rumors, myths, and controversy after outbreaks are common, maybe even unavoidable. Every single outbreak, from the plague to the various influenza pandemics to “SARS, MERS, EBOLA, ZIKA, you name it,” Leo Poon would finish my exact thoughts. Each one of them was followed by conspiracy theories that blamed humans for it, and a substantial number of people were willing to believe any explanation given, no matter how absurd. The best I can tell is that we humans have a tendency to seek and see agency behind grand catastrophes. We also tend to assign blame to an outgroup when things go wrong.The bat viruses collected in 2018 in Zhoushan might have been the earliest of the man-made conspiracy theories that received inauthentic amplification and went viral, but Miles Guo and his gang of influencers were, of course, not the only ones who tapped into the political moment. General anxiety and uncertainty at the beginning of any crisis lend themselves to media manipulation. In fact, multiple related origin myths would emerge separately and almost simultaneously all over the world, sometimes mingling and converging topically but gradually and independently gaining more attention.For example, on January 20th, Russian disinformation operations in state media started to pick up on the man-made theme, albeit with a twist: they platformed self-proclaimed biosecurity expert Igor Nikulin, a political activist with no discernable expertise, who argued that the US created the virus and used it to attack China. He first expressed this belief on Zvezda, a state media outlet tied to the Russian military, and repeated it dozens of times in other interviews with mainstream outlets that seemed to eat it up uncritically. This facade of laundering information through supposed independent voices and intermediaries is neither new nor unexpected from Russia. The KGB had run a similar disinformation campaign in the 1980s, today known as “Операция Инфекция,” a.k.a. Operation Infection (originally Operation Denver), to blame the emergent AIDS pandemic on their foreign adversary, the US. Iran and China would follow this playbook in due time.In the US, on January 21st, a QAnon influencer expressing strong anti-vaccine sentiments named Jordan Sather picked up and amplified to his hundreds of thousands of followers a different conspiracy myth, creating roots for a set of ideas that would later resurface occasionally under the name “Plandemic.” He alleged that the pandemic was man-made for nefarious purposes, such as selling vaccines for profit. His evidence? Links to an old patent entry. He claimed researchers had produced a vaccine against the new virus, but now the patent was about to expire. That patent he linked to does, in fact, exist. It was work that was partially supported by grants from the Bill Gates Foundation and pharmaceutical companies. What a coincidence, he echoed on social media. “Was the release of this disease planned? Is the media being used to incite fear around it? Is the Cabal desperate for money, so they're tapping their Big Pharma reserves? Are there vaccines already being manufactured to "fight" this?” Sather did not realize or care that the patent in question was for a vaccine against SARS that broke out in 2003, not SARS-CoV-2. But of course, he did not need to get the facts right; his posts prompted countless online engagements all the same, spreading the patent myth far and wide.​​​A few days later on January 23, with a veneer of serious reporting, the UK tabloid Daily Mail amplified another very influential myth that would also spread like wildfire. A Western scientist wrote in a 2017 Nature News article a warning about how the Chinese culture of hiding problems and lack of transparency might pose an issue for working in BSL-4 labs like in Wuhan. The Daily Mail’s insinuation was clear: The new virus might have leaked from this lab in Wuhan because of bad biosafety. The article bolstered its claims with the commentary of a bioweapon fearmonger who had an axe to grind with virological biosafety for years. It gave a veneer of serious reporting. However, BSL-4 labs only work with known, very dangerous pathogens, not random bat viruses whose pathogenicity has not been characterized yet. Ordinary bat viruses cannot infect humans, so they could be studied under BSL-2 at the time. But the high-security BSL-4 sounded more dangerous, so it was good for headlines. That any such proposed lab accident from a BSL-4 lab would have, by necessity, required knowledge and documentation of this hitherto unseen virus first, or that no unknown virus ever leaked from a high biosafety lab to the best of our knowledge, was conveniently withheld from readers.On January 23, 2020, Wuhan, a megacity of 11 million, went into lockdown. Outbound public transport was suspended. Public activities were canceled. Flights got grounded. Panic set in. The news sent shockwaves around the world. The outbreak in Wuhan had been a narrow issue for most of the world until this point. Suddenly, it really captured the attention and imagination of the masses. The infosphere exploded into overdrive. With a large global audience came a huge market demand for more outbreak information and answers, a need that scientists and institutions could not satisfy immediately. However, commentators, bloggers, and influencers were all too happy to fill those gaps with more rumors, speculations, and falsehoods, often by scraping together bits and pieces from dubious internet sources and Google searches. Speed over accuracy is how you make gains in the attention economy. It was like putting gasoline on a fire. With the media attention surrounding the dramatic lockdown announcements, conspiracy theories exploded into the mainstream. The early conspiracy theories received the biggest amplification from crowd-sourced interest. It’s called first-mover advantage. Everybody was sharing, retweeting, and commenting on content that featured the Wuhan outbreak and the mysterious virus as its topic.On January 25, Guo Media’s GNews announced in an article that the CCP admitted to the bioweapon release—a complete fabrication—by providing a Word document full of “evidence” for the bioweapon. That document included screenshots Guo and his network had spread before, along with some loose commentary and descriptions to create the superficial appearance of merit. It was happily picked up by fringe and right-wing media as well as partisans.On January 26, the obscure Indian blogger Great Game India amplified social media chatter by publishing an article titled Coronavirus Bioweapon – How China Stole Coronavirus from Canada and Weaponized It. The piece was a complete fabrication, distorting a legitimate July 2019 report from Canada. Around the same time, the U.S. partisan tabloid The Washington Times picked up similar rumors, blending Daily Mail reporting from three days earlier about biosafety concerns with baseless speculations from a questionable Israeli intelligence analyst. This analyst reiterated the false Canadian spy story and claimed the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was involved in bioweapons research. The narrative, fueled by the Israeli bioweapon analyst’s claim, quickly gained traction within right-wing media circles.On January 29, the blogging outlet Zerohedge started doxxing a Chinese scientist, accusing him of being responsible for the pandemic. The outrage that followed the blaming of an individual was good for amplification; major media outlets would cover these lies in an attempt to debunk them, but this only added to their spread. The poor scientist’s name, photograph, telephone number, and email address were shared over 11,500 times on Twitter. Zerohedge would later be temporarily banned on Twitter for doxxing because it violated company policies. But this was only after the blogger pulled off his biggest stunt two days later.On January 30, Indian researchers published a preprint finding an “uncanny similarity of unique inserts” in the spike protein, identical to peptide fragments found in HIV. The uncanny sequences were just arising out of coincidence, and the preprint would be withdrawn later, but not before amplifiers on social media picked up on it and ran their mouths off. In parallel, foreign policy hawks like Francis Boyle and US senators like Tom Cotton were publicly entertaining the idea that the new virus was a bioweapon or could have come from the Wuhan BSL-4 lab.On January 31, ZeroHedge dramatically amplified the bioweapon myth by creating a fairytale based on merging many circulating themes. A chimera bioweapon myth, if you will. Integrating the Daily Mail reporting about biosafety warnings, the pick-up of Great Game India’s Canadian spies, the fresh preprint about supposed HIV sequences found, and the scientists he felt justified doxxing two days earlier, the blogger built an engaging storyline for his audience that included many of the prevailing themes and sentiments. The emotional truth of the narrative went along the lines of “Chinese scientists have ulterior motives; they wanted to create a bioweapon, but WIV was lacking biosafety, and it escaped.” True or not, it was a sentiment so powerful that it would never leave the conversation again in US right-wing ideological circles, and often beyond.These were, of course, only a fraction of the early narratives bubbling up in various corners around the world. Nobody can accurately trace them all, figure out where exactly they all came from, or identify who was “patient zero” for their spread. The only thing that we can say for sure is that after the dramatic lockdown announcement in Wuhan brought global attention, a week of wild speculations, viral conspiracy theories, and crowd-sourced myth-making followed. Everybody wanted to talk about it and be seen talking about it. Within that week, the dynamics of our global interconnected information systems made sure that the unsubstantiated idea of a man-made virus would be broadcast all around the world. China might have wanted to control rumors and craft its heroic response narrative, but its mantle of silence did not extinguish the fire; it fueled the flames.Aristotle famously claimed that nature abhors a vacuum. After spending way too much time on social media over the last few years, I became pretty convinced that, just as nature fears a void, the internet fears an information vacuum. Whether fiction or fact, truth or trickery, myth, magical thinking, or outright manipulation, whatever is offered seems to be more desirable to us than having to wait for information. This is human. Especially in times of ambiguity and dire peril, we tend to prioritize information speed over accuracy.Consequences be damned.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.Continue reading chapter 3 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

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.A disturbingly dry cough broke the silence of the Malaysian night; the pigs resting under the mango trees had been uneasy that day. Loud, whooping breaths filled the backyards of small farmhouses. Pig farming had been a family business in the villages of Bukit Pelandok and Sikamat, and for the Foochow Chinese, it was a source of pride and good income. While most Malay are Muslim and not permitted to touch pigs, for Mr. Yap, handling these animals would feed his family of five, the youngest just three years old. The pork supply chain had recently exploded into a huge industry in Malaysia, employing thousands and lifting many more out of poverty. Within the lush and dense green vegetation, small streets connected scattered farmhouses, and the many small pig operations that originally started in backyards kept expanding, requiring more space and cultivation of the land.Mr. Yap’s days were humid and hot, but the nights were pleasant, and he would often sit outside until the tropical sunset. A brighter and more hopeful future lay ahead for the immigrant family. He had felt a bit tired the last few days, and then he developed a fever on that fateful Monday in March 1999. A week later, he fell into a mysterious coma, never to wake up again. He would not be the only one.“My father died of Nipah virus,” Wee Chee revealed timidly. “So did my uncle.”Mr. Yap’s then-three-year-old daughter was sitting in front of me 23 years later. She was tall with straight hair, and her large round glasses amplified her intelligent mocha eyes, exuding curiosity. She was a young researcher on her journey to earn a PhD in virology at one of the best labs in Singapore. “I don’t remember him; I was too young.” Her soft voice and casual tone were in stark contrast to the severity of the revelation about her father. I felt a bit uneasy interrogating her about the painful past, but I needed to understand what drove her to be out here with the other virus hunters.“The authorities first thought it was Japanese encephalitis,” she explained, a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. The year before, after the first unusual encephalitis casualties in 1998, the pig farmers in Malaysia received vaccinations. Despite taking mosquito protection measures, the outbreak continued unabated, and the death toll skyrocketed. Something did not add up. Although some of the initial patients demonstrated cross-reactivity with Japanese encephalitis antibodies in serological assays, indicating their recent exposure to the virus, not all patients tested positive. Some would even get sick after being vaccinated against the Japanese encephalitis virus. These cases were attributed to an ineffective vaccine — something almost unheard of. Confused, the department heads were more concerned with confirming Japanese encephalitis through PCR tests rather than challenging their assumptions. In the meantime, the authorities would continue with their prevention measures, even telling the pig farmers it was safe to keep working. Wee Chee’s father trusted them despite knowing his pigs had died too.However, Dr. Kaw Bing Chua, a tenacious local scientist had developed a hunch that it was a new virus that caused the disease, jumping over from pigs to farmers. With a subtle tone of admiration in her voice, Wee Chee briefly recounted his history. He would isolate the virus from the cerebrospinal fluid of patients and attempt to cultivate it not only in insect cell lines, as is indicated for the Japanese encephalitis virus, but also in human, canine, pig, and monkey cell lines available at the University Malaya Medical Center. He discovered that the isolated virus would not only grow in various cell lines but also show a cytopathic effect — the infected cells looked rugged and sick under a microscope, quite similar to syncytial virus infection, a respiratory pathogen. Excited, he raised the alarm, but his supervisor initially attributed his findings to contamination. He had to keep pushing. Time was working against them, as a new wave was killing more farmers. With the help of the CDC in the US, he eventually figured out that the suspected new virus was of the paramyxoviridae family.“Paramyxoviridae,” a word that rolled off Wee Chee’s tongue easily. Even today, I mess up sometimes. It meant that the new virus, later named Nipah, was part of the same larger family as measles, mumps, and many parainfluenza cold viruses causing bronchitis or pneumonia. This insight had dramatic significance. The control measures against a paramyxovirus are completely different from the mosquito-transmitted Japanese encephalitis virus. The authorities had to switch tactics, which they did after a short review process.Unfortunately, the necessary policy change would come too late for Mr. Yap, who was infected just two days prior to that recognition. Two freaking days. A sinking feeling entered my gut. “If actions would have followed immediately…” Wee Chee ended her thought mid-sentence. I understood. Nothing was to be gained from what-ifs anymore. The history of emergent diseases is often one of cruel timing and unlucky circumstances. Mr. Yap was among the last of the farmers to become infected before the pigs were finally identified as the intermediate culprits spreading the disease to humans. Pig farms were shut down, over a million pigs were culled, and a half-billion-dollar industry crashed overnight. While “what happened” was eventually figured out and the outbreak stopped, the victims and impacted families were often left with no answer as to “why did it happen?”. Why did Nipah appear in Malaysian pigs, and when and where did it appear? Why did nobody see it coming? And, perhaps most crucially, could it happen again?Disease outbreaks are almost always shrouded in mysteries and uncertainties. The true origin story and transmission route of the Nipah virus, a pathogen that can lurk in fruit for days, was only worked out conclusively years later. Leading the effort were the talented scientific teams of Dr. Linfa Wang from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance, headed by the zoologist Peter Daszak. This was a whole decade before their research into pandemic outbreaks would become controversial. It was long before the global spotlight fell on them and their close collaborator Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Back then, they had found that pig farms had not only extended into local fruit bat territory, but also the plantation of fruit carrying trees like Mango trees around the farms had attracted bats. While feasting, some of the bats ended up contaminating the tree fruits with their saliva full of Nipah virus. Their leftovers or half-eaten pieces would fall to the ground, where they would remain infectious for days. Some of these contaminated fruits were snuffed up and eaten by the pigs.Given the factory farming environment, the unlucky farm animals would become infected, even intermediate reservoirs of Nipah. Usually, such an outbreak in animals would burn itself out. Adult pigs would be culled, die off, or gradually develop immunity. Yet Peter Daszak’s team could show through epidemiological modeling that it was the young piglets, coupled with the rapid breeding and selling practices of farmers, that provided fresh immune-naive hosts to sustain the outbreak. Protected by Nipah antibodies from their immune mother sows while being raised, the moment these piglets got weaned off to be sold to other farms, they could become infected by Nipah. The Foochow farmers, who bought those piglets to raise them for their backyard businesses, would gradually spread the outbreak to other provinces. Like Mr. Yap, most of them would eventually contract the infection, and four out of ten would meet an untimely demise. Over a hundred farmers died in the Malaysian Nipah outbreak, and, over the course of nine months, the disease had spread all the way to neighboring Singapore.While a scientific explanation can provide closure, the threat is far from gone. Wee Chee was here with Linfa Wang’s team. Today, the Nipah virus is monitored in multiple countries in Southeast Asia where Pteropus fruit bats, also known as flying foxes, roost. The virus’s persistent danger and high case fatality rate (40–70%) have led to its classification as a Biosafety Level 4 pathogen. With good reason. Since 1998 and 1999 in Malaysia, several Nipah outbreaks have occurred in India and Bangladesh, with the majority caused by direct zoonotic spillovers from infected bat reservoirs to humans via contaminated fruits or tree sap. In 2011, 35 out of 40 infected people died after drinking contaminated palm tree sap (imagine something akin to maple syrup), which resulted in a local ban on fresh sap. But enforcement has been difficult to this day. Many Bangladeshi villagers, who are Muslim and don’t drink alcohol, prefer drinking the fresh sap over the safer fermented wine.Education has been identified as a barrier to prevention, with only about 5% of villagers ever hearing about the Nipah virus and only 1 in 3 saying they are aware that raw sap can transmit diseases. But education is not the only barrier. A study showed that even villagers who had heard about the risk of raw sap were just as likely to drink sap as those who were not aware of the potential danger. Despite the deadly precedents, the threat just does not seem real enough to local residents to change their behavior. As outsiders, we are often quick to condemn, or we might shake our heads in incredulity. But as a science communicator, this did not surprise me. It is not uncommon for cultural practices and lived experiences to trump abstract scientific knowledge. It’s the norm everywhere around the world. It’s a human universal that needs constant efforts from scientists to counterbalance.Unfortunately, the rift between scientific knowledge and societal actions means that Nipah’s story is not over. Researchers learning about its existence, where it lingers, and how it spreads is a necessary first step, yet it is unlikely to spell the end of its lethal trajectory. Wee Chee was not optimistic. Some other virologists worry the regular local outbreaks could just be Nipah’s first act, a warming up of something much, much worse to come. Maybe a warning shot like SARS was for COVID-19. The more opportunities we give our viral adversaries to try and adapt to us and our farmed animals, the more likely calamity becomes. Constant monitoring, educational efforts in communities, and new solutions are required to tackle these perpetual risks. Yet our attention wavers and life moves on. After more than a decade of reduced activity following the spillover, the pig farming industry is now back in full swing in Malaysia. The Nipah outbreak, if not forgotten, is little more than a cautionary, distant memory for most Malaysians. Its only remaining digital footprints are a Wikipedia page and a few dated publications.We humans are often very set in our ways, even if, theoretically, we know better. I believe that compassion often gets lost between the idiosyncrasies of lived culture and the detached nature of scientific analysis. Compassion is what motivates lasting behavioral change. We owe it to those who paid the bitter price of figuring it out the hard way. Maybe there is also some concern for our future selves, which we tend to set up for unnecessary failure tomorrow. Once we care, action becomes a necessity. We cannot help it. Change becomes inevitable. That’s at least what drove Wee Chee.“What really gets me is that even at university, Nipah is just one of those viruses you learn for an exam and forget about briefly after, you know?” Her voice was slightly trembling toward the end of the sentence. The pressure of my probing was finally getting to her. Talking about science in the abstract was one thing; talking about her life was quite another. The otherwise composed research assistant lifted her oversized round glasses to wipe away some tears. She had trouble dealing with the lack of attention and compassion for the topic. To her, Nipah was not just a historical anecdote, a schoolbook entry, or a mere scientific statistic. It had ripped apart her family, made her move away from the countryside to her grandmother’s, made her question why her mother kept crying and made her wonder why they were not allowed to play with the pigs anymore. She had no recollection of her father, having been so young when he passed. “I only found out that it was Nipah when I was 12,” she remembered. Her mother’s explanations about Japanese encephalitis did not make sense to her because what did this mosquito virus have to do with pigs? “So, I actually googled what happened and found out it was Nipah virus.” Her curiosity would put her on a path to study biology, followed by a job in an industry working with stem cells. Despite the tragic past, her future looked rosier.Yet when the COVID pandemic hit, she felt herself at a crossroads. “I just had to do something,” she confessed. At the time, she was sharing a flat with multiple other young adults who did not have a science background. Their confusion, worries, and asking for her input to navigate a new virus made her realize she had something more to offer; it awakened a dormant desire in her. She describes it as an unavoidable “obligation” imposed on her to “reduce future outbreaks.” While she confided in me, her eyes peeked into the distance. Or the past. I was not sure. It was clear to me that losing someone dear to an unknown virus is something she did not wish on anybody. That’s why she needed to act.But how was she to go about it? One day, while listening to the niche podcast This Week in Virology, she heard about Linfa Wang’s work on bat immunology, and everything clicked. That was what she needed to do. She quit her job in the middle of the pandemic and took a position as a research assistant at Linfa Wang’s lab in Singapore “to help however I could.” Among many things, Linfa Wang’s lab was building a tech platform that will allow the rapid serological testing of a range of bat viruses, especially coronaviruses like SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2, and henipaviruses like Hendra and Nipah. If serological tests like these had existed 25 years ago, when Wee Chee was a child, the initial confusion and PCR misdiagnosis of Japanese encephalitis that stalled real action for months might have been avoided. At least technically, that is.One of the lessons I kept re-learning the last few years is that during a crisis, we humans have a reduced capacity to deal with uncertainty. We long for an explanation, any explanation, no matter how at odds with the evidence. We rush to judgment and often stick with it, as had been the case with ineffective measures against Japanese encephalitis. It is difficult to change entrenched beliefs. Wee Chee lamented that, even now, more often than not, her own mother would still conflate or misattribute her husband’s demise to Japanese encephalitis.Understandable, given what her mother had been told repeatedly at the time. Scientists eventually figured out that it was a different virus, which made no difference to her mother’s tragedy; the name Nipah was a mostly irrelevant detail to her. Like the raw sap drinking Bangladeshi villagers, lived memory is just more visceral than abstract scientific knowledge. It’s the norm. It is human. It makes sense.Of course, the problem arises when that abstract scientific knowledge becomes relevant again. Those who forget history are bound to repeat it. I shuddered at the thought.I met Wee Chee on a field sampling trip in Chonburi, Thailand. A magnificent bat colony of at least ten thousand Pteropus fruit bats, or flying foxes, has nested in the trees around picturesque Wat Luang Phrommawat, a Buddhist temple. Sittiwatt, the head monk who protects the colony and manages the temple, explained to us that the bats had been there for at least 300 years, dating back to when the temple was first built. He had started to thin out the trees and plant them on the other side of the small creek next to the temple, reducing the risk of getting hit by excretions while strolling under the branches. I knew that the very deadly Bangladesh variant of Nipah can also directly infect humans if one is unlucky enough to get contaminated liquids like urine in the eyes, nose, or mouth. Wait, why was I walking haphazardly under those Thai flying fox colonies again?“Don’t look up when you are below”Peter Daszak urged me from the side. I pulled my protective hat, glasses, and masks closer over my face, probably looking odd given that Sittiwatt and the other monks walk under those trees every day with their shaved heads, bare feet, and orange Buddhist robes.The zoologist Peter Daszak has become a controversial figure and household name in many conspiratorial circles, from online message boards, Substack blogs, and right-wing tabloids all the way to the pages of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the halls of the US Congress. Many believe he is at the center of an elaborate cover-up conspiracy that ultimately puts the blame for the pandemic on him, his organization EcoHealth Alliance, and their Chinese collaborators at WIV in China. What does he know? What might he be hiding? Trained scientists like myself tend to prefer hard evidence over speculation; we avoid or even shy away from giving weight to the ambivalence, messiness, and uncertainty of human motivations and actions. In any scientific investigation, human idiosyncrasies often make it difficult to assert matters with confidence.However, after almost two years of chasing answers to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, Peter Daszak was among the last promising avenues of investigation left for me: the big unknown. He embodied a human uncertainty that I needed to narrow as much as I could now that I had the opportunity. This, I told myself, is how the scientific process is supposed to work, after all. A constant strife to reduce uncertainty as much as possible, but not more than is warranted. His circumstances did not make my work easy, though.I first met Peter Daszak a few days prior at Zurich Airport. He snuck up on me and opened with a clumsy joke about my lack of situational awareness. Immediately, he wanted to get me in on a game to figure out who the “sound guy” was, the third group member flying from Zurich on our trip to Thailand. He pointed to a few random passengers at the terminal with a half-stretched thumb, a little less obvious than finger-pointing but still pretty impolite for Swiss standards. “That’s how they point in Thailand,” he explained as if that somehow made it better.Peter was wearing mostly unremarkable clothes: a shirt with some silvery or blond chest hair just peeking beyond, and a bit of a higher voice pitch for a man his size and age than I would have presumed. We started chatting all over the place, but also somewhat right to the point about how crazy things have gotten. He wanted to take a selfie with me by his side. I declined. Yet this was a feeling I got from most of what he was saying: he was trying to create a connection, any connection, between strangers. He had been fighting alone for quite some time.“My wife follows you on Twitter,” he assured me more than once. Words just kept flowing from him. As if haunted. I was trying to decide if he wanted company, if he wanted to win me over, or if he was trying to entertain, impress, or just enjoy himself. He’d probably contest that it was just his open and confident charm. In general, he contested a lot.The reality was probably somewhere in the middle. He can be a bit of a character. As far as first impressions go, it was pretty modest. He was entertaining but did not seem very humble, contrary to what I would have expected from a scientist. Often, he was not shy with words and strong opinions. My first instinct was to be guarded, keep listening, and let him do the talking. He was clearly restless. Pacing. He informed me how he had already “wasted hours” on the flight from the US to Zurich, redacting irrelevant details in “FOIA” emails sent between the NIH (US National Institute of Health) and his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit that grew out of the wildlife trust. FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act, a law US citizens can use to obtain information, such as emails from federal agencies and employees, in the name of transparency and democratic accountability. A noble and important tool that can, unfortunately, be abused as well. For Peter, being FOIA’d mostly meant sifting through endless paperwork and redacting personal information, such as phone numbers, addresses, or irrelevant personal stuff, about other people in his communications with the NIH. He knew that his appearance before the GOP House Committee at the end of 2022 was only a matter of time. A politically motivated witch hunt was coming. His head would be desired next in line after Anthony Fauci, the former head of NIAID (US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) and presidential advisor, along with a list of other independent scientists, all being targeted and subsumed by the same energy that was driving outrage in social networks. What started with anti-scientific conspiracy myths online, spread by anonymous accounts on social media and amplified by clandestine disinformation campaigns, tabloid journalism, cynical influencers, and other media manipulators, has eventually mutated into real-life ramifications for many scientists.I asked him how he dealt with what happened to him, not sure what to expect in an answer. He tried to play it cool, joking about the time these people waste creating elaborate fantasies or the work they put into making comics or memes about him. He had even “collected their best art pieces,” assuring me he was handling it okay and making fun of them. But there was also something haunted about his responses and, sporadically, a not-so-subtle anger. “Sometimes, I’d like to meet and smack them,” he offered once on this recurring theme of what to do about his often-anonymous tormentors as if he had reached the limits of his patience. He would not be the only one. Nobody really knows how to deal with so much weaponized hatred.After a split moment of vulnerability, Peter was back to being a bit of an entertainer, telling me about how he tries to mess with the most abusive harassers but without much success. The danger is, however, all too present. Some of them doxxed — released private information to harass or intimidate — his family, work connections, and every move. One of them had just recently spread private information about his daughter, her college attendance, and what courses she takes, together with a picture of her. They all are on death lists, posted publicly. His daughter, who is 21 years old, is now targeted and put in harm’s way just by sheer fact of sharing the family name. Peter and his family had to get security for their house in New York once online stalkers and harassers started posting their home addresses, together with allegations of him being a mass murderer, responsible for the pandemic, and involved in the COVID cover-up. While many scientists, not just Peter, have been sent credible death threats, few have had a constant siege around their houses. Letters with unidentified white powder substances have been sent to his home and his place of work. Calls at night to disrupt his sleep. The FBI informs him regularly about his name appearing on death lists of groups classified as domestic terrorist threats.Fomenting online hate campaigns against individuals is a common tactic of information combatants — public discourse manipulators ranging from anonymous trolls and fringe scientists to influencers, foreign agents, activists, and even journalists and politicians — on social media platforms because of the asymmetric cost they incur on their opponents. Putting out hateful lies is cheap and easy, yet defusing the situation for those targeted is not. This is especially true when emotional accusations about having created the pandemic and of being responsible for the deaths of millions are leveraged for attention. These accusations put the lives of scientists at stake. Experts would classify such hate campaigns against individuals as a form of “stochastic terrorism.” Putting a mark on somebody’s back with emotionally charged lies and repeated falsehoods runs the predictable risk that some consumers of those lies might believe them and become radicalized to act on these accusations. A few do. However, the overall goal of these communication tactics is not necessarily to harm but to silence. His politically unwelcome voice needed to go away. “They want me to turn radioactive” Peter told me. He was mostly correct, but it would turn out much more sinister than he could ever imagine.“The worst part is they succeeded. I am posting way less on Twitter, and I almost don’t travel anymore,” he lamented. Due to all the FOIA and congressional requests, he cannot get his normal work done. “They even petitioned to have me kicked off every committee and scientific society.” Even respectable colleagues had disinvited him from speaking because of the fear of controversy. Few in the US wanted to be exposed to the potential harassment his presence could bring. He has lost funding, and his organization, EcoHealth Alliance, is fighting against lawmakers in the US Congress for its existence. Maybe that’s why he preferred to go to rural Asia, where the temperature of origin discussion had a cooler, more scientifically nuanced tone. It certainly would be a welcome respite from the constant harassment for him.A few days later, back in Thailand with me, the head monk Sittiwatt led us into the restricted and closed-off Wat Luang Phrommawat shrine. Peter would get a selfie of us to send to his wife. He and the weird science blogger who wanted to learn what he had been up to. Alright, I gave in under the condition that it was not to be spread beyond that. I had no interest in becoming collateral damage in the hate campaigns against him just yet. It would be inevitable soon enough.My intuition proved correct. When Peter had snapped photos of me and others in full protective gear exploring a different bat cave at five in the morning that day and uploaded them on Twitter to explain this type of fieldwork, all hell would break lose. Social media can be a boon for direct science communication from the field, a brilliant thing that can bring science and society closer. But not when you’re radioactive. Within 24 hours, my figure ended up on the pages of both the New York Post and Daily Mail, two tabloid newspapers, with my identity luckily unrecognized behind the full protective gear I wore. The tabloids’ non-stories were about how Peter Daszak dared to post “brazen photos of himself” in the bat cave after doing work that allegedly started the pandemic. When it came to substance, that was it. These articles were basically what digital natives call “outrage bait,” a good opportunity for the newspapers to rehash a bunch of engaging conspiratorial talking points, provoke some outrage, and make sure the attention does not drop on the topic. That is what the attention economy rewards, after all — an effortless story that one can copy and paste together quickly to reap clicks and engagements. A suspicious picture of bats, a sensationalist headline, an antagonist with name recognition, and a well-known trope are all that are really necessary to go viral on social media. And viral it went, with two US Senators angrily commenting on the record about this type of work as a “smoke and mirror operation” from somebody who might have caused the pandemic. What a mess. It was a waste of everyone’s time and a poor reflection on the so-called “journalists” involved.Nuanced scientific information about the benefits of this work can never compete in this information environment, I thought while observing about two dozen field workers. They were busy setting up impromptu field labs, raising nets between the trees, and carefully capturing flying foxes. No tabloid would ever write an article about this.It is hard work. Everybody had to wear N95 masks, hair nets, nitrile gloves, and large white polyethylene coveralls in the scorching heat. I had spent the day strolling around, watching both clockwork military discipline as well as the careful treatment of sensitive equipment and captured animals. The Forestry Department scientists, together with virology students, research assistants, and their supervisors, had set up a field lab, which was, in essence, three small kitchen tables under a roof. After being caught by nets, the flying foxes would be transferred into loose cotton bags and hung on a long bar next to the field lab for subsequent processing. Each station would perform a sequence of steps, from measuring the captured animals’ size, wingspan, and weight to taking stool, urine, and blood samples. More recently, they also started taking wing clips, small tissue samples from the bat’s wing, to try to establish primary bat tissue cultures. This would be a way to explore some biological and immunological questions that scientists have not yet wrapped their heads around. On average, each animal went through the ordeal in less than ten minutes, received some fruit juice and banana pieces as a reward, and was subsequently released back into the trees, to fly back to their colony. The laborious hours dragged on until dusk when the flying foxes would prepare for their fly-off.The buzzing of the trees became a cascade of noise, excitement, and conflict. It is not clear who gives the start signal. Like a hive mind, at some point, a collective decision is made, and thousands of animals leave in concert into the unknown of the night. Standing under and listening to the buzz is a humbling experience, an homage to the brilliance and vastness of nature. Not wanting to look up when directly below, I made my way to a little visiting tower with a roof on top, where tourists could safely watch the nightly flyout.While watching the bat colony take flight, several thoughts came to me. Are we socially interconnected humans so different? How do we aggregate and make certain topics go viral? Is it a collective decision or one made by a select few? My thoughts trailed off.Later that night, after spending a whole day walking in their shadow, I finally got to ask about the disease prevalence in these fruit bats again.“Oh, about 1–2% of those bats [now] actively carry Nipah,” Supaporn Wacharapluesadee let us know; it was not her first field trip to this specific colony. I gulped. Certainly tempted by the lightly dressed monks all day, I was happy that, following Peter’s advice, I did not remove my mask, glasses, or hat despite the heat. She continued, “But no Nipah antibodies in pigs anywhere yet.” Years ago, they implemented prevention measures against Nipah spillovers. The slim and timid-looking Thai scientist was very precise in her language. She was a scientific icon to many, the first one to sequence SARS-CoV-2 outside of China, as well as a virus hunter and discoverer of many novel bat viruses, including SARS1 and 2-related coronaviruses. Before that, she had made a name for herself by studying and surveilling the Nipah virus for almost two decades — work that still continues. She and others had identified Nipah as one of the viruses with the highest risk of spillover to humans, causing devastating outbreaks. After all, Nipah has done so in the past, continues to cause local spillovers today, and might wreak unspeakable havoc in the future. Supaporn is intent on not letting it happen; that’s why she is training all these young scientists, including collaborators from Singapore like Wee Chee, to perform this essential surveillance work. We need the next generation of scientists to be equipped for what is coming.I quite appreciated Supaporn taking us all out to dinner now that the night had set in. Her golden-rimmed glasses shone in the modest light from the streetside restaurant we sat down in. I’d been wanting to talk to her all day. Earlier, we had driven for four hours in a van together to get to Chonburi, and she had barely spoken two sentences on the trip. “When I was young, I was not a communicative person, so working in the lab, there was no need to talk to anyone. I thought being a technician was the best job for me,” she once admitted in an interview with the journal Science. She was very pensive and clearly did not need to be the center of attention. Eventually, she warmed up and conversed with us as she served everyone an incredibly spicy Thai soup. She even displayed a mischievous hint of a smile towards Peter and me, unless my watering eyes were playing a trick on me. I hastily grabbed my drink and some rice. To think I’d do well with spicy food, even in Thailand, was naive. Wee Chee laughed openly at my misery. Eventually, I decided to stay with the rice dish.In contrast to Supaporn’s food taste, her mild-mannered, unpresumptuous, nurturing demeanor, even when collaborating with students from Singapore, was quite endearing. She would insist on ordering and serving everybody else’s food and drinks first — a cultural norm for her that we respected despite it feeling unusual for us — after a long, exhausting day of stressful field sampling that must have taken a toll on her, too. Jokes were exchanged, and old anecdotes were recalled as if we were at a long-awaited reunion with friends. Evenings like these also embody a certain beauty within the scientific enterprise: its ability to bring people together from all over the world, even in difficult times.Make no mistake; the times have become difficult for virus hunters. Supaporn has been collaborating with Peter Daszak and Ecohealth Alliance since 2009, dedicated to tackling potential pandemic pathogens at their place of origin, where they spill over into humans at often complex human-animal interfaces. The US Agency for International Development (USAID)-sponsored PREDICT program was established to identify new emerging infectious diseases that could become a threat to human health in geographic hot spots all over the world, including countries like Thailand, Bangladesh, and China. While PREDICT ended in 2020, it included efforts and training similar to the one I visited today. Scientists collect swabs or other samples in the field from animals and humans, and then they analyze the samples in the lab to look for evidence of disease, gaining insights about what pathogens are out there, how they evolve, and how often they spill over into humans.However, since the pandemic, this type of work has become seen by some as misguided, pricey, and possibly dangerous. Some influential activists have attributed the pandemic to the PREDICT work performed by Peter Daszak and a network of regional collaborators, including Supaporn as well as Shi Zhengli from WIV at the heart of the pandemic. It was one of many mutually contradictory theories about how scientists might be culpable for the misery of the past years. From bioweapon research to gain-of-function experiments or unorthodox culturing methods to just trying to identify viral threats in the wild, everything and anything virologists might reasonably study about coronaviruses was made to sound suspicious, dangerous, and unnecessary.Even virus surveillance has been made a target. In 2023, the USAID canceled a virus discovery grant named DEEP VZN after an influence campaign by biotechnology fearmongers reached all the way to the Biden White House. This was a program the USAID had deemed essential for pandemic prevention just two years earlier before virus hunting became controversial as well. For Supaporn, her coronavirus work has since led to a fallout with her boss, the head of her previous institute at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital in Bangkok. Despite being a trained physician, her boss was a strong believer that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered and leaked from a Chinese lab, that the mRNA vaccines cause harm, that ivermectin works against COVID-19, that the media was suppressing the truth. He was not taking no for an answer. Everyone is familiar with this type of conspiratorial person by now. Suddenly, Supaporn found herself without a lab, equipment, or trained technicians. He had also alleged, without evidence, that she siphoned off and misappropriated grant money for her “risky” research, but Supaporn was completely exonerated by an internal investigation. Eventually, she managed to keep her professorship at the Memorial Hospital, changing institutes, and now works for its Clinical Center with a new lab and team.To us, she was shrugging her shoulders and rolling her eyes at what she called “politics.” She still respects her former department head’s work, and that was all she had to say about him and this stressful episode. Some claim her former boss was jealous of the international recognition and fame this timid woman received for her coronavirus work. It would not be surprising. Our documentary was not the first she participated in; Channel News Asia did a long segment about her work in 2020 that catapulted her to the spotlight. Even within science, such media attention can hurt egos and drive quite nasty conflicts. I lean toward this explanation. In my experience, behind every successful woman, there is no shortage of lesser men with a grudge trying to denigrate her accomplishments and drag her down. The international and geopolitical spotlight on researchers like her or Peter can be a double-edged sword. Even the Thai government has made it difficult for her to publish new coronavirus sequences for fear of becoming the focus of the origin controversy from what I gathered.Over the years, I’ve come in contact with many renowned academics and researchers who worked on the COVID-19 origin topic and became targets of opportunists, activists, conspiracy theorists, and governments alike. Many of them saw their expertise discredited, their funding withdrawn, their work forbidden, or their safety threatened. Currently, resources for virus discovery and surveillance have been cut globally, while international cooperation, especially with China, has dried up because of geopolitics. Many bat scientists in authoritarian countries, including China, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and even Malaysia, are under heightened pressure and scrutiny. On top of that, governments, institutions, funders, and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) everywhere seem to have lost interest in public health and abdicated their responsibilities to act to prevent the next pandemic. China even pulled out of previous commitments for wildlife and wet market surveillance and loosened its laws against this industry again. We are moving in the wrong direction and show no signs of changing course.Despite the current obstacles, Supaporn does not allow herself to give up. If not her, who else would carry out the crucial work that needs to be done? Who will surveil the humans and animals at these spillover hotspots and study which pathogens are out there, waiting for their chance? Isn’t anticipating what might be coming next the first necessary step if we want a chance to control outbreaks? There is no question that another pandemic will come, even if most of us would rather put aside the unwelcome reality. The work of Supaporn and many other researchers in the region, no matter if funded by the Institut Pasteur, the UN, or EcoHealth Alliance, is directly related to reducing both the frequency and severity of outbreaks. Their effort lies in stopping as many of them as possible in their tracks before they turn into a major public health crisis. Given our current trajectory of failing to learn the lessons of COVID-19, another pandemic is likely within the next decade, as many experts I interviewed now fear. After spending years listening, learning, and trying to understand our current conundrums, I share their worry. We are squandering valuable time and sabotaging our future.A few months after our trip, I caught up with Wee Chee. The compassionate research assistant has had struggles on her own. She has not yet managed to get into a PhD program in virology in Singapore because there are just too few positions, too little interest, and not enough money. Acquiring the necessary scientific funding for a multi-year PhD project is a struggle worldwide, but for her, the pandemic has not made it easier, but harder. Highly unusual. After devastating outbreaks, we would traditionally see an influx of young and brilliant minds going into medicine or science, which would push the whole field forward. Now we seem intent on cutting off the legs of the next generation of researchers.Wee Chee remained focused on her work. We talked shortly before the Chinese New Year holiday. While others might have prepared for being on vacation, she had been in Vietnam “capacity building” in a collaborating lab. This meant that she would travel there on a very modest budget, often without comfortable housing, yet stay to work ten or even twelve hours a day, teaching local students how to perform more complex experiments. For example, she would teach them how to use the neutralization assay Linfa Wang’s lab developed to monitor bat viruses. Work was challenging, she admitted, but she would still try to find time to go home and visit her family in Malaysia. She just needed to get the work done first. For all of its importance, the lived reality of her day-to-day research boiled down to demanding, often dreary, and always piecemeal work and effort. Unrewarding for most people, yet, like many young scientists, she was driven by her idealism and the hope of contributing a tiny puzzle piece to the larger whole of pandemic anticipation and prevention.In the end, that hope, coupled with a sense of obligation and compassion, is what all the virus hunters and virologists I met have in common. There is a need to understand not just the “how” but also the “why” of outbreaks. That’s the reason they gear up and venture out into the unknown. They are playing the long game against an untold number of faceless opponents that are versatile, deadly, and ever-changing.And while often a lonely and frustrating endeavor, not a single virus hunter expected that during a global pandemic, their formidable viral adversaries would somehow find a way to have society blame scientists instead. How the hell did we get here?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.Continue reading chapter 2 here.Note: If you want to download, print-out, share or otherwise collect this chapter, run it through an LLM or just store for record keeping; here is a high-quality pdf version as well:Thanks for reading Protagonist Science! Subscribe for free to follow this investigative story about the origin of SARS-CoV-2Find more background info, chapter footnotes and video interviews at www.lab-leak-fever.com. If you want a physical copy of the book, kindle ebook, or support my work, you can buy directly on Amazon. (for non-US readers, please check your regional Amazon such as amazon.br or amazon.in as ebook prices may differ dramatically)How did you feel about this chapter? Please let me know any feedback or comment below. Make sure to share. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

With the GOP ramping up voter manipulation efforts for the general election, the “gain-of-function lab leak” myth is back in full swingYesterday, the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic announced in a grandstanding letter the public interrogation of Dr. Peter Daszak, President of the non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance.This announcement is the second one this week, following an earlier such proclamation addressing the editors-in-chief of the flagship scientific journals Nature, Science, and TheLancet.The announcements were coordinated with multiple right-leaning news outlets such as Fox News and the Washington Times, who had long articles lined up the moment the announcement went public. Further such announcements of public interrogations are expected, ultimately leading to the GOP-led public haranguing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who will likely be required to testify in early summer.The origin controversy is political and polarizing. The “gain-of-function lab leak” myth is emotionally powerful; it stokes fears about reckless, unaccountable, and mad scientists who performed arcane experiments that led to a deadly chimeric pathogen causing the pandemic. A flask monster. The myth is also hopeful; it offers the illusion that if only somebody can stop them, we will be spared another tragedy like COVID-19. And who would not want to vote for the politicians who promise to hold these mad scientists accountable? Right?These efforts from the GOP are part of a larger media manipulation and voter mobilization strategy for the upcoming general election.Yet these upcoming battles over the origin controversy are not just about a handful of scientists and public health officials, they are a sign that science and an evidence-based worldview as a whole have come under pressure this election season.While Trump is consolidating power and acquiring old allies in the media, disinformation researchers and journalists who track manipulation campaigns have similarly been harassed, discredited, and smeared by elected representatives and their client propagandists.As the NYT apt headline writers put it: Trump’s allies are winning the war over disinformation.“... Half of politics is "image-making", the other half is the art of making people believe the image” ― Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence, and Thoughts on Politics and RevolutionIn the presence of so much manipulation and power, standing up for an evidence-based worldview is as much a duty as an act of courage.Science is an important guardrail of democracy because of its unique ability and role to solve informational conflicts and dispel false myths. That puts it in confrontation with usurping politics that aim to rewrite reality to fit ideology.I am not an important person, I have no insights to give into what best to do in politics, nor do I command the attention of large audiences. But the small thing I can do is to address the “gain-of-function lab leak” myth the best I know how. With science, curiosity, and an appreciation for the vastness of our complex world.This is where you will find me putting my effort in the near future.See you next week with the release of my big article titled: Treacherous Ancestry, a phylogeographic hunt for the ghosts of SARS-COV-2Cheers,PhilippUpdate April 12: Here is the full article now This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com

The lab leak hypothesis is dead, but the lab leak myth will never die.A new paper makes the rounds in the media by claiming a risk assessment score sheet can determine the "unnatural" nature of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. A stark contrast to the scientific consensus on zoonotic spillover. Over the years, we have seen many such probabilistic, Bayesian, or “common sense” analyses from various sources and all of them were of dubious quality and distributed by dubious actors with a very limited grasp of scientific evidence. However, this does not mean that alternative methods for looking at a problem can not add valuable insights. Will a risk assessment questionnaire finally offer something new? A hard look at the facts? A real conceptual contribution to the scientific literature? Or is it going to be what I tend to call a “meme paper”, abusing the format of a scientific article to launder unsubstantiated opinions and influence public perception? To answer this question, I invited two fantastic guests for a scientific discussion: Prof. Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist, bat huntress, and directly involved in the scientific search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2. She has published multiple papers of critical importance on the topic and continues to research with her team at the University of Hong Kong. Dr. Sam Gregson is a former CERN physicist, scicomm YouTuber, and bad statistics debunker. He has monitored bad actors and sensationalist claims on the origin topic while giving renowned experts room to lay out the scientific case for a zoonotic origin of the pandemic. If you see somebody reference this new paper as strong evidence for a lab leak, please share our video discussion to correct the record. Thank you!PS: If you have not gotten enough about this topic, I also was interviewed this week by the journalist Walker Bragman asking about the status of the origin controversy. I think this was a very nice conversation and some meta-discussion about the forces driving the lab leak myth, despite it having no evidence behind it.Thanks for reading The Protagonist Future! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my science communication work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.protagonist-science.com