Since scientists first began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So, the Wuhan research was totally safe and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission: It certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.
Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles or the evolving bird flu, right?
Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.
Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted — if at all! — with the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or beyond it, the world.
You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test potential gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.
Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit this research is risky now, and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe, without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.
Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had once proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses, you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide. It did not. Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city.
Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.
The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists, and which declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately, many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
Spooked, the co-authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his own book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.
Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.
The second influential publication to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak was a letter published in early 2020 in The Lancet. The letter, which described the idea as a conspiracy theory, appeared to be the work of a group of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to public document requests by U.S. Right to Know, the public later learned that behind the scenes, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, had drafted and circulated the letter, while strategizing on how to hide his tracks and telling the signatories that it “will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.” The Lancet later published an addendum disclosing Daszak’s conflict of interest as a collaborator of the Wuhan lab, but the journal did not retract the letter.
And they had assistance. Thanks to more public records requests and congressional subpoenas, the public learned that David Morens, a senior scientific adviser to Fauci at N.I.H., wrote to Daszak that he had learned how to make “emails disappear,” especially emails about pandemic origins. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote.
It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate may have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries, they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.
That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials, or the organizations they represent, to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they may have withheld relevant information and even misled the public. Such self-scrutiny is especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated child has died of measles and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out by the top of the federal government. But a clumsy, misguided effort like this didn’t just fail, it backfired. These half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.
After a few dogged journalists, a small nonprofit pursuing Freedom of Information requests and an independent group of researchers brought these issues to light, followed by a congressional investigation, the Biden administration finally banned EcoHealth from all federal grants for five years.
That’s a start. The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. had already come to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?
To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.
Only an honest conversation will lead us forward. Like any field with the potential to inflict harm on a global scale, research with dangerous, potentially super-transmissible pathogens cannot be left to self-regulation or lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The goal should be an international treaty guiding biosafety, but we don’t have to be frozen in place until one appears. Leading journals could refuse to publish research that doesn’t conform to safety standards, the way they already reject research that doesn’t conform to ethical standards. Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses or computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. If some risky research is truly irreplaceable, it should be held to the highest safety conditions, and conducted far away from cities.
We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third.
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