What happened next has done little to allay concern.

Reports circulated that Shipilova had contracted pneumonic plague following a lab accident involving a broken test tube. Russian authorities deny this. They say there is no evidence of an accident involving dangerous pathogens and that testing has not established a connection between her illness and her work. Yet around 200 contacts have reportedly been placed under medical observation, parts of the hospital where she was treated were quarantined, and Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s public-health agency Rospotrebnadzor, flew to Siberia for an emergency meeting. One local government official confirmed over the weekend that Shipilova had died from the plague, only to later edit his statement to add the word “possibly”. Meanwhile, the world has seen footage of men in hazmat suits stalking the streets of Irkutsk.

For the moment, there is no sign of a spreading plague outbreak. No further infections have been identified among Shipilova’s contacts, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed the public-health risk as “moderate to low” in Irkutsk, and “low” for the country as a whole, while seeking further information from Moscow.

But there is a more unsettling question lurking behind the headlines. What exactly goes on in a “plague institute” in Siberia? Might the organism involved have been altered in some way? Since Russia inherited part of the Soviet Union’s enormous biological warfare infrastructure, is it conceivable that this was not simply a laboratory accident, but pointed to something much more dangerous?

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So what do we know? It’s important to understand that there is nothing inherently sinister about having an anti-plague institute in Siberia. Plague did not disappear with the Black Death. Yersinia pestis still circulates naturally in populations of rodents and their fleas, including across parts of Russia, Mongolia and Central Asia. While human infections are relatively rare, the Irkutsk institute grew out of this natural prevalence. The regional anti-plague institute for Siberia and the Russian Far East has, for more than a century, monitored dangerous infections, investigated natural disease reservoirs and maintained specialist teams capable of responding to outbreaks of plague, anthrax, cholera and other serious infectious diseases.

In other words, its existence makes epidemiological sense. Nor is it uniquely Russian. Across the world, labs which are capable of working with dangerous pathogens are maintained. They are essential for diagnosing outbreaks, developing vaccines and treatments, and understanding diseases that might threaten us in future.

Russia does, however, have baggage. The Soviet Union secretly operated the largest-known biological weapons programme in history: Biopreparat. Soviet military scientists were working on pathogens which caused anthrax, smallpox and investigating whether they could be turned into effective weapons. Founded in the Twenties, it continued clandestinely even after they had become signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. This history matters because it inevitably colours the interpretation of unexplained incidents at Russian biological facilities. Let’s not forget the smallpox outbreak of 1971.

But here is currently still no evidence that Shipilova encountered an engineered strain of plague; still less that Russia is developing a “pandemic weapon” at the institute. Could Yersinia pestis be used as a biological weapon? Certainly. Its potential has been recognised for decades. Pneumonic plague is particularly frightening because of its historical associations. Infection of the lungs can progress extremely rapidly and can spread between people through respiratory particles. Untreated, it is frequently fatal.

But plague today is not the Black Death. It is a bacterial infection for which effective antibiotics are readily available. If recognised and treated quickly, patients have a good chance of recovery. Public-health authorities also know how to contain it: isolate suspected pneumonic cases, identify and monitor contacts, provide preventive antibiotics where necessary and protect healthcare workers.

This also puts the Russian response into perspective. The extensive quarantine measures have fuelled speculation that the authorities know something they are not saying. Perhaps they do. But the measures themselves are not proof of an engineered pathogen, nor even that Shipilova acquired her infection in the laboratory. If doctors genuinely suspected pneumonic plague in somebody who had already been treated in hospital, isolating contacts and healthcare workers is precisely the precautionary response one would expect.

The more disturbing hypothetical is not that this was ordinary plague, but that it was an engineered form of the pathogen, deliberately altered to make existing defences less effective. Modern biotechnology raises possibilities that 20th-century biological weapons programmes did not possess. Pathogens might, in principle, be altered in ways that change their disease-causing properties or reduce the effectiveness of existing medical countermeasures.

Indeed, one of the great difficulties with biological threats is precisely that the same scientific capabilities can serve very different purposes. Scientists legitimately study how pathogens spread, why some variants cause more severe disease, and whether treatments will remain effective. But the knowledge and techniques needed to defend against biological threats can also potentially be repurposed to deliberately cause harm. The boundary between defensive research and activities that could contribute to weapons development is therefore not always visible simply by looking at the equipment inside a laboratory.

And this problem is becoming more important because the number of labs capable of conducting high-consequence biological research has grown. The Global BioLabs initiative, which I established at King’s College London, has documented a substantial expansion in maximum and high-containment laboratory capacity around the world. There are good reasons for this. Covid taught governments that the ability to detect emerging diseases, characterise pathogens and develop medical countermeasures must be part of national security.

Yet more labs and more work with dangerous pathogens also means more opportunity for something to go wrong. Of course buildings, protective equipment and elaborate operating procedures will reduce risk enormously. But they cannot abolish it. Equipment fails. Samples are mishandled. Procedures are breached. Humans tire. Researchers can be infected without immediately recognising their exposure.

We know this because it has happened before. After the 2003-SARS epidemic had been brought under control, laboratory-acquired infections subsequently occurred in Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing. In Beijing, one such infection led to further transmission outside the laboratory. But, accidents are not proof that dangerous-pathogen research should stop; they are proof that humans work in laboratories.

Covid should have forced us to confront the second half of this problem: not merely how to prevent lab accidents, but how to establish whether one has taken place.

Within weeks of Covid reaching Europe, when discussion of the origin of the enfolding pandemic was already becoming politically toxic, I argued that a credible investigation was needed to examine all plausible routes of emergence. Evidence of SARS-CoV-2‘s evolutionary history could not, by itself, establish how it first entered the human population. A naturally occurring virus could pass directly from animals to people. It could also, in principle, infect somebody collecting animals or samples in the field, or someone subsequently working with them.

Instead, the Covid origins question became trapped in geopolitics. On one side, to raise the possibility of a research-related accident came to be treated as equivalent to promoting a conspiracy theory. On the other, the absence of transparency was taken as proof that a lab leak had occurred. Intelligence agencies were asked to resolve questions that would require scientific, epidemiological and forensic investigation. Years later, we still lack a definitive explanation that commands broad international confidence. That failure is directly relevant to Irkutsk.

Traditional outbreak investigations start with straightforward questions. Who became ill? When? Where? What did they have in common? What were their likely exposures?

But when a plausible connection to a laboratory emerges, investigators need to be able to ask another set of questions. What pathogens were being held there? Which strains? What work was being conducted? Who handled them? Were any incidents recorded? Did staff report unusual illnesses? What do clinical samples, sequencing data, laboratory records and occupational-health records show?

The purpose of such an investigation is not to prove that a lab caused an outbreak. It is to provide a credible way of determining whether it did or didn’t. That capability remains surprisingly weak internationally. WHO can investigate disease outbreaks and request information, but it cannot compel a sovereign government to provide unfettered access to outsiders. Other international protocols, including the Biological Weapons Convention and the UN Secretary General’s mechanism for investigating allegations of biological-weapons, are primarily concerned with suspected use of deliberately engineered pathogens. But they were not designed as routine forensic systems to answer a more basic question: did an outbreak occur naturally, or was it the result of a laboratory accident?

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This creates a dangerous vacuum. We do not know whether Shipilova died from plague. We do not know whether she was exposed to anything at the Irkutsk institute. There is no proof that the pathogen involved was engineered, nor that this episode reveals a Russian pandemic-weapons programme. But nor should the world have to choose between taking Moscow’s assurances on trust and imagining the most frightening alternative.

What is needed now, then, is quite mundane: a clear diagnosis; an account of what Shipilova was working on; confirmation of whether a lab incident occurred; the results of testing and sequencing; and, ideally, sufficient independent scrutiny to make those findings credible. Essentially, we need informed transparency.

The gap between what is known and what is imaginable is where speculation flourishes. Covid demonstrated just how politically destructive that gap can become. The lesson from Irkutsk is, therefore, not that every unexplained illness in a biological researcher should be treated as evidence of a lab leak — still less a bioweapon. It is that, six years after Covid began, we still lack an international system capable of showing convincingly when one is not.

For Edinburgh University officials are stifling my efforts to help find the truth about the origins of Covid-19 in order to protect one of their top academics, who finds himself a central figure in a furore of worldwide significance. It might seem a long way from Wuhan, where the pandemic erupted at some point in 2019, to Scotland’s genteel capital. But at the core of debate over the birth of a strange coronavirus stands an evolutionary biologist called Andrew Rambaut. This influential professor, among the world’s most cited scientists, is accused of playing a key role in efforts by a cabal of prominent experts to suppress the idea Covid might be linked to risky research carried out inside a Chinese laboratory.

Science, of course, depends on data, evidence and unfettered debate. And tracking down Covid’s origins could help protect the planet from future pandemics; it might even have implications for the global tussle between autocracy and democracy. But it seems clear now there was an alarming cover-up led by the heads of major American and British research funding bodies — and the emails exchanged between Rambaut and other leading players might shed light on what else went on behind the scenes.

Edinburgh University boasts a “culture of openness” on its website. But it rejected my requests under the Freedom of Information Act to access these emails on the basis that such a move might affect their professor’s health and safety. After 27 months — and following my appeal to Scotland’s Information Commissioner — the university admitted finally it held the information that I sought. However, it declined still to release it into the public domain, and rebuffed similar requests on the same grounds from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group that has winkled out significant information on these issues using similar tactics.

So in the absence of their evidence, let us examine some of the existing data. After all, as Conan Doyle once wrote to explain how dodgy theories can get bolstered to mask the truth, “there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact”. There are at least 10,000 cities on our planet. And yet, Covid emerged in the Chinese metropolis of Wuhan. This sprawling city is hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses, found in the tropical caves of southern China, so the location surprised even Shi “Bat Woman” Zhengli, their leading expert on such diseases. She is based at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most important bio-security laboratory and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia. It had known safety concerns. And it was conducting risky research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice in low-level biosafety conditions.

Other labs in the city were also carrying out cutting-edge scientific work. So it did not take the forensic genius of a great detective to suspect the emergence of Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — could possibly be tied to research in the city. Especially when this new disease had a feature not seen on more than 200 similar types of coronavirus called a furin cleavage site, which allows its spike protein to bind effectively to cells in many human tissues.

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Maintaining on an open mind regarding all possible scenarios the available data might indicate should not have been controversial. This is, after all, the basis of science. Yet from start of the pandemic, a few prominent scientists, led by the bossses of the most important research funding bodies in Britain and the US, publicly dismissed fears Covid might be linked to a Wuhan lab. This led the suggestion to be scorned as “conspiracy theory”, condemned by patsy journalists, and even dismissed by some people as racist.

Among these experts was Rambaut, who ran the online site that first published the Sars-CoV-2 genome after it was leaked by a brave Chinese scientist in early 2020 in tandem with their mutual friend Eddie Holmes, a Sydney-based British virologist. Before the pandemic, both men were critics of the sort of “misguided” virus-hunting carried out by Wuhan scientists such as Shi in those bat caves of southern China. Some of this work was carried out with Western partners, especially the controversial British scientist Peter Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance group that was backed by US taxpayers.

Yet in mid-March 2020 — just 11 weeks after Taiwan tipped off the World Health Organisation about a weird new disease in Wuhan, and six weeks after the body had declared Covid to be an international emergency — Rambaut and Holmes were among five authors of a commentary in Nature Medicine hastily stating that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This unequivocal statement — entitled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — was arguably the most influential scientific document published in the pandemic. It was even cited in the White House by Anthony Fauci. And it was singled out to me for its significance by Sir Jeremy Farrar, the former head of the Wellcome Trust who was appointed as the WHO’s Chief Scientist last year.

It has since been revealed through leaks, investigations, books and a barrage of freedom of information requests that these two scientific leaders, along with the head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved in covertly drafting this statement (although strangely not credited). And it emerged that some of these scientists privately feared the possibility of a laboratory link even as they drafted the paper condemning such ideas. Farrar himself had complained to Francis Collins, then the head of the US National Institutes of Health, which helped fund some research in Wuhan, about the “Wild West” biosecurity at labs in the central Chinese city. Private messages released though a Congressional inquiry — detailing “super secret” discussions between Rambaut and three fellow authors of the “proximal origins” statement — further exposed concerns that Covid might be tied to scientific research, along with concerning signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such a stance.

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One admitted the lab escape theory was “so friggin’ likely” based on work carried out in Wuhan and molecular data — leading Rambaut to say that their discussion of the idea “shows how plausible it is”. In February 2020 he wrote: “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff… I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good. The truth is never going to come out (if escape is the truth).”

Rambaut also said that “once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off” — a reference to the theory that the virus originated with an infected animal in a food market, ruled out three months later by the Chinese authorities. The Edinburgh academic also wrote about “the shit show” if “anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release”, arguing they should say “given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural process”.

Such discrepancies between the private views of prominent experts and their public positions, published in prestigious journals with commercial ties to China, fuel fears that powerful scientists — whether trying to appease China or mask Western funding ties to risky research — duped the world by trying to stifle debate. Needless to say, this has been firmly denied by those involved. Rambaut, however, also used social media to debunk the “Mojiang miners theory”. This suggests Sars-Cov-2 might be tied to three miners who died from a respiratory disease, similar to Covid 19, that they caught while clearing bat droppings in a cave network in south China. The trio were infected in an abandoned copper mine where scientists from Wuhan sampled RaTG13, the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.

Having been looking into these issues since early 2020, I requested Rambaut’s email discussions with Farrar, Fauci, Holmes and Danish evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen in relation to that controversial Nature Medicine document. I had made an earlier effort to obtain emails between these experts through Whitehall and Sir Patrick Vallance, then the government’s chief scientific adviser, but this resulted in release of a batch of documents so heavily redacted that they were almost worthless. So I sought Rambaut’s emails with Vallance, too, on this issue.

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This was far from a journalistic fishing exercise — as proven by evidence that has emerged elsewhere from other FOI requests. These include US Right to Know’s exposure of how Daszak had secretly organised another notorious statement published in The Lancet early in the pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and ridiculously praised Beijing for “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. It was signed by 27 experts, including Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues.

Daszak also authored a $14.2 million funding request to the Pentagon’s research arm for a study supposedly “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses” that suggested the insertion of “human-specific cleavage sites”. US Right to Know found last month that he envisaged much of this controversial gain-of-function work being carried out in Wuhan — although Ralph Baric, his partner on this project, admitted they might grow viruses in such low-level biosecurity that US researchers “will likely freak out”. The initial 2018 proposal was rejected since it could “put local communities at risk” — but clearly there were plans afoot for precisely the sort of high-risk work in Wuhan that could have led to the pandemic.

We still do not know the definitive answer to the riddle of Covid’s origins. But we do know China’s Communist dictatorship covered up the emergence of a deadly new virus with disastrous consequences, silencing medical whistleblowers and burying crucial data that could have saved lives. We know that two major US intelligence agencies feared the virus leaked from a lab. We heard housing minister Michael Gove tell the Covid inquiry “there is a significant body of judgement” that believes coronavirus “was man-made”. Meanwhile no sustainable evidence has emerged to prove the claims of zoonotic transmission, despite desperate efforts to link animals such as pangolins and raccoon dogs to the spread of a bat disease into humans.

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Curiously, Edinburgh University admitted last year to being over-reliant on Chinese funding with more than 7,500 students coming from Asian superpower, compared with 11,000 from England. Two months ago, Civitas think tank accused it of taking £12 million in five years from bodies with ties to China’s military — revealed through freedom of interest requests. Such sources of finance are not unusual at our universities, sadly, but it would be disturbing if such links were the real reason why this prestigious institution does not want to release important documents that might embarrass Beijing.

It rebuffed my request in an eight-page letter from its legal chief that even had the gall to argue that Rambaut had already published his views on Covid origins in that contentious Nature Medicine article “accessed over five and half million times”. The letter — ironically delayed for months by Covid’s impact on working practices — ruled that disclosure of their professor’s emails might “endanger the physical or mental health or safety of an individual” following “threatening behaviour against several academics in this narrow field”. Like many journalists, I am aware of the unsettling nature of abuse and threats. Such treatment is unacceptable for any scientist, however famous or controversial. But it should be pointed out that it is the shameful behaviour of some of science’s leading lights that turned this into such a toxic debate, which became all the more poisonous after becoming entangled in tribal politics amid disingenuous talk of conspiracy theories.

Science, like academia and journalism, should not be undermined by hiding of key information. Data, facts and evidence should be shared, not shackled or suppressed in a democracy — especially if they might cast light on the worst public health disaster for a century.

Bird is right about the need for faith in scientists as we hurtle into a technological revolution based on artificial intelligence — and indeed, to point out how their efforts depend on rigorous testing of theories with facts. Unfortunately, the behaviour of a few key scientific figures in the pandemic, seemingly desperate to appease China and protect their ties to high-risk research, has done the precise opposite.

This is, one prominent US biologist told me, “the biggest scientific scandal of our lifetime”, involving a deliberate attempt to suppress debate on a health catastrophe that killed almost 15 million people in two years. It revolves around a landmark commentary in Nature Medicine stating firmly that the five authors “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This was published in March 2020 — barely six weeks after the stumbling World Health Organization had declared an international emergency.

Now, hundreds of private messages between four of these five scientists, exchanged as they wrote and published this article, have emerged — and they are astonishing. The “super secret” discussions show this arrogant quartet boasting about success, misleading the media, sneering at journalists and making fun of other experts, even a world-renowned epidemiologist co-opted as the fifth author. They condemn China “for trying to rewrite what happened” and disclose Beijing sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid — just before the rest of the world discovered from a Taiwanese tip-off that the disease had erupted in Wuhan.

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Most significantly, these discussions on Slack expose the quartet’s deep fears that Sars-CoV-2 could have been tied to laboratory research — along with overt signs of pressure from “higher ups” to squash such suggestions. Clearly these scientists were concerned the disease was engineered. They dismiss the well-worn theory about the virus arising in a Wuhan animal market on several occasions, one calling it a “red herring”. Yet they abruptly switched direction in public despite the lack of discernible new evidence. They carried on debating their suspicions in private after the article’s publication — even as they attacked claims about a possible lab leak in public and their statement was used to condemn such “conspiracy theories”.

“Let’s face it, unless there is a whistleblower from the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] who is going to defect and live in the West under a new identity we are NEVER going to know what happened in the lab,” wrote Eddie Holmes, a British virologist based in Australia with strong contacts in China, at one point a month after publication. “That’s my thinking too,” responded lead author Kristian Andersen, a Danish evolutionary biologist — although he admitted that he was “worried” US diplomatic cables showing concerns over biosecurity in Wuhan, which had been disclosed by The Washington Post, “might have something”.

It is hard to overstate the influence of this single article, accessed almost six million times and cited by 5,942 other specialist papers. The journal’s editor João Monteiro tweeted out a link saying: “Let’s put conspiracy theories about the origin of #SARSCoV2 to rest and help to stop spread of misinformation.” China’s ministry of foreign affairs welcomed its “evidence” — as did the Communist Party chief at WIV. It was highlighted in the White House by Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and adviser to several presidents. Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, told me it was “the most important research on the genomic epidemiology of the origins of this virus” more than one year later as he insisted “no scientific evidence I have seen to date points to outbreak linked to a laboratory”.

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It subsequently emerged through leaks and freedom of information requests that this pair, along with Francis Collins, head of the biggest US science funding body, were involved behind the scenes in the article. Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust, was tasked with hosting a teleconference on February 1 involving the five authors and six other experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser until three months ago. After the call, Farrar confessed he was “50:50” on whether Covid came from a lab — and later was found to have told Collins that Wuhan engaged in “Wild West” research practices. His office admitted to me eventually, after a barrage of emails, that he helped “convene” the Nature Medicine authors.

As Vallance once wrote in another science journal, “inferences should be drawn from attempts to hide interactions”. Unfortunately, the lab leak theory was snarled in tribal politics after it was flagged by Donald Trump, creating a toxic climate for those of us probing the origins in the pandemic’s early days. Now, this article is at the centre of a House subcommittee investigation after Republicans summoned the two US-based authors — Andersen and Bob Garry, a microbiologist in New Orleans — to answer questions earlier this month on their deliberations. Afterwards, the cache of documents and messages were detected in the committee papers and on its website by members of Drastic, a group of independent researchers that has uncovered many key nuggets in this quest for the truth about a deadly disease.

Andersen set up what he called the “super secret” Slack group under the intriguing original name of “project-wuhan-engineering” with Holmes and Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, on the day of the teleconference. Farrar, portrayed as a driving force behind the paper, urged everyone to keep their deliberations confidential in that first discussion. A few days later, he signed a letter with two Wellcome Trust colleagues in The Lancet journal hitting out at “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by British scientist Peter Daszak, who runs a body that funnelled substantial US funding for research into bat coronaviruses to WIV.

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The Dane declared to his colleagues that the question they needed to answer was whether Covid emerged due to “evolution or engineering” since both were “really rather plausible” — as remains the case today. Andersen added that Garry would not want the virus to have arisen from “GOF escape” — a reference to controversial Gain of Function research, which boosts the infectivity of viruses and was banned for four years in the US. “The main thing still in my mind is that 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,” he said.

The fact they were discussing the concept of a lab leak “shows how plausible it is”, added Rambaut the next day. But the Scottish-based expert urged them to change tack. “I personally think we should get away from all the strange coincidence stuff. I agree it smells really fishy but without a smoking gun it will not do us any good,” he wrote. “The truth is never going to come out (if [lab] escape is the truth). Would need to be irrefutable evidence. My position is that natural evolution is entirely plausible and we will have to leave it at that. Lab passaging might also generate this mutation but we have no evidence that that happened.”

Rambaut said revealingly that due to “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content with ascribing it to natural processes”. Andersen responded that he agreed this was “a very reasonable conclusion” despite hating “when politics is injected into science”. And this seemed to become their eventual template.

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Much of their subsequent discussion, interspersed with banter, is technical. They discuss RaTG13, the closest known relative to Sars-Cov-2 that was collected by scientists at WIV from a mine hundreds of miles from Wuhan and is linked to the deaths from a mysterious Covid-like respiratory virus of three miners clearing bat guano from a cave. They puzzle over the infamous furin cleavage site, which allows more efficient entry into human cells and is not found on similar types of coronaviruses. “Bob [Garry] said the insertion was the 1st thing he would add,” wrote Holmes. “Yeah,” responded Andersen. “The furin site would be the first thing to add for sure.”

Garry even explains at one point how easy it would be — even for a graduate student — to make such a virus by inserting a furin cleavage site into a bat virus such as RaTG13 in cell culture. “It’s not crackpot to suggest this could have happened given the GoF research we know is happening,” he adds.

Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and co-founder of the advocacy group Biosafety Now, said he was struck by how strongly the Slack messages made the case for a laboratory origin for Covid. He pointed to a decade-old paper shared among the quartet detailing experiments on bovine coronaviruses, which found that when inserted in different human cells they developed a strikingly similar furin cleavage site. Kinney claims knowledge of this paper flew in the face of their claim in Nature Medicine that such cleavage sites had only been observed after prolonged experiments on avian flu. “Bovine coronavirus is much more closely related and this took place after minimal passage in cell culture,” he said.

The discussions show how Farrar strengthened one key phrase — and that the force of their entire argument was beefed up after an initial draft was rejected by Nature, a more prestigious journal. Last month, Garry admitted to a BBC podcast “maybe we went a little too far” by taking such a strident position. Kinney, who wants the paper to be retracted, believes they succumbed to the intensity of pressure from a variety of directions, including from funders with the cash and power to determine the future of their careers — and that this cover-up could have disastrous consequences for their profession. “Science must be honest,” he said. “The logic in the paper is so weak, the conflicts of interest are not revealed and it now seems clear that the authors did not fully believe their own claims.”

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Emails show the team consulted with Ron Fouchier, a Dutch scientist who pushed the boundaries of Gain of Function work with experiments on avian flu. “Molecular biologists like myself can generate perfect copies of viruses without leaving a trace,” he told them baldly. There is also mention of “intel” in the background — and at one point, members of the quartet accuse “Ron” of leaking details of their activities to a journalist.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of these revelations is how their private debate over the origins carried on after publication of their seismic statement. The March article stated that their “analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. Yet Andersen wrote on 16 April that he was “still not fully convinced that no culture was involved”. When Holmes pushed back, warning such fears could lead to an end of Gain of Function research, the Danish biologist replied that the top bat researcher at WIV was carrying out “a lot of work that involved isolating and culturing SARS-like viruses in BSL 2” — a reference to the sort of low-level biosecurity comparable to that found in a dental surgery. He linked to four papers on this “concerning work”. And he said again the next day that “we can’t fully disprove [cell] culture… we also can’t fully rule out engineering”.

Later that month, this same scientist told a journalist that the odds of Covid’s accidental release in Wuhan were “a million to one”. And he told those politicians that after considering all the evidence, their group concluded that “culturing” — which can make a virus more infectious and better-adapted for human transmission — had not occurred since the virus most likely spilled over naturally from wildlife. “By the time we published our final version of Proximal Origin I no longer believed that a culturing scenario was plausible,” he stated in written evidence. The evidence now seems to challenge this pivotal claim to Congress.

Andersen claimed they reached this conclusion through scientific inquiry rather than under pressure from Fauci or other funders. Yet he told the others at the outset “it’s well above my pay grade to call the shots on a final conclusion”. The messages show that just before the paper was submitted for publication it was shared with Farrar and Collins, at the time heads of the two most significant funding bodies in Western science. They were “very happy”, reported back Holmes. Coincidentally, Andersen works at Scripps Research in California, a non-profit lab given $8.9 million for work on infectious disease outbreaks from the grant body headed by Collins five months after the statement’s publication — although he insisted to the Congressional subcommittee that this funding decision was agreed before the pandemic.

We still do not know for sure the origins of that destructive pandemic. But we do know it was an extraordinary coincidence that Covid emerged in the Chinese city containing the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia, a place with known safety concerns conducting high-risk research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. We know China covered up the outbreak, hid key data, lied to other countries and refused to allow proper investigation. And we know that accidents and human error can occur during research. So as Andersen said to his pals, the possibility of some kind of lab incident was “friggin’ likely”.

It looks beyond doubt that Beijing’s cover-up was aided by an outrageous attempt to suppress global debate, led by the Western scientists we should have been able to trust to search for the truth and guide an unshackled debate based on hard facts. They were assisted by patsy politicians, supine journalists and complicit scientific publications. This murky affair appears to be the most terrible betrayal of science — and indeed of democracy — that was far darker and more disturbing than those sinister events that felled Oppenheimer seven decades ago.

So how strange to discover that this same man had previously warned that risky research was “intensifying” threats from “lab-enhanced viruses”. In fact, two years before the pandemic erupted, Daszak was involved in drafting a presentation about the dangers of engineered viruses being accidentally or even deliberately released into the world.

In this newly uncovered presentation, the scientist warned that “gain-of-function” research — which boosts the transmissibility of viruses — was “elevating the risk” that “deadly novel biological agents” could be released through accident or design. The document, demanding the urgent development of counter-measures, put such risk at the same level as natural spillover from the wild. It even focused on the specific threat from coronaviruses.

Yet after the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, Daszak headed the charge against those claiming the mysterious new disease might be potentially linked to research in the city, with even the British Medical Journal branding him the leader of the campaign to label such critics as conspiracy theorists.

Little wonder the disclosure of this document has provoked angry claims of hypocrisy. Richard Ebright, an expert on biosecurity and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, told me it meant that Daszak and his allies have spent the past three years not telling the world the whole truth. The revelations, he said, underlined “the shocking recklessness” of funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan that was being carried out at a low-level biosecurity lab “with no protections beyond a pair of gloves, a lab coat and a hood”.

Today, Daszak is the $460,368-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group that channelled US research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology until the payments were exposed and terminated by President Trump in April 2020. The former Kingston University snail researcher responded with outrage, rounding on suggestions that research in Wuhan might have sparked the pandemic. Typical was a June 2020 article in The Guardian entitled “Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab” that insisted claims of “frankenviruses” made in labs were “the latest chapter in a tale of blame, misinformation and finger-pointing”.

Most infamously, he was the covert organiser of a statement in The Lancet journal that condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin” and absurdly praised China’s “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. Signed by 27 experts, the document helped to crush scientific, political and media debate on whether the new virus might have been manipulated or leaked from a laboratory. The journal was forced later to add a note clarifying Daszak’s “competing interests” and he was removed from heading up its own inquiry into the virus’ origins.

Yet the presentation for the launch of his Global Virome Project (GVP) suggested something very different: that the risks of lab leaks and gain-of-function research needed to be taken seriously. It was seeking $1.3 billion funding over 10 years to help end “the pandemic era” by identifying viruses with the “greatest potential to infect humans and their laboratory-enhanced variants so we can prepare for them before they jump to us”.

The GVP was chaired by the infectious diseases expert Dennis Carroll, another of the signatories to The Lancet statement. Daszak was the project’s director, secretary and treasurer and emails obtained through freedom of information requests demonstrate that he had helped draft the pitch document.

The 40 slides prepared for the 2017 presentation focus on “dual threats” posed by both natural emergence of diseases and the accidental or intentional release of “laboratory enhanced variants”. They warn that gain-of-function research is inflaming the danger of “illnesses and deaths” along with “mass hysteria and panic”. They propose a 10-year project to “develop countermeasures” and build a huge database of viruses to enable their “rapid detection of natural and laboratory-enhanced threats”.

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The real Covid conspiracy

By Ian Birrell

This presentation reflects sensible fears held by many sensible scientists. One page discloses plans for quick identification of engineered viruses. Another underlines the need to “rapidly recognise a lab-enhanced virus”. A third highlights the evidence of Sars-like coronaviruses in Yunnan — a tropical region of southern China where bats roost and scientists from Wuhan Institute of Virology went to collect their samples — while finding no signs of such infections in Wuhan itself.

A version of the slide deck came to light in an email exchange between Daszak and his GVP colleagues, obtained in a freedom of information request from US Right to Know, a public health campaign group. The full set was found by Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist and member of the Drastic group which challenged the science establishment’s narrative that Covid almost certainly spilled over naturally from animals.“When Daszak needed to protect his back,” says Demaneuf, “anybody who dares say exactly what he wrote in these slides was called a conspiracy theorist — or worse.”

Emails indicate that the GVP organisers also held discussions on their plans with Washington defence research agencies. Last month, FBI director Christopher Wray said his agency had “for quite some time assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident”. It is now backed by the Department of Energy, which oversees a network of laboratories engaged in advanced biology, although other US intelligence agencies disagree with their conclusion.

After the pandemic started, the GVP stalled. Three months ago, a federal watchdog accused US funding authorities and EcoHealth Alliance of “deficiencies” in their monitoring and oversight of the work conducted on coronavirus strains at Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak has collaborated on extensive field research in Yunnan and 17 scientific papers since 2005 with the laboratory’s leading bat coronavirus expert Shi Zhengli.

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Science journals have been corrupted by China

By Ian Birrell

Last month, EcoHealth Alliance boasted of winning fresh US grants to “identify” spillovers of bat coronaviruses in three other Asian nations by sampling thousands of bats and other mammals. “This will help identify the potential role of other wildlife as intermediate hosts in the transmission of bat CoVs — and may also help to shed light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” it claimed. The body did not respond to requests for comment on the GVP presentation.

Critics of virus hunting schemes argue that they present high risk while delivering few tangible benefits. A year-long investigation by The Washington Post concluded that such research could be placing the planet in greater danger of another pandemic, accusing the US of continuing to funnel big sums into overseas research despite insufficient oversight as regulation fails to keep pace with new technologies.There are thought to be thousands of biocontainment labs handling dangerous pathogens, although the precise number around the world is unknown.

Simon Wain-Hobson, the virologist who discovered the genetic blueprint of HIV, is among those wanting to see a ban on gain-of-function work.  He told me that Daszak’s presentation exposed the “fallacious logic” of suggesting engineered viruses could help to predict pandemics or assist production of preventative drugs and vaccines. “The science fiction goes on,” he said.

Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.

This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories — but it’s also true.

One of the main “conspiracy theorists” is none other than Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. He is not your typical tinfoil-hat-wearing internet crank. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public health agency, and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in order to cover up evidence that US-funded research in Wuhan may have played a role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Many are convinced that the debate is settled, largely because almost immediately a public narrative surrounding the origin of the virus emerged. This held that the virus was zoonotic in nature, meaning that it had jumped from one or more animals (probably, it was argued, bats) to one or more humans, possibly through one or more unidentified animal intermediate hosts, and most likely at the Huanan Seafood Market  — even though there was no conclusive evidence of any of this.

Early in the pandemic, an alternative theory emerged, suggesting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — known, of all things, for its research into SARS-related coronaviruses, and only eight miles from the Huanan Seafood Market — might have had something to do with an accidental outbreak. From a purely circumstantial standpoint, and considering the long history of safety breaches previously recorded at various facilities in China and throughout the world, one could have been justified for considering it, at the very least, a lead worth pursuing.

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Is Giorgia Meloni an EU puppet?

By Thomas Fazi

As Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, Europe’s biggest philanthropic research funding body, notes in his bestselling book Spike: “It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab … which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses” — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. If this were a coincidence, he adds, it would be a “huge” one.

Yet from the beginning the very notion that the virus might have a laboratory-based origin was stifled. The hot denials came not only from the Chinese authorities and the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself, but also from the WHO and leading Western scientists, institutions and media organisations. For around a year and a half, the “lab-leak” hypothesis was ridiculed and dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory and anyone who raised it deemed a crackpot — and even subject to censorship on Twitter and Facebook.

The mood seemed to shift when, beginning in mid-2021, several high-profile Western scientists, intelligence officials and politicians — including President Joe Biden — started to acknowledge the plausibility of a laboratory accident. Almost overnight, the lab-leak scenario went from being a “crackpot theory” to a credible and legitimate hypothesis. On the same day Biden announced that his administration would be investigating the origins of Covid-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident”, Facebook stated that it would “no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made or manufactured” from its apps.

More than a year later, there is simply no conclusive evidence of whether the virus is zoonotic or artificial in nature — even though the public narrative continues to be heavily skewed towards the natural origin theory. What we do know, however, is that a massive cover-up was orchestrated from the earliest days of the pandemic by leading members of the scientific establishment and the Chinese authorities.

This incredible story sheds light on several key aspects of the entire pandemic management, something that Toby Green and I go into in detail in our forthcoming book: the stifling of critical opinion, the lack of transparency by public institutions, the deeply unscientific manner in which the “scientific consensus” about many aspects of the pandemic came about, and how some of the leading actors of the pandemic tragedy — the WHO, Anthony Fauci, the NIH, leading scientific journals — were already engaging in the publication of papers which traduced the scientific method from the very first days of the pandemic.

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Civil disobedience is coming

By Thomas Fazi

Here’s a brief recap of what we know about the cover-up — much of which we are aware of thanks to a series of Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests. Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was part of an active and highly collaborative US-China scientific research programme funded by the US government — primarily through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed by Anthony Fauci, which is part of the NIH — and coordinated by the US-based non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The group’s research work went beyond the simple analysis of existing coronaviruses, and actually involved the engineering of “chimeric” bat coronaviruses, some of which proved to be potentially more infectious to humans — a highly risky technique known as gain-of-function.

In 2018, EcoHealth and the WIV (in collaboration with other institutions) sent a grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which included a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into existing bat coronaviruses — spots in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. The DARPA proposal was rejected — and yet the presence of a furin cleavage site is precisely what sets SARS-CoV-2 apart from all known SARS-like coronaviruses. Did the researchers carry out the research anyway, possibly using other sources of funding? Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore stated that he considered this to be “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus”.

In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that in the early days of the pandemic, at the highest levels of the US establishment, the question of whether the virus might have been engineered at the WIV, possibly through research part-funded by the US government, was taken very seriously. As a result of an FoIA request, we know that on February 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci convened a “totally confidential” conference call with at least a dozen high-level experts from around the world, many of whom privately admitted that there was a very high probability that the virus had been artificially engineered and had then “escaped” from the Wuhan lab.

Yet not only did the NIH fail to disclose this to the public or to Congress, but the emails released under the FoIA suggest that it took an early and active role in promoting the “zoonotic hypothesis” and the rejection of the laboratory-associated hypothesis. Indeed, within days of the February 1 call, a group of virologists, including some who were on it and had endorsed the “artificial origin” theory, prepared the first draft of a hugely influential paper on The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 — subsequently published in Nature — that argued for the exact opposite.

Moreover, the NIH has resisted the release of important evidence, such as the grant proposals and project reports of EHA, and has continued to redact materials released under FoIA, including a remarkable 290-page redaction in a recent release. Even more incredibly, at some point after March 2020 a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences were deleted from the NIH’s own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.

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The dangers of monkeypox hysteria

By Thomas Fazi

The strangeness doesn’t end here. In February 2020, an influential letter signed by 27 global experts was published in The Lancet, strongly condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The letter proved crucial, alongside the aforementioned Nature paper, in nipping in the bud the lab-leak hypothesis and giving the illusion of scientific consensus. In late 2020, however, emails released following a FoIA request showed that the Lancet statement had been orchestrated by one of the 27 co-authors — none other than Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. It was also revealed that all but one of the other 26 scientists were linked to the Wuhan lab, their colleagues or funders.

Daszak was first appointed in late 2020 as chair of the task force created by the Lancet Covid-19 Commission with the aim of establishing none other than “the origins of Covid-19”; and shortly thereafter as the only US representative to a WHO fact-finding mission to China tasked with the same goal. Unsurprisingly, both task forces found that the virus was most likely zoonotic (i.e., natural) in origin, and that transmission through a laboratory incident was extremely unlikely.

The WHO report, in particular, came under heavy criticism, leading to the establishment of a specific work group tasked with ascertaining the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which published its first preliminary report in June 2022. The results were inconclusive, largely because “key pieces of data” from China were missing, leading the WHO to recommend in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe was required into whether a lab accident may be to blame. As we have seen, however, it’s not only the Chinese government that is covering up its tracks about its possible involvement in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 — but the American one as well.

A new campaign is now underway to put the lab-leak theory to rest once and for all. The recent publication of two new studies providing more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged into humans via the live animal trade at the Huanan Seafood Market has led several outlets to emphatically claim that “the Covid lab leak theory is dead”, once again misleading citizens into thinking that the debate is now really settled.

But the studies don’t provide any evidence that the virus didn’t escape from the Wuhan lab — they simply argue that it’s not a plausible scenario, also based on the fact that there’s no evidence that the virus was present at the WIV before the pandemic started. But of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As Sachs notes, “this [claim] is only as good as the limited data on which it is based, and verification of this claim is dependent on gaining access to any other unpublished viral sequences that are deposited in relevant US and Chinese databases”.

Ultimately, the virus may indeed be conclusively proven to be natural in origin. But in order to do that, as Sachs stresses, a real independent scientific investigation is needed. The public deserves to be shown incontrovertible proof that the Wuhan lab has nothing to do with all this — but that means that the US and Chinese governments have to open up their lab records instead of going out of their way to prevent a real investigation. Amid a time of heightened geopolitical tensions and crumbling faith in political leadership across the West, transparency is needed more than ever. If we can’t get this one right, how else can we be expected to place our faith in authorities ever again?

Nevertheless, Western media has repeatedly validated the claim, often celebrating it. The result is that in the minds of billions of people, China was uniquely successful at containing the virus. What few, if any, have realised is that among the many false narratives constructed and deployed by the Chinese government, Zero Covid has been the most successful — a fact evidenced by the widespread adoption and use of that patently self-contradictory term itself.

Like any global, historically significant false narrative worth its salt, Zero Covid has not been monolithic in its claims. Rather, it has been modulated by the Chinese propaganda apparatus, with, of course, the witting or unwitting collaboration of Western media that has been essential to its success. The most recent manifestation of the Zero Covid false narrative is one that speaks to its daring and sophistication — the idea that, in response to criticism and pressure, the Chinese government came to terms with the fact that it could not cope with the swell of Omicron cases and so needed to ease restrictions.

The new “China is easing restrictions” phase of the CCP’s Zero Covid campaign began to emerge in March when a high-ranking Chinese health official began arguing in the Chinese business news outlet, Caixin, that China should fight the disease “more sustainably”. “We should carve a very clear path and not spend all our time debating whether we should continue zero Covid or coexist (with the virus),” wrote Zhang Wenhong, a senior infectious disease specialist known as the “Chinese Fauci”. Zhang followed up with another opinion piece a week later: “China’s Pandemic Fight Can and Should Allow for Normal Life.”

This development seemingly exposed the flaws in China’s Covid strategy, which is exactly what was messaged by the US media. The Associated Press article that reported Zhang’s comments added that despite the new policy advice, “the government is sticking with the tried-and-true policy of lockdowns, repeated mass testing of millions of people and a two-week or more quarantine for overseas arrivals…Opening up carries risks, because the country’s success in protecting people from Covid-19 means many don’t have antibodies to fight the virus from previous infection.”

The reality that the AP report papered over — and what virtually all Western media has missed as it swallowed CCP’s Covid narrative whole — is that China’s true Covid strategy wasn’t aimed at containing the virus; it was aimed at containing the narrative. “The Chinese CDC was told how it’s going to go,” a private intelligence analyst with knowledge of the data said. The source explains that the CCP’s methodology of choice is not to flatly deny data or take down reporting wholesale but simply “round the edges” off the story by obfuscating just enough to blunt any alternative narrative from forming.

This new inflection in the Zero Covid narrative, which claimed that Omicron reveals the “limits” of China’s approach, merely served to reinforce the idea that China had successfully contained Covid had up that point. In an article on the limits of Zero Covid in the Omicron era, the BBC credulously noted, “If you adjust for population size, there’s been around three deaths per million people in mainland China, compared with about 3,000 in the US and 2,400 in the UK.”

Even entertaining China’s absurd Zero Covid claims requires suspending basic human logic. Consider the case of Singapore, a country much richer and more advanced than China that was able to drive compliance at least as well. (Though considering the entire country is an urban island, in distinction to China’s vast rural expanses, probably much better.)

According to analyst George Calhoun, official Chinese data put China’s mortality rate 50 times lower than Singapore’s. South Korea — which has a single, permanently closed border which effectively makes it an island — is another standout for Covid success. Yet by Chinese official reporting, South Korea’s Covid mortality would be 73 times higher Covid-19 than China’s.

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Did the New York Times stifle lab leak debate?

By Ashley Rindsberg

Late last year, The Economist published a machine learning study on global Covid-19 under-reporting rates, comparing reported Covid deaths to estimated excess deaths. The study found that it looked like the US under-reported Covid mortality by around 20%, though a number of Western European countries at times over-reported by around 2-3%. The highest rates of under-reported mortality top out at around 1,000% for countries including India, Afghanistan, Venezuela and a handful of others. That is, except for China, which the study estimates to have under-reported mortality by an eye-watering 19,000%.

Looking at China’s official death counts tells an equally surreal story. Like a fairytale princess, China’s total death count was frozen for well over a year from January 25, 2021 until March 21, 2022 at the magical number of 4,636. Prior to that, from April 20, 2020 to January 25, there were four deaths. Taking these numbers at face value, this would make the death rate of the United States, where superior vaccines were distributed with high compliance rates, 800 times higher than China’s.

In the US, we have an old saying about gullibility which goes that if you’re willing to believe some outlandish statement then we have a bridge to sell you (that being the Brooklyn Bridge). If we were to abstract this reality and describe this situation generically to a group of listeners, be they savvy statisticians or plain-thinking journalists, the chances that they would believe these numbers to be real would be next to zero.

And yet, not only have we all believed China’s claims about its Covid “success”, specifically Zero Covid, we’ve built an entire political theory around it. This theory states that while China’s authoritarian system of government certainly has its downsides (human rights and civil liberties and all that), the big upside is that it’s effective. With the pandemic, this reasoning goes, China was naturally somewhat draconian, but ultimately successful. Authoritarianism saves lives, you see.

“China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic,” a WHO report on China’s handling of the pandemic observed. Interestingly, one of the members of the WHO mission that produced the report, epidemiologist Tim Eckmanns, told Science magazine, “I thought there was no way those numbers could be real.” And yet, despite his own disbelief, he believed them to be real.

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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

By Matt Ridley and Alina Chan

In a 2020 column titled “China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump.” Thomas Friedman touted the wild success of the CCP. “[W]ho can blame the Chinese for gloating? A pandemic that began in Wuhan, and, for now, has been contained in China.” Friedman even allowed for a little number-fudging, writing, “Maybe China’s fibbing. OK — so quadruple its numbers — China still has been vastly better at protecting its people than the United States.”

Friedman never pondered the possibility that he might need to not quadruple China’s numbers but multiply them by 180 or 800 times. The patently ridiculous baseline mortality numbers set by China and validated endlessly by the Western media allowed commentators like Friedman to factor in CCP lying by a factor of four and still be off by an order of magnitude. (Who can blame China for gloating, indeed.)

What’s curious about the narrative that emerged in Western media is that it’s almost exactly the same one that Beijing was (and still is) advancing. While Western observers might think that the CCP’s wanting to “round the edges” of reporting on data would want to do the same regarding the rougher edges of its political approach, that’s incorrect. The CCP’s own messaging used the term “draconian” to describe the measures taken in response to Covid. For us “draconian measures” is harsh criticism; for the CCP it’s self-affirmation.

As egregious as it is, Zero Covid is only one facet of China’s propaganda campaign. Another equally important piece of this puzzle, one that ties Zero Covid to the question of the pandemic’s origin, is the date of the first outbreak. While most of the media has let the question settle comfortably on China’s official story, the reality is much more questionable.

According to China (and some Western experts), the first recorded cases were diagnosed sometime in mid-December 2019, which connects the outbreak of the pandemic to people who visited the now infamous seafood market. But evidence has emerged suggesting that the first outbreak might have emerged as early as November that year that would make the seafood market origin much more difficult (if not impossible) to support.

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Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

The same arsenal of tactics has been deployed, such as disqualifying early cases in China because they didn’t meet an almost impossible criteria — for example, being admitted to hospital and testing positive with a PCR test, which required being admitted to one of the very few hospitals that administered PCR tests in those early days. A key article in Caixin tracking these disqualified early cases was swiftly taken offline with a redirect put in place to the Office of Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission. It cites a statute that calls on Chinese citizens to “fulfil social responsibilities, adhere to correct public opinion orientation and value orientation, promote socialist core values, and publish high-quality information content that is upward and good,” as DRASTIC researcher Gilles Demaneuf documented.

In a way, the CCP can be forgiven its epistemic sins. It was, after all, just doing its job: consolidating power, weaving false narratives, tamping down dissent. What’s more concerning — what is in fact, a four-alarm fire raging deep in an institutional sub-basement — is that the CCP campaign could never have succeeded without Western complicity, and most of all, with the complicity of the American media, broadly construed.

If it weren’t for the fact that China’s false mortality data was presented in Google search results; or that Twitter-verified members of China’s State-Sponsored Media could post without being flagged; or, most glaringly and egregiously, that the legacy press actively spread the mistruths and openly celebrated them, the narrative could never have been built. And even if it had been, it would never have mattered.

“The world is turning its eyes to China, and China is ready,” Xi Jinping said in advance of the great authoritarian spectacle, the Beijing Olympics, which took place when Zero Covid was still the official party line. Xi was right that China was ready, but though the West had turned its eyes to China, it failed to scrutinise it whatsoever.

Imagine if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile had killed 21 million people. It’s hard to believe the world would shrug and say: let’s not bother finding out how it happened. The Covid pandemic has killed around that number and disrupted the lives of billions. Nothing like it has happened in more than a century; it is the greatest cause of global suffering since the Forties. Yet we still do not know how it started, and much of the world seems to be increasingly incurious to find out.

We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible: spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip.

In this we are in line with the US government, the G7, the World Health Organisation and the general public, all of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important “to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident”. That is huge news. It means that an accident caused by human error may have happened on the same scale as a nuclear missile destroying New York.

Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.

All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the book then cancelled at the last minute — at the behest of their health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did the other mainstream US and UK networks. The topic remains taboo in much of the mainstream media. Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington invited us to give a presentation on the book, then cancelled the invitation. We asked the Royal Society if they had considered a debate on the topic of the origin of the Covid pandemic: no, they said, it’s not a proper topic for scientific discussion. What? We tried a couple of other learned societies: no, sorry, too controversial. Seriously.

Opinion polls show that the public generally thinks the virus began with a lab leak. So virologists who think it did not ought to be keen to have an opportunity to make their case, rather than avoid debate.

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Did virus hunters cover up a lab leak?

By Matt Ridley

We think we know why people feel so threatened by Viral. After all we are not lab-leak extremists and we have also been attacked by those who are. But by taking down credible moderate voices, our critics within the scientific establishment are polarising the issue and casting the lab origin hypothesis as one that is only championed by anti-science or uninformed groups. As Professor Jonathan Haidt of New York University has pointed out, on social media these days it is common for activists to spend a lot of time criticising moderates on their own side of an argument.

The Chinese authorities have made it clear that any discussion of a possible lab leak is — in their view — xenophobic bullying. “The lab leak theory is totally a lie concocted by anti-China forces for political purposes, which has nothing to do with science,” said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman on 10 June. (Although they also argue that a lab leak of Covid from US laboratories should be investigated.) This stance from the Chinese government puts universities and scientific journals in a tough spot because of their increasing dependency on Chinese funding and patronage.

Science funders are embarrassed to note that, as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University has recently documented, some of the funding that went into collecting and manipulating bat viruses in Wuhan came from the West, so better to let that sleeping dog lie. Virologists are worried that fingering a lab leak will affect their flow of grant money or result in more oversight and regulation of virology research. One scientist told us that: “If we investigate and expose an error on the part of scientists, then the public will no longer trust science.” As if choosing to deliberately not uncover a possible error would make people trust science more.

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Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

Science journalists generally see their job as cheerleading for scientists, not investigating them, so have largely refused to engage with the evidence for a lab leak. Some environmentalists would prefer the episode to be a cautionary tale about the destruction of rainforests. The issue has rapidly become partisan with Republicans largely driving the calls for an investigation. Bipartisan efforts and proposals to investigate the origin of Covid — a pandemic that has taken the lives of more than a million Americans — have proceeded at a glacial pace. Many younger commentators see blaming a Chinese lab as more racist than blaming Chinese eating habits for some reason (despite the fact that no bats or pangolins were found to be sold in Wuhan markets in the years leading up to the pandemic). And so on.

In short, there is a confluence of vested interest that results in a lot of motivated reasoning. It is hard to find anybody, with the exception of a few fringe media outfits, who is being paid as part of their day job to investigate the possibility of a lab leak without fear or favour. The people who have persisted in keeping the lab-leak hypothesis alive, against staunch opposition by some virologists and the media, are doing it in their spare time and at their own expense — as are we.

One of the commonest criticisms we have received from scientists is that by writing a book we are profiteering from a pandemic, an odd charge to come from people also earning salaries and grants to investigate the virus and its effects. Anyway, we took an early decision before the book was published, which we made public, to give away half of the proceeds from the book to charity.

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When fear leads to tyranny

By Jonathan Sumption

Perhaps the oddest reaction we get from scientists, politicians and even journalists is this: why does it matter? The pandemic has happened, it cannot be undone and we may never know how it started, so why rake over the coals and stir up animosities? We find this astounding as an argument. If we don’t know how this pandemic started, how can we inform strategies to stop the next one? If we don’t investigate, what signal does that send to bioterrorists? If we shrug our shoulders, what respect does that show to the memory of the dead? The risk of lab-based outbreaks does not disappear if we pretend they are unlikely.

Another excuse we hear for the refusal to engage in the debate is that the Chinese government is secretive and authoritarian, so it will never share the vital information that we need to determine the origin of the virus. This seems to us defeatist, as is the often-expressed view that we cannot know how this pandemic started unless we get cooperation from the Chinese authorities. Like Dr Sachs, we think it is possible that a diligent investigation of the kind that has not yet been launched may yet solve the mystery even without Chinese cooperation. A steady trickle of revelations from within Western institutions has confirmed our view.

The World Health Organisation did in 2020 launch an inquiry into the source of the virus, which unfortunately gave Western governments the excuse to do nothing. It proved to be an embarrassing farce: months of dilatory negotiations over terms of reference, followed by the appointment of experts with conflicts of interest, then a brief chaperoned visit to a few spots in Wuhan, culminating in a press conference at which the WHO meekly endorsed an evidence-free Chinese theory that the virus had been imported to Wuhan on frozen food possibly from overseas. More than a year later, the WHO has now published a preliminary report from its scientific advisory group for the origins of novel pathogens (SAGO), which admits that the lab leak needs to be investigated — 30 months after the pandemic began.

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That this pandemic flared up in a powerful and influential country with no free press, little freedom for scientists to speak out and centralised control of information by a totalitarian dictator certainly makes it uniquely difficult to investigate. Had it occurred in almost any other country in the world — the US, India, Brazil, even Russia — we think it would have been impossible to prevent the truth emerging.

But China’s refusal to be transparent has been matched by a determined effort on the part of many Western scientists to prevent a proper investigation getting under way. Despite thinking privately that a lab leak was most definitely possible — as shown by emails revealed through freedom of information requests — these scientists now appear even more keen than the Chinese authorities to tell the media that the matter is settled and they are sure the first infection happened in Wuhan’s seafood market.

Yet no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found, and there is no evidence of exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior to the Covid outbreak. The amount of evidence for a wildlife trade origin of the virus is comparable to that for a research-related origin — both are plausible ways for a bat coronavirus from southern China or Southeast Asia to have made its way to Wuhan in central China, but both pathways remain poorly investigated. As we say to those who claim it definitely came via wild animals in the market, we don’t think you are certainly wrong, but we do think you are wrongly certain.

Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 is now out in paperback.

What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.

The program I was listening to was called All Things Considered, on a network with the unfamiliar name of NPR, short for National Public Radio. I was immediately hooked. In no time flat, I’d put it on whenever I was home. Morning Edition as soon as I opened my eyes, All Things Considered when I got back in the afternoon, Fresh Air during dinner. I fell in love with Robert Siegel’s wit, Renée Montagne’s voice, Scott Simon’s charm. These people got me. They shared my interests, my outlook, my sensibilities. For the first time, I felt myself reflected in the public sphere. “NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

And that’s the way it was for over 30 years, through the advent of Talk of the Nation and This American Life, of On the Media and Here & Now. NPR became the soundtrack of my life — when I drove, cooked, ate, exercised, did laundry — three or four hours a day, every day.

That is, until around the beginning of last year. My discontent had been building since the previous summer, the summer of the George Floyd protests. It was clear from the beginning that the network would be covering the movement not like journalists but advocates. A particular line was being pushed. There was an epidemic of police violence against unarmed African-Americans; black people were in danger of being murdered by the state whenever they walked down the street. The protests were peaceful, and when they weren’t, the violence was minor, or it was justified, or it was exclusively initiated by the cops. Although we had been told for months to stay indoors, the gatherings did not endanger public health — indeed, they promoted it. I supported the protests; I just did not appreciate the fact that I was being lied to.

But it wasn’t just that story. Overnight, the network’s entire orientation had changed. Every segment was about race, and when it wasn’t about race, it was about gender. The stories were no longer reports but morality plays, with predictable bad guys and good guys. Scepticism was banished. Divergent opinions were banished. The pronouncements of activists, the arguments of ideologically motivated academics, were accepted without question. The tone became smug, certain, self-righteous. To turn on the network was to be subjected to a program of ideological force-feeding. I was used to the idiocies of the academic Left — I had been dealing with them ever since I started graduate school — but now they were leaking out of my radio.

Nor was it only NPR. One by one, the outlets that I counted on for reliable reporting and intelligent opinion — that I, in some measure, identified with — fell in line. The New York Times, which was already in an advanced state of decay, surrendered completely. Ditto The New Yorker. The Atlantic was drifting in the same direction. Inroads appeared in The New York Review of Books. Satirists whom I admired for their alert sense of irony, their ability to recognise the absurdity at all points of the political spectrum  — Stephen Colbert, John Oliver — got the new religion, and started preaching sermons. 

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“Moral clarity” became the new journalistic standard, as if the phrase meant anything other than tailoring the evidence to fit one’s preexisting beliefs. I was lamenting the loss, not of “journalistic objectivity,” a foolish term and impossible goal, but of simple journalistic good faith: a willingness to gather and present the facts that bear upon an issue, honestly and clearly, regardless of their implications.

For months, I felt trapped, alone with my incredulity. Was I the only person seeing this? Every time I turned on NPR, my exasperation grew — basically, I was hate-listening after a certain point — but what was the alternative? I literally couldn’t think of any. Then, by sheer dumb luck, I was invited on a podcast to discuss a book I had recently published. It was The Unspeakable, with Meghan Daum, and while I had never thought of myself as a podcast person, I so enjoyed myself, was so impressed with her intelligence and humour, that I became a listener.

I quickly discovered that there was another person seeing what I had been seeing, and not only seeing it, but talking about it: frankly, fearlessly, incisively, in public. And not only one person. For I also discovered, from references she dropped, that there were other podcasts like hers, ones where things you weren’t supposed to talk about were talked about, where things you weren’t supposed to say were said. But how was I going to find the time to listen to them, on top of all that NPR? And then it came to me: I could just stop listening to NPR.

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So that is pretty much what I did. Now, in addition to The Unspeakable, I listen to Blocked and Reported (Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal), The Dishcast (Andrew Sullivan), The Glenn Show (Glenn Loury, with John McWhorter as a regular guest), Honestly (Bari Weiss), and LibertiesTalk (Celeste Marcus). I don’t agree with everything these people say, still less with everything their guests do. Weiss is on the centre-Left, Sullivan and Loury on the centre-Right, but more to the point, all of these figures are heterodox, which means that their positions aren’t predictable.

But I didn’t start listening to them because I felt I had a civic duty to expose myself to opinions I disagree with. I started listening to them because I couldn’t stand the bullshit anymore. Because I needed to let in some air. They make me think. They introduce me to perspectives that I hadn’t entertained. They teach me things, and they are usually things the Times or NPR won’t tell you.

I have learned about the lab-leak hypothesis before it became an acceptable topic of discourse. About the lunacy of transgender orthodoxy (“affirmative therapy” for small children, the “cotton ceiling”). About the real statistics on police killings of unarmed black people (according to a Washington Post database, the number shot to death came to 18 in 2020, 6 in 2021). About the truth about Matthew Shepard (who was murdered, by a sometime lover and another acquaintance, over drugs), Jacob Blake (who was shot while stealing his girlfriend’s car, kidnapping her children, resisting arrest, and trying to stab a cop), and Kyle Rittenhouse (who worked in Kenosha, had a father who lived there, and was out that night, however misguidedly, to protect property and provide medical assistance).

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More broadly, I have learned of the emergence of an alternative ecosystem of independent-minded journalists, experts, and thinkers, many of them exiles, voluntary or otherwise, from the established media. They are free of institutional allegiances. They are unintimidated by the Twitter mob. They are committed to free inquiry and free speech. They are unafraid of debate. For the first time in a good long while, I feel myself reflected in the public sphere. I have a home, once again, in America.

We talk incessantly these days about political polarisation. Americans are hunkered down in our camps, we say, in our tribes. We are blue versus red, urban versus rural, secular versus religious. But wherever there are tribes, there are individuals who leave their tribe: renegades, heretics, converts; expatriates, emigrants, exiles. The late, great anthropologist David Graeber remarked that despite what we tend to believe about pre-modern social formations — that they were self-enclosed and inescapable — some five percent of their inhabitants, on average, left their group.

So it clearly is today, whatever the exact percentage. We rarely talk about this, but we should. It would help us perceive that our tribes, mentally and socially, are not so inescapable, so self-enclosed. That we have options. That there aren’t just two camps. That you do not have to join a camp at all. Because most of the people who leave one, I would venture to say, do not join the other. They become, as we say, politically homeless: anti-Trump conservatives who do not recognise what’s happened to their movement or their party; progressives, like me, who are disgusted at the spectacle of what progressivism has become.

But maybe the most important reason to talk about the existence of today’s political renegades and ideological heretics is to enable each of them, each of us, to feel less lonely. To live within a tribe is to enjoy the reassurance that you’re one of many. To leave one — to break one’s attachments, to call down the condemnation of one’s peers and friends — is necessarily to feel that you’re alone. But you are not alone.

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So why do people leave? How do they change their minds? Different ways, I think. There is the lightning conversion, the stunning realisation that everything you’d previously thought is wrong, and everything you’d thought is wrong is right. Today that sometimes seems to happen to individuals who are raised in restrictive religious environments and who find themselves exposed, accidentally or otherwise, to the scepticism and relativism of the secular world — though obviously the road to Damascus can lead in the other direction, the direction of faith. There is the opposite experience: the feeling not that you have changed but that your tribe has — something that many are feeling with respect to one or other of the major political formations. There is the slow accretion of countervailing information that eventually leads (gradually, then suddenly, like Hemingway’s bankrupt) to a change in one’s view of reality, the way a scientist changes their mind.

But for me the most important way, and not just because it is the one I find most salient for me, is this. You change your mind when you consent to stop ignoring things you know full well but do not want to think about — things that you push to the edges of consciousness, or all the way out. Few of us are scientists. We do not gather facts through careful, ordered processes; we aren’t compelled to make our arguments in formal terms in front of expert referees. Our thinking is less about finding the truth than about making ourselves feel good. And so when we encounter a countervailing piece of information, an uncomfortable truth, we dismiss it as an anomaly, or as not undermining the general point, forgetting the previous “anomalies” and not regarding how they might together utterly destroy the point.

To overcome such a block, to look in the face an unwelcome reality, is first consternation, then liberation. Anyone who’s been in therapy will understand this. The truth always feels good, on a certain level, just because it is the truth. It relieves us of the psychic stress it costs us to resist it.

A few examples from my own thought. Some concern the recognition that we on our side are not any better, in many respects, than those scoundrels on the other. Yes, conservatives are making common cause with authoritarian regimes, but only lately did I let myself acknowledge that the Left has done the same for many years: with Cuba still today, Nicaragua in the 80s, North Vietnam in the 60s, the Soviet Union in the 30s. Yes, Republican leaders are cowards who refuse to denounce the Trumpian extremists in their ranks, but only recently did I allow myself to see that many leaders on the Left are equally spineless, equally faithless, equally complicit in the face of the extremists on their own side. For a lifelong Leftist pushing sixty, admitting this is, as Joe Biden might say, a big fucking deal.

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But those are just examples, and they and others like them add up to far more than the sum of their parts. For knowing now how wrong I think I’ve been about so many things, knowing too that outlets and authorities I trusted have been, at the least, not telling the entire truth, and sometimes outright lying; knowing furthermore that others, ones to which I’m not “supposed” to pay attention, might supply the fact or argument that challenges another unexamined assumption — all this has been, to use one of Daum’s favourite words, destabilising. She started her podcast, she’s said, because she doesn’t know what to think anymore, and when I first heard her say that, I smugly dissented. No more. There are plenty of issues on which I still possess a firm opinion, but there are none, I now believe, on which my opinion cannot be overturned.

History is changing, fast. Stabilities are fracturing; intellectual borders are shifting. New movements have emerged, impelled by hidden emotional currents, impelled in turn by forces economic, technological, environmental. But history, I’ve learned, isn’t just something that happens out there. The upheavals it causes are psychic, as well. I had read about this with respect to people in the past, but now I find that I am living it. But that is the thing about history: we always think of it as happening to others, until it comes for us.

***

NOTE: I originally wrote this essay for a different publication. It was one with which I’ve had a long and fruitful relationship, and the editor-in-chief, who is retiring, invited me to contribute to his valedictory issue. His initial reaction was positive, to say the least. “Like all your best pieces,” he wrote, “and like many of the other best pieces I’ve run, this one makes me a little scared, but also makes me excited by the prospect of waking people up. It wakes me up. I’ve felt some of this without ever quite admitting it to myself.”

 This, I should say, was according to plan. While politically neutral in theory, the journal had been drifting in the same direction as the rest of the mainstream media. Waking up his readers, whom I doubt had ever heard this kind of argument before, was exactly my intention.

Alas, it was not to be. Two weeks later, the editor wrote me again. “[T]he more I’ve thought about it, the less comfortable I’ve become with associating [the journal] with many of the assertions you make…. [T]here is too much in your piece that I could not defend.”

I had written a piece about the truths we aren’t allowed to utter on the Left, but that truth too, apparently, must not be uttered. The editor, it seemed, did not appreciate the irony. – W.D.

But this virus has now killed over 6,000,000 people across the planet, and if lab research caused it, imagine what it would do to the entire field of virology. Money would be withdrawn and careers shuttered; it would be devastating. Small wonder, perhaps, that at the beginning of the pandemic anyone discussing a possible lab accident was swiftly dismissed by the science community as a “conspiracy theorist”. Donald Trump’s own opinion was particularly helpful on this matter.

Two essays in particular had a particularly powerful effect on the narrative. Placed in The Lancet and Emerging Microbes & Infections, both of them debunked the lab-leak theory. Their publication initially shut down any debate about the pandemic origin; but both reports were subsequently exposed as being rather compromised. The essay in The Lancet had been orchestrated behind the scenes by Peter Daszak, who runs a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, that directly funds research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak’s obvious conflicts of interest forced The Lancet to shut down their own investigation of the pandemic’s origin. At Emerging Microbes & Infections, the essay authors were caught passing the draft for approval to a scientist who Daszak funds at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Since that strategy has been wearing thin, a new tactic is being deployed: drafts of useful studies are being published online and then rushed into public discussion with friendly science writers.

To push back against public perception that their Wuhan colleagues could have made a mistake, researchers have been allaying themselves with science writers, who often regurgitate whatever researchers say or publish. “Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives,” wrote science writer, Nicholas Wade, in an essay last year, that detailed how the pandemic could have started in a Wuhan lab. “Most see their role largely as purveying the wisdom of scientists to the unwashed masses.”

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This lack of cautious scepticism now extends to preprints — the drafts of studies that scientists post online before they have been vetted by journal editors and peer reviewers. Peer review can be laborious and time-consuming, sometimes lasting weeks or months, and is far from perfect. But when a scientist wants to plant an opinion in the public mindset, publishing a preprint can serve this purpose; it helps if science writers are willing to ignore the need for expert vetting of the paper, before rushing the draft study into headlines. Such is the thirst for new stories about Covid-19 that this is now proving the case. A perfect example has just been published.

A week ago, Chinese government scientists posted a preprint online that analysed swabs sampled early in the pandemic at a market in Wuhan to detect the Covid-19 virus. The following day, a coterie of Western scientists rushed to publish two preprints of their own, analysing much of the same evidence. The Chinese preprint concluded that the market was the focus of either the pandemic’s origin or a spreading event where someone outside the market brought it in. Western scientists, however, argued that the same evidence showed the pandemic began in the market from an infected animal.

The Western report and its emphasis on an infected animal passing the virus to someone in the market as being the origin of the pandemic became the dominant narrative for New York Times science writers. Their story ran soon after.

“BREAKING NEWS: Two major scientific studies point to a market in Wuhan, China — not a lab in the same city — as the birthplace of the coronavirus pandemic,” read an early version of a story filed by New York Times reporters Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller. The opening failed to note that the “major scientific studies” were only preprints that had not been vetted by experts.

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“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” the Times quoted Michael Worobey, a co-author of both studies and a researcher at the University of Arizona. In an essay he published last November in Science Magazine, Worobey also argued that the pandemic began in the Wuhan market. However, this conclusion was later criticised as unscientific by Liang Wannian, a Beijing public health official who has led the country’s Covid-19 response.

The New York Times article does give brief mention to the Chinese preprint, which noted that no infected animals have been found, for example, and wrote that an infected human could have brought the virus into the market. “Thus, the market might have acted as an amplifier due to the high number of visitors every day,” the Chinese scientists report, “causing many initially identified infection clusters in the early stage of the outbreak as indicated in the Report of WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2.”

The Western scientists, in contrast concluded, “Together, these analyses provide dispositive evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.” And this is what the New York Times reported, even though both sets of scientists drew polar opposite conclusions based on mostly similar data.

This did not escape the notice of Alina Chan, a Scientific Advisor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and co-author of VIRAL: the search for the origin of Covid-19. Interviewed by The Hill TV, Chan pointed out that the Western scientists did not find the “incontrovertible” proof that was claimed — and Chinese researchers concluded the opposite. “We are just repeating what happened in 2020, which is a bunch of scientists and reporters rushing to print headlines about the origins of COVID19.” Chan said.

Politically, as Matt Yglesias noted, this is important. The New York Times report shows that “once again, I think the press is getting way ahead of its skis,” he wrote. “But we should keep in mind that the virologists publishing papers downplaying the possibility of a lab leak are not disinterested parties in this. The political context is a debate about regulating virus labs, and it’s hardly shocking that a large segment of the virus lab community doesn’t like that idea.”

This wasn’t the only omission by the Times: it also failed to report on a note buried at the bottom of both Western studies, where several scientists — including Michael Worobey and Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute — disclosed that they have received consulting fees or have been compensated for expert testimony on the Covid-19 pandemic. Neither scientist responded to questions from me about the nature of this consulting or expert testimony, or who it is for.

“Journalists owe it to their readers to help them understand both the strengths and limitations of scientific research – especially when the paper is a pre-print and has not been through peer review,” says Alison Young, who spent many years as an investigative reporter uncovering problems at labs studying dangerous pathogens and is now the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “In covering this kind of research, especially on the polarized topic of Covid’s origin, it is critical for reporters to note where conclusions are based in part on speculation,” she added.

Worryingly, this isn’t the first instance of uncritical reporting on preprints at the New York Times science desk. Last October, the Times’s Carl Zimmer reported on a preprint that discovered viruses most closely related to Covid-19 in Laos, far, far away from Wuhan. Zimmer quoted Worobey saying that the preprint finding these viruses in Laos “puts to bed” the idea that the Covid-19 virus could have come from a Wuhan lab. However, months prior to this Times article, researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had already reported in a scientific paper that they had been collecting viruses from Laos since at least 2006.

Before this unfortunate incident, Zimmer wrote an article for Time Magazine praising research by China’s controversial virologist Shi Zhengli, and described claims that the pandemic could have started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “not just baseless but dangerous”.

“It does look like the science desk at the New York Times has a position on the subject of the lab leak,” says Richard Ebright, professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a biosafety expert. And few answers explaining how the pandemic started will be found in science journals; Ebright thinks the world needs forensic investigators and congressional committees to get to the bottom of what caused so many deaths.

Getting to the bottom of this is important because as we’ve seen over the course of the pandemic, science can be used to present a contrived picture of reality. It can be co-opted by politics and even used as an instrument of state propaganda. “So long as this is kept within science, all other evidence is excluded,” says Ebright. “And that’s what some science journalists and scientists want to do.” As we now know, not all parties are disinterested ones.

Neither Carl Zimmer nor editor Virginia Hughes responded for comment.

This is the official Chinese narrative: that Covid 19 should be traced back to this “earliest onset date” when Chen visited a hospital dental clinic. The World Health Organisation promoted this story in its study group report earlier this year into origins of the virus, influencing global discussion. Yet this “first case” merely highlights the duplicity of Beijing in obscuring the truth about the birth of this deadly disease — along with the complicity of the global public health body and so much of the scientific establishment in promoting the Communist regime’s deceptive stance.

The extent of the dishonesty became startlingly obvious after the WHO’s patsy report was published in March. Data for Chen, this heavily-scrutinised patient, seemed confused since the sample sequence listed in its documents belonged to another man who had died after falling sick later in December 2019. Chen’s profile actually matched the sequence of a patient listed as becoming ill on December 16. This was one of the cases that frightened local doctors — leading ophthalmologist Li Wenliang to warn colleagues about a contagious new virus, only for him to be detained by police for “rumour-mongering”. His death several weeks later from the disease sparked an eruption of grief and fury on social media.

Chen’s case could not be hidden, since it had been highlighted by Ai Fen, another doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, who was also reprimanded by party chiefs after sharing details about the alarming new virus. The stricken accountant, who lived in the dense residential district closest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology site in the southern part of the city, had no known links to the infamous Huanan Seafood Market. After failing to respond to treatment, he travelled some distance from his district hospital to the renowned emergency department at the major hospital where his relative worked.

Last month, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, declared in Science that Chen was not really the first known case. He argued correctly that the WHO had bungled its chronology — but then pointed instead to a female seafood vendor who fell ill on December 11, saying Chen developed his symptoms five days later. The existence of this new Patient Zero sparked excitable headlines around the world about the pandemic being triggered by a spillover from animals sold at the bustling market in the central Chinese city. “The latest report adds weight to the theory that the virus originated from wildlife sold at the market, rather than as a leak from a Wuhan virology lab,” stated The Guardian.

Yet as one expert told me, this latest study — eagerly lapped up by docile science correspondents — simply “piled wishful thinking on deception”. The market was discounted even by Chinese authorities last year as birthplace of the pandemic after being challenged by academic studies, and again in a paper co-authored by the country’s top infectious diseases expert six months ago. It was more likely to have been the location of a super-spreader event. Despite Beijing’s efforts to control the narrative, stifle dissent and suppress data, there is still considerable evidence in circulation to counter the concept that either of these two cases was Patient Zero.

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By Ian Birrell

I have previously revealed how Professor Yu Chuanhua, a professor of biostatistics at Wuhan University placed in charge of collating official data, told a Chinese health journal that he had 47,000 cases on his database by late February. These included two more suspected cases on November 14 and 21. The Health Times article even included a screenshot exposing personal details of one of them: Patient Su, a 61-year-old who lived about a mile from a lab run by China’s Centre for Disease Control and less than three miles from the downtown Wuhan Institute of Virology site — but more than 13 miles from the wildlife market.

Other early cases included Connor Reed, a 25-year-old Briton teaching in Wuhan, who said he grew ill on November 25 and that his condition was later confirmed as the new coronavirus. US intelligence was reported to have issued alerts to allies at end of that month after analysing communication intercepts and satellite images collected in preceding weeks. The Lancet published a landmark early pandemic paper by Chinese scientists on a cluster of initial Wuhan cases, which recorded the first patient on December 1 — and stated that three of the first four cases had no confirmed exposure to the market. Then a well-sourced article in the South China Morning Post disclosed nine confirmed cases by the end of November, involving four men and five women aged between 39 and 79 with the first diagnosis on November 17. Finally it was discovered that specimen data records from four Covid patients were created on December 10 by scientists at a Wuhan military hospital, including for a woman aged 21 listed as coming from close to Wuhan Institute of Virology’s older city centre site and another high-security university lab carrying out bat coronavirus experiments on genetically-modified mice.

There were also whispers among well-connected scientists. Several academics spoke publicly of hearing about the disease by mid-December — including Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University honoured by China for work on the first SARS epidemic earlier this century, who said he knew about it on December 15. Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law in Washington, said he heard in mid-December from a friend in Wuhan about a novel coronavirus and that “it looks very serious”. It seems strange that George Gao, the Oxford-educated virologist who is director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed to have found out about the disease more than two weeks later, on December 30 — the day before the WHO was tipped off by Taiwan.

The issue of early cases is clouded by geo-politics and an intensifying superpower struggle. Donald Trump’s outbursts — “the China virus” — during his presidency were often intemperate, and tended to inflame opinions on both sides. Yet his administration concluded with a carefully-worded State Department document claiming researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology “became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses”. David Asher, who led the inquiries, told me three scientists were believed to have fallen ill in the second week of November, 2019, with “credible” information from a trusted foreign source that the wife of one researcher died later that month.

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Scientific analysis based on dynamics of disease outbreaks and genome evolution suggests a most likely emergence between mid-October and mid-November — which tallies with censored reports, circumstantial evidence, leaks and US intelligence claims. Chen’s case actually implies that the virus had spread significantly around the city by the second week of December, since he lived almost 20 miles from the centre and the notorious market.

None of this proves anything definitive about the first case of SARS-Cov-2 — the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid — let alone its origins. Worobey argues it may still be possible to obtain conclusive evidence from these late December cases, although evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom is more pessimistic. “Normally in an outbreak investigation you trace the contacts of known patients backward in time to find earlier cases,” he tweeted recently. “But for SARS-CoV-2 investigations in Wuhan, it’s going in the opposite direction!”

Yet this vexatious issue does raise two big questions. First, why has China gone to such lengths to conceal crucial data about the origins of this disease, given the critical importance in understanding the cause of this public health disaster? Certainly, it is impossible to ignore the coincidence that it erupted in the city that hosts Asia’s biggest bat coronavirus research centre, located far from the dark places where scientists from the lab and their associates collect samples from bats in southern China and — according to recent revelations — possibly eight other nations. Not least when there are so many unanswered riddles swirling around the secretive Wuhan labs over the real nature of their research, the erratic behaviour of their most prominent scientist and their true relationship with key Western funding bodies.

We know also from Chinese media reports — later deleted from the internet — that Chinese firms were sequencing the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 before the WHO even learned about the new disease, with one passing its findings to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. And it is clear from early cases involving infected medical workers and family members that human transmission was known about well before such critical information was shared beyond its borders. Bear in mind that modelling experts suggest the number of global cases could have been cut by 95% if China had moved to contain the disease three weeks earlier instead of pressing ahead with New Year festivities that involve the biggest annual migration of humans on the planet.

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By Ian Birrell

Nor is there any sign yet of an animal host for natural zoonotic transmission. So the second, profoundly-disturbing question raised by this issue is to ask why leading scientists and their funding bodies effectively colluded with China to stifle public debate over a possible laboratory cause of this pandemic — aided by swathes of the news media, leading science journals, science administrators and most of the Left that seemed to loathe Trump more than a horribly repressive Chinese dictatorship.

A series of email conversations have emerged through freedom of information requests showing how key scientists held discussions that led to publication of influential papers dismissing “conspiracy theories” — despite several of those figures initially fearing that some kind of lab incident sparked this public health disaster. Participants included Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser; Francis Collins, head of the major US funding body that backed high-risk experiments into bat coronaviruses in Wuhan; Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of The Wellcome Trust; and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific officer.

The latest communications obtained by US Right To Know, a public health campaign group, disclose how James Le Duc, the former director of a top-level biosafety lab in Texas who had trained Wuhan researchers, told the ex-president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene last year that it was “certainly possible a lab accident was the source of the epidemic and I also agree that we can’t trust the Chinese government”.

Intriguingly, soon after the pandemic erupted, Le Duc wrote to Yuan Zhiming, head of biosafety at Wuhan Institute of Virology and its most senior Communist party official, with a barrage of questions about samples, security, inventories and handling of live viruses. These included asking about disgruntled employees with access to coronavirus stocks, signs of unusual illnesses among staff, team members visiting the wildlife market and if anyone was “conducting gain of function research, recombination studies or any other studies that may have resulted in the creation of the nCoV [novel coronavirus]”?  Le Duc said he was being peppered with questions from “senior officials and major reputable papers” and stressed the need to “aggressively address these rumours and presumably false accusations quickly and provide definitive, honest information to counter misinformation”.

Instead, China built a wall of lies and obfuscation. The utter failure of the Western scientific establishment to follow evidence wherever it led — whether for personal, political or financial reasons — helped impede investigations and, given their lack of transparency, duped the public at a time when we need trust in our political and scientific leaders. Little wonder Gilles Demaneuf, a member of the Drastic team of researchers that winkled out critical evidence to challenge China’s narrative, argues the response would have been far tougher if the pandemic had emerged elsewhere. “It would be deemed unacceptable if it was in Sierra Leone or Pakistan, so why should it be different with China,” he asked.

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The most dramatic Drastic revelation came two months ago with details of a 2018 submission to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by EcoHealth Alliance — the New York-based body headed by Peter Daszak, the controversial British scientist who has led efforts to dampen talk of lab leaks. It sought $14.2m for work with his long-term collaborators in Wuhan on a scheme to insert rare cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses collected in the field, then conduct experiments on live bats. This particular request — supposedly aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses” — was rejected on risk grounds. Curiously, there has been fierce debate over the furin cleavage site on SARS-CoV-2, a feature not found on similar types of coronavirus that allows it to enter so efficiently into human cells.

Two years on, it remains impossible to prove the cause of this catastrophe. The Communist regime led by President Xi Jinping should be a pariah for blocking investigations to discover the cause of this cruel disease given the terrible impact on the planet (and indeed for the crimes against humanity being inflicted on Muslim minorities in Xinjiang). Instead, it is preparing for another parade of its power with a global showcase as host of the Winter Olympics. Meanwhile we see how the WHO still kowtows to Beijing, skipping the use of ‘Xi’ when rifling through the Greek alphabet to name the latest variant of the virus ‘Omicron’ in deference to China’s leader. This symbolises how as wave after wave of this mutating virus washes over the world, there seems still the most astonishing global complacency over Beijing’s duplicitous actions that, regardless of the origins, have led to millions of fatalities.

This research, carried out in labs that did not have maximum level of biosafety, was increasing the infectivity of laboratory-created diseases by constructing chimeric coronaviruses — despite strong denial of such practices by the key Chinese scientists. And the bio-engineering was being funded by United States taxpayers — channelled through a charity run by a British scientist — despite similar denials from America’s most senior public health officials that they supported such science fiction activities in Chinese labs.

The details have been confirmed by the latest batch of documents emerging under US freedom of information rules — which unlike in Britain, actually assist attempts to break through walls of official obfuscation. The Intercept obtained 900 pages of documents detailing two research grants in 2014 and 2019 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance. This is the charity headed by Peter Daszak, the controversial Briton who led efforts to squash “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab incident after spending years hunting viruses with Shi Zhengli, the now-famous “Batwoman” expert at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Some of these grant details have emerged previously — but these documents include the original proposals along with project updates, so significantly flesh out what we knew. They highlight how US funding bodies outsourced risky gain-of-function research to China, even over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017 when it was banned in their own nation. They also show, with new clarity, the kind of work taking place in secretive Wuhan labs. These disclosures fuel the mystery over the pandemic origins, while also sparking fresh concerns over top scientists in both China and the West who sought to suppress inquiries into the lab leak hypothesis.

A $3.1m grant, according to the documents, was awarded to understand “the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” through screening thousands of samples collected from the nocturnal creatures. This included a chunk of funding worth $599,000 for WIV. Bear in mind that three months ago, Shi, director of its Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, angrily protested over the world “pouring filth on an innocent scientist” when emphatically refuting that they carried out gain-of-function work. “My lab has never conducted or co-operated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses” she told the New York Times.

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According to NIH “the term gain-of-function research describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent”. Analysis of these papers show US funds supported construction of new chimeric Sars-related coronaviruses, which combined a spike gene from one with genetic material from another — and then showed the resulting creation could infect human cells and mice engineered to display human-type receptors on their cells.

One new virus had increased pathogenicity over the original virus and three new viruses increased viral load in lung tissues up to ten thousandfold, which is most definitely “enhanced activity.” As scientists pointed out to me, these results demonstrated increased pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanised mouse models. And similar construction work was proposed to be done with another type of deadly pathogen — the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, which first flared up in Jordan nine years ago after spilling over from camels and has since cropped up in 27 countries, causing 858 deaths.

So yet again it seems Shi — probably under intense pressure from the Communist regime — has been manipulating not just bat viruses but the truth over her lab’s activities. Just like when she claimed a database containing 22,000 virus sequences and samples was taken offline due to hacking in the pandemic when it disappeared on September 12, 2019 — several weeks before infections emerged in Wuhan and months before global attention turned on her lab. Or when the name of the most closely-related virus to Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — was changed in a key scientific paper, thus masking ties to three miners who died in 2012 from a strange respiratory condition while clearing out a copper mine in southern China.

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Yet she is not the only key player in this drama telling porkies. Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser, insisted earlier this year that his country “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”. His stance led to a furious clash in Congress with Senator Rand Paul, who gleefully tweeted after The Intercept published its article on the papers: “Surprise surprise – Fauci lied again. And I was right about his agency funding novel coronavirus research at Wuhan.”

Paul was backed by Richard Ebright, the bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, who has long been a fierce critic of such work since he argues that the risks of creating new diseases in laboratories vastly outweigh any potential benefits. “The documents make it clear that assertions by Anthony Fauci and the NIH Director, Francis Collins that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” he said.

There are many fascinating nuggets in these papers such as discussion  of isolating coronaviruses using “transformed bat cell lines” from nine different species. “We have used these for virus isolation, infection assays and receptor molecule gene cloning.” Monali Rahalkar, an Indian microbiologist, said it was clear after combing through the details how such collaborative research could lead to something such as Sars-Cov-2. “And these are just two projects,” she said. “There were other projects and additionally the ones going on in China sponsored by their government.”

Buried in the documents are two more intriguing details. First, the experimental work creating mutant chimeric coronaviruses was carried out at WIV’s biosafety level 2 lab and then the work analysing them in humanised mice performed at the biosafety level 3 Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, not at the new maximum level 4 WIV lab built with French assistance. The cluster of labs at the university hospital, incidentally, includes a breeding centre that created at least 1,000 types of genetically engineered animals from mice to monkeys. So this means the details in the papers accord with a previous statement by Shi that their coronavirus research is “conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories” — although a level 2 lab has, some say, barely higher safety standards than a dental clinic and certainly few safeguards against an lethal airborne virus.

Yet this is where the puzzle intensifies. For six months ago David Asher, who led State Department investigations into the origins, told a Washington seminar the first “known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be Covid’ were three people who fell sick at a BSL 3 lab within a week of each other.

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“There is a possibility it was influenza,” he said. “But I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in a hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything with the coronavirus. That’s highly hard to believe. From that point forward, it certainly seemed to have started to spread within their community.”

Second, while Daszak has been condemning supposed conspiracy theories and defending his friends in China with whom he has collected thousands of samples, his own charity was pointing out the major risk of accidental infection faced by researchers when collecting such specimens in a project he led. “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled. There is also some risk of exposure to pathogens …while handling bats, civets, rodents or other animals, their blood samples or their excreta.”

It is, at last, largely accepted that there are two plausible theories behind this public health catastrophe, so perhaps these revelations have more political than scientific consequence. Even Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish food scientist who led the dismal World Health Organisation study trip to Wuhan earlier this year, recently admitted the possibility that a field incident sparked the pandemic was “a likely hypothesis”.

He told a documentary there might have been “human error” somewhere but this could not be admitted inside China’s repressive autocracy. “The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect. Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?” The engima has not been cracked but these are small steps forward in the search for the pandemic origins.

The clandestine involvement of Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance charity, was exposed in a batch of emails obtained by US Right To Know. This tenacious body has played an important role in opening up global debate on the pandemic’s origins, chipping away with freedom of information requests to draw out crumbs of evidence exposing attempts by leading scientific figures to shut down talk of any lab-related incident. And the more we discover from such efforts, the murkier the events early last year seem to appear.

The investigative body’s most recent cache of documents — published this week — involve emails obtained from Ohio State University virologist Shan-Lu Liu. They reveal a senior Chinese researcher was infected with Covid-19 in a leading Beijing virology laboratory soon after the Wuhan outbreak, highlighting the risks of inadvertent laboratory transmission. They also suggest that, according to Prof Liu, WIV “has many bat samples not yet worked out or results published”.

Yet perhaps most significantly, the emails from early last year expose yet again how key science journals, supposed to promote unfettered debate among experts, instead pushed the idea that anyone questioning the notion of natural transmission from animals was a wild-eyed conspiracy nut. There has been alarm over The Lancet, along with the likes of Nature and Scientific American, for their roles in inflaming such myopic viewpoints, sparking concern over the Chinese ties of their corporate owners. Such fears are heightened when even Peter Ben Embarek, head of the World Health Organisation’s patsy study into the origins, suddenly turns round — as he did yesterday — and says Patient Zero in the pandemic may be a worker at a Wuhan laboratory after all.

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But these latest emails provoke serious questions over another influential journal, Emerging Microbes & Infections, which is printed by Taylor & Francis, the blue-chip British publisher with roots stretching back to the eighteenth century.

Last February, this journal published a widely-cited commentary by four US-based scientists under the title: “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of Sars-CoV-2.” The newly obtained emails show the article was “invited” by Shan Lu, a professor in Massachusetts who co-edits the journal. Later, Prof Liu mentions comments and changes suggested by Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist nicknamed “Batwoman” whose research was backed by Daszak. The pair found scores of Sars-like viruses in the bat caves of southern China, hundreds of miles from Wuhan.

The commentary appears to be carefully crafted to skirt around vexatious issues that might raise concerns over possible laboratory links. For instance, the emails show that the title was changed from “Sars-CoV-2: no evidence of laboratory origin”. This was suggested by Prof Liu since “we cannot rule out the possibility that it comes from a bat virus leaked out of a lab”. Later, he acknowledged rumours that the “furin cleavage site” — which allows the spike protein to bind efficiently to cells in human tissues — “may be engineered”. Similarly, another author admitted this could be “a marker for where the virus came from — frightening to think it may have been engineered”. Strangely, despite these emails, there was no mention of this furin site in the final statement, although it is one of the most striking aspects of the new virus and not found in similar coronaviruses.

The correspondence also shows a trio of US-based experts discussing whether to mention the risks of working with contagious coronaviruses in the statement. One suggested they should emphasise that “although Sars-CoV-2 shows no evidence of laboratory origins, viruses with such great public health threats must be handled properly in the laboratory and properly regulated”. This appeared in the final version.)

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The journal’s Shanghai-based editorial office accepted the article within 12 hours. Such alacrity does not suggest the most rigorous peer review process, although one peer reviewer still hailed the “timely commentary” with a suggestion it must be published “right away”. Indeed, it’s curious that the newly obtained email chain shows editor Shan Lu telling two of the authors he would share a “secret” with them — that Taylor & Francis could become “very suspicious” when he pushed “a super fast review and accept (basically no review)”.

Their correspondence does not stop there. Linda Saif, another Ohio State University virologist, was asked to sign the commentary “to dispute some rumors”. She agreed by saying “I too feel strongly about denouncing this” — so strongly, in fact, that she also signed The Lancet commentary.

Another signatory was Lishan Su, a Chinese-born virologist then working at the same University of North Carolina as a prominent epidemiologist called Ralph Baric, who carried out hugely controversial research with Shi Zhengli that spliced a pair of coronaviruses to create a powerful chimeric version with potential to infect human airways.

Apologies for this blizzard of names, but bear with me. For the emails indicate that Baric was also consulted to review the Emerging Microbes & Infections statement before publication. Editor Shan Lu said, however, that they did not want to “appear that we are defending Ralph even though he did nothing wrong.” (Baric, incidentally, went on to sign a significant letter with 17 other prominent figures to Science three months ago, which helped change the dominant narrative by insisting “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable”.)

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But let’s return to that cutting-edge research by Baric and “Batwoman”. For another set of emails obtained by Buzzfeed have revealed that a copy of their paper — published in 2015 — was sent to Anthony Fauci, the leading US infectious diseases expert, at the end of January last year with a magazine article on how researchers were trying to unravel the pandemic origins that mentioned Shi’s work with Daszak. Fauci instantly circulated them around top US officials. He also contacted Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, who agreed to host a conference call the next day with eleven other experts. Lo and behold, within days some of these key figures had discounted previous strongly-held concerns about possible laboratory link — and then started attacking such “conspiracy theories” in journals, debates and on social media.

The dates of these events are intriguing. Five days after that conference call, Daszak started circulating the draft of the proposed Lancet statement — which was signed also by Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues. This was published on February 19. One week later, Emerging Microbes and Infections printed its own commentary adopting a similar standpoint. The following month, four of the five participants on the conference call published another important commentary in Nature — which Farrar later admitted he convened — stating firmly that they did not believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Why might a reputable British publisher act in such a manner? Well, it is worth noting that Emerging Microbes & Infections is published with a Chinese firm. It may not be the world’s best-known journal, but this commentary has been viewed 81,000 times and was the third most downloaded article last year for Taylor & Francis, a firm that publishes more than 2,500 academic journals. It’s also striking that members of the Emerging Microbes & Infections editorial board include a scientist who is a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and was second in command of the military team sent into Wuhan to respond to the crisis, as well as two scientists who sought to change the name of the new virus to distance it from China and a top public health official in Beijing involved in the World Health Organisation’s inquiries into the origins.

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Taylor & Francis did not respond to any of my queries on these issues. But on its website, it talks boldly of “enabling the latest academic thinking and discovery to be shared and built on”. Certainly it has pushed hard into the Chinese market — alongside its owner, the British-based exhibitions giant Informa — since opening an office in Shanghai in 2005. Indeed, the publisher has been criticised in the past for dropping dozens of journals from its offerings to Chinese libraries at the Communist regime’s request. The firm has denied bowing to censorship.

But it is hard to disagree with the conclusion of of Gary Ruskin, executive director of US Right To Know, on this latest twist in the origins saga: “The fact that Emerging Microbes & Infections solicited the commentary denying lab engineering of Sars-CoV-2, and expedited it with cursory review, suggests its editors may have intended to make a political point that was highly valuable to the Chinese government.”

So whose interests have the academic publishing sector and scientific establishment really been serving in this crisis? Sadly, it does not seem to have been always the noble ideal of furthering the global quest for scientific knowledge, let alone pushing our understanding of the origins of this cruel pandemic.

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”. The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the world’s most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic’s origins. And it celebrated China’s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

Of course, over the past year newspapers across the world have fallen for the CCP’s distorted Covid-19 narrative. And there is no evidence to suggest that the CCP did put pressure on the Times. But when it came to the lab leak debate, the Times was relentless. Starting in early 2020, when little was known about the virus — and nothing about its origins — the Times adopted a stridently anti-lab leak stance. In its first report on the topic, a February 17, 2020 article covering comments made by Sen. Tom Cotton, the Times stigmatised lab leak as a “fringe theory”. Once the story was published, its reporter took to Twitter to describe it as “the kind of conspiracy once reserved for the tinfoil hatters”.

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Only one week prior, another outlet made strikingly similar claims. In an editorial, the CCP-owned China Daily thundered that Cotton’s decision to spread “malicious rumors” shows “how irresponsible some are in their haste to attack China”. The Times, echoing China Daily, also cast the lab leak hypothesis as a “rumor”.

Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda. In February 2020, it gave a platform to zoologist Peter Daszak, publishing an opinion piece by him which claimed that the pandemic was caused by “road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development”. Daszak argued that “discovering and sequencing” viruses like Covid-19 in labs like the one in Wuhan should be a priority.

The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest. Crucially, there was no mention of this when a reporter interviewed Daszak this February, following his return from a heavily criticised WHO investigation into the virus’s origins. (Danszak later recused himself from the investigation because of the conflict of interest.)

But the Times also never revealed that Daszak was a favoured source for another outlet: China Daily. The state-owned media organisation, along with Xinhua and sister outlet Global Times, repeatedly quoted Daszak to assure readers of China’s full cooperation in the search for the virus’s origins — and to discredit the possibility of a lab leak.

In fact, the Times appears to have been so enthusiastic in its attempts to discredit the lab leak hypothesis that Chinese propaganda outlets promoted its reporting on social media. In April 2020, for instance, the Times published an article claiming the Trump Administration’s investigation into a lab leak “has echoes of the Bush administration’s 2002 push for assessments saying that Iraq had weapons of mass of destruction.” Within minutes, a China Daily columnist retweeted the story and parroted its central claim.

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But why would the Times stake its credibility on a position that had no evidence behind it, and one that, as we are now discovering, looks increasingly unlikely? Was it simply a knee-jerk response by a liberal outlet to President Trump’s endorsement of the lab leak hypothesis at the time? Perhaps — but I suspect the answer is more complicated than that. Researching and writing my new book, I discovered that the Times has a dark history of inadvertently helping authoritarian regimes with its reporting, including the Nazis, the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro.

In the case of China, this appears true to an alarming degree. For over a decade, the Times has nurtured a special relationship with the CCP — though we can only speculate as to whether this influenced its editorial output. Still, the Times certainly appeared unconcerned about the appearance of impropriety as it took millions of dollars from Chinese propaganda outlets, most prominently China Daily. In exchange for this badly needed revenue, the Times has published hundreds of “advertorials” written by Chinese propaganda outlets, including China Daily, which promote CCP messaging on the most serious topics, such as a double-page spread on the hotly contested Diaoyu Islands brazenly titled: “Diaoyu Islands Belong to China”.

But the paper’s advertising relationship with Chinese state outlets is only the visible part of the iceberg. In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine. “The appetite for New York Times journalism in Chinese has never been stronger,” a company press release stated at the time.

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In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Times learned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation for an unfavourable article on the family finances of China’s outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao. The Times set out on a year-long “lobbying” effort to restore coverage that included meetings with Xinhua, the parent of China Daily.

Today, however, just as the tide is turning on the lab leak debate, so too is the Times’s approach to the subject. Last summer, the Times abruptly ended its advertising relationship with Chinese state media outlets and scrubbed all trace of the advertorials from its archive. And in recent months, it has published a handful of articles quoting scientists who believe we should take seriously the prospect of a lab leak.

But does this excuse the paper’s behaviour at the start of the pandemic?

Of course, the New York Times, like so many industry-leading corporations, should be expected to make mistakes. But unlike other big businesses, this one is entrusted with shaping our reality — especially on murky issues as critical as the origins of a pandemic that claimed four million lives. Only time will tell whether the lab leak hypothesis is true or false. But whatever the result, what a tragedy it would be if the Times’s coverage delayed that verdict.

Something like a pandemic, for instance. A hundred years ago, in 2019, the idea that the world would soon be brought to a standstill by a virus would have seemed like a science fiction movie. Sure, a few Cassandras in the infectious disease community might have warned against it, but for most of us, it was just not a serious consideration.

But now we have had an obvious corrective to that attitude. Pandemics might be unlikely in any given year, but if there’s only a 1% chance per year of something terrible happening, it’ll probably happen in your lifetime.

Only preparing for another pandemic, however, would be getting ready to fight the last war. We need to think about what other horrible disasters we might expect in the coming decades. Luckily, last week, a think tank called the Centre for Long-Term Resilience released a report into the most likely extreme risks that humanity faces, and what Britain in particular can do to prepare for them.

Covid-19 has cost millions of lives and tens of trillions of dollars so far — but it could have been a lot worse. The extreme risks that the report is talking about range from those that kill 10% or more of the total human population, to those that kill every last one of us. And it suggests that the two most likely causes of a disaster of this magnitude are bioengineered pathogens, and artificial intelligence.

Even now, that might sound like science fiction, especially the idea of AI. We picture AI going wrong as being like The Terminator: an intelligence achieving consciousness and rebelling against its masters. But that’s not what we ought to worry about, and to illustrate that, I want to tell you about a marvellous little paper published in 2018. It described building AIs through digital evolution.

Digital evolution is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of machine-learning programs are asked to come up with solutions to some problem or other; then the ones that do best at solving that problem are “bred”, copied repeatedly with small, random variations. Then those new copies try to solve the problem, and the ones that do best are again bred, and so on, for thousands of generations. It’s exactly the same process, of replication, variation and competition, as biological, “real”, evolution.

The paper was basically a series of anecdotes about how that process had gone wrong in surprising ways. In each one, essentially, the AIs had learnt to game the system, often with disastrous results.

For instance, one task involved locomotion, featuring a 3D simulated world with little 3D avatars. The avatars were told to travel from point A to point B as quickly as possible, the programmers wanting the system to discover clever ways of travelling: would it breed snake-like belly-slithering? Hopping like a kangaroo?

But what actually happened was that, “instead of inventing clever limbs or snake-like motions that could push them along (as was hoped for), the creatures evolved to become tall and rigid. When simulated, they would fall over.” Essentially, it created a very tall tower with a weight on the end, standing on point A. When the simulation started, the tower fell over in the direction of point B. It had achieved the task, but … not exactly how its creators hoped.

There were other, rather scarier ones. One was given some text files, and told to create new text files as similar as possible to the originals. The various algorithms were trying, and doing moderately well, when suddenly lots of them started returning perfect scores all at once — because one algorithm had realised that if it deleted the target files, it (and any other algorithm) could just hand in a blank sheet for a 100% score.

And one was supposed to play a version of noughts and crosses on an infinitely large board. But it realised that if it played a move hundreds of billions of squares away from the centre, its opponents would have to try to represent a board billions of squares across in its memory: they couldn’t do that, and crashed, so the cheating algorithm was declared the winner.

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The point is that when you give an AI a goal, it will try to achieve exactly that goal. Not what you wanted it to do; not what any halfwit would obviously understand you meant it to do. Just what you tell it to do.

When people worry about AI going wrong in disastrous ways, that’s what they’re worrying about. Not about The Terminator; not about AI “going rogue”. They worry about AI doing exactly what you told it to do, and being extremely good at doing what you told it to do, when “what you told it to do” is not what you actually wanted.

These AIs were just toys; when they go wrong, it’s funny. But if you have a much more powerful AI, with commensurately greater responsibilities — running a power grid, for instance,  driving vehicles or commanding military ordnance — it would be less comical. When you have a really, really powerful AI, it could be disastrous. In an illustrative but perhaps unrealistic example, if you gave an enormously powerful AI the goal of “ridding the world population of cancer”, it might come to realise that biochemistry is difficult but that hacking the nuclear codes of ex-Soviet states is quite easy, and a world without humans is a world without humans with cancer. You might think you could just switch them off, but since the AI would know it would be less likely to achieve its goal if it was switched off, you might find that it resisted your efforts to do so.

The Centre for Long-Term Resilience report, co-authored by Toby Ord, a professor at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and the author of a marvellous book about existential risks, argues that right now we have a rare opportunity. After the Second World War, both the world and Britain took advantage of the disaster to build new institutions. In the UK, we created the NHS, and a comprehensive welfare state based around a system of national insurance. Worldwide, we helped build things like the World Bank, the UN, the International Monetary Fund. This was possible, they argue, because the scale of the recent tragedy was fresh in people’s minds, and there was a willingness to take drastic, difficult steps to preserve long-term peace and stability.

Now, they argue, we have the opportunity to build similarly vital new institutions in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. There will, Ord et al hope, be enough public will now to get ready for the next disaster, even though government and democracy in general is not brilliant at thinking about long-term risks. The risk, of course, is that we will prepare brilliantly for the thing that has already happened, getting ready to fight the last war, and Ord says “We need to look beyond the next coronavirus.”

A few years ago I wrote a book which was (partly) about existential risk. The people I spoke to said, just as Ord et al’s report does, that the two things  most likely to cause the human species to go extinct are 1) bioengineered pandemics and 2) artificial intelligence. (Climate change and nuclear weapons are very likely to cause awful disasters, but less so to literally drive us extinct.)

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The world shouldn’t need too much convincing of the possibility of a bioengineered pandemic, not least because there is growing support for the “lab leak” hypothesis. But even after Covid, it may be that AI seems too much like science fiction. People are happy to accept that it will cause near-term problems, like algorithmic bias, but the idea that it could go really, disastrously badly wrong in future is harder to swallow.

But we should have learnt from the pandemic that it is worth preparing for unlikely, but plausible, disasters, especially as AI researchers don’t think it’s that unlikely. Surveys in 2014 and 2016 asked AI researchers when they thought the first “human-level” AI — an AI capable of doing all the intellectual tasks that humans can do — will be built. The median guess was that there’s a 50% chance by 2050 and a 90% chance by 2075. And what was really interesting was that those same researchers thought there was about a one in six chance that when true AI does arrive, the outcome will be “extremely bad (existential catastrophe)”. That is: everybody dead.

I’m faintly sceptical of the surveys — only about a third of people responded to them, and they may not be representative of AI researchers in general — but even if the results are off by an order of magnitude, it means that AI experts think there’s a greater than 1% chance that the world will be devastated by AI in my children’s lifetimes. Certainly I spoke to several AI researchers who thought it was worth worrying about.

Ord et al have some simple prescriptions for how to be ready for the next disaster. On future pandemics, they suggest creating a national body dedicated to monitoring and preparing for biological threats; and they suggest improving “metagenomics”, sequencing technology which takes a sample from a patient and sequences the DNA of every organism in it, before comparing it to a database of known pathogens. If it detects a dangerous or unknown one, it will alert the medical staff. The UK’s world-dominant position in sequencing puts us in a powerful position here.

And for AI they make some relatively commonsense suggestions, like investing in AI safety R&D and monitoring, bringing more expertise into government, and (and I have to say this does seem very wise) keeping AI systems out of the nuclear “command, control and communication” chain.

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More generally, they suggest setting up bodies to consider long-term extreme risks to the UK and the world, such as a Chief Risk Officer and a National Extreme Risk Institute, to think about these things on a longer timescale than the democratic cycle allows. All their ideas add up to less than £50 million a year, while in contrast the pandemic has cost the UK about £300 billion so far; 6,000 times as much. If there’s even a small chance of reducing the impact of future disasters, it is a worthwhile bet to make.

My own feeling is that they could do more to bring in the UK’s almost unrivalled expertise on this into government. Ord and his colleagues at FHI, such as the philosopher and AI researcher Nick Bostrom, are just one of several groups here who focus on the long-term future of humanity. Only the US has access to anything like as much knowledge. Dominic Cummings, for all his many faults, seemed to realise this.

As Ord et al say: there’s a window of opportunity to do this stuff now, while it’s all fresh in our minds.

A noughts-and-crosses-playing AI that makes its opponents crash is, as I say, kind of funny. But at a fundamental level, a much more powerful AI that can command military theatres or civil engineering projects will be similar: it will only care about the things we explicitly tell it to care about. I don’t think it’s silly science fiction to worry about it, or about bioengineered pandemics. We have a chance, over the next year or so, to make those disasters a little bit less likely. We should take it.