Where did it come from? Credit: Kate Geraghty/The Sydney Morning Herald/Getty
Last autumn, American intelligence agencies reported to the White House that they remain divided on whether the pandemic started naturally or was the result of a lab accident. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident,” the report concluded. At least among foreign policy experts, the lab-leak theory is no longer dismissed out of hand.
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 Money would be withdrawn and careers shuttered; it would be devastating.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.”
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.
“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.
Paul D. Thacker is an award-winning reporter and former investigator for the United States Senate where he led probes of corruption in science and medicine.
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SubscribeThe “virology movement” finally got its provoked pandemic outbreak after more than 20 years of trying to get attention for its cause, like so many other lobbying movements. Now that it has happened, and it looks like it came about through “gain of function” laboratory experiments, the credibility of virological research is at stake. To make matters worse, scientists should not be making policy decisions or telling people how to live their lives, much less giving advice on closing down economies. They lack the ability to differentiate and consider the collateral damage involved, and they are not held accountable for their actions. This was a very poor decision making process by a political establishment that failed to do its job of scrutinizing experts in the field or seeking a second opinions on the measures to be imposed. Honest science has been undermined, and good, solid debate has been suppressed by factions of specialists who have become dogmatic, and by the media who have played along from the very beginning. When will people wake up? Probably never.
I’m honestly baffled as to how anyone would be stupid enough to believe that a virus coincidentally appeared in a market instead of the virology facility a handful of miles away.
It certainly doesn’t accord with the principle of Occam’s razor.
I know. It’s such desperately obvious deflection, and it’s persistently done by bad actors in the science sector (reminds me of diehard Remainers still fighting for us to rejoin).
I saw these articles with some surprise and read the reasoning, and it didn’t sound convincing to me – they seemed to leap from initial points to their conclusion with no connecting logic.
I’d like to see these bad science actors revealed and put in metaphorical stocks for the charlatans they are.
Has the NYT rushed into print to report research by K. Balamurali et al (‘MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site’) suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus contains ‘proprietary (i.e. patented) sequences’?
Tell us more!
Hi Lesley, apologies for this late response. Computer problems. Perhaps the quickest reply is to point you to Jessica Rose’s Substack post entitled: ‘It does incorporate into human DNA. And it’s probably messing up embryogenesis’ (link below – if permitted), in which she discusses the Balamurali paper, which found 100% correlations between SARS-CoV-2 sequences and earlier patents held by Moderna et al, and a second paper by Alden et al which speaks to how mRNA reverse transcribes into the DNA of liver cells within six hours of insertion/injection.
Link >> https://jessicar.substack.com/p/it-does-incorporate-into-human-dna?r=520ll&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&s=r
Thanks will have a look!
Thanks, we need more frank journalism like this. For a brilliant explanation of the lab leak , this interview with Matt Ridley, co-author with Alison Chan, is perfect:
https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/the-case-for-the-lab-leak-theory/
The kind of ‘science propaganda’ which this article highlights emanating from what were once respected media sources is proving very corrosive to public trust. I no longer respect BBC journalism, for instance, even though I am a subscriber (alright, I admit it’s a state-enforced subscription)!
“Science….can be co-opted by politics and even used as an instrument of state propaganda”
I think we have seen little last for the last 2 years.
I asked my cat (she’s not the brightest) where did the virus come from. Her response “the Wuhan lab, stupid”. now that is definitive.
“Science reporters, unlike political reporters, have little innate skepticism of their sources’ motives,”
This is true, sad and also rather ironic, when one considers the role of skepticism in the scientific method itself. I say ‘method’ rather than institutional science as it is practised today.
And what about the continuing scandal around the rubbishing of ivermectin both as a prophylactic and treatment against the virus? Outrageous that we were and are denied access to this drug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfyOihhAD4A
‘Outrageous’ is one way of putting it. ‘Criminal’ is another.
Suppressing information about, and outright forbidding distribution of, promising early treatments is something like a war crime, or genocide. There is no term I can think of that expresses the enormity of this obscenity. Millions of people are dead and millions more permanently injured; the world has been BROKEN by the response to this pandemic. What if early treatment had been vigorously pursued?
New reports that it was given to the Queen when she got COVID. Can’t validate it though.
Given the size of the scientific enterprise at the disposal of the CCP, if the CCP wanted to determine the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus AND that information was not too embarrassing to the CCP we would have it now in the West. The fact that no good animal vector evidence exists implies that all the CCP actions to block Western scientists had an intention to hide some embarrassing fact. Barring leaked, credible, secret Chinese research docs we likely will never know the virus source with any certainty so we will need to apply Occam’s Razor – another dangerous virus release from a poorly run Chinese facility.
Exactly. But it’s amazing how highly credentialed trained scientists refuse to apply Occam’s Razor to what is really a very simple set of circumstances.
Your point shows that scientific research in biology has become very corrupted, though we already knew that in the climate change science sector.
I would phrase the issues as follows. Namely that the “ScienceTM”, the media and the government agencies (including people such as Collins and Fauci who should have a good deal more common sense) have failed the simplest test of good detective work. In other words, if you find somebody’s wife murdered at home (or even not at home), the most likely and first suspect is the husband or another family member. The same goes for the origins of SARS-CoV2. When a pandemic/epidemic originates in the very close vicinity of a lab working on Corona viruses and has a collection of thousands of infected bats, the likelihood that the outbreak originated in the lab by a lab leak is very high indeed. The same would be true if the first cases of some other viral infection just happened to occur in Frederick Maryland – then the most likely suspect would be USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. As for gain of function research, we know that the Wuhan lab was conducting such research. Whether NIH funded this research directly or indirectly is immaterial. NIH should have known better given that all funding moneys to a lab are co-mingled. In other words, it wouldn’t have mattered what research NIH was funding, and it may have been completely innocuous, the fact that the lab itself was conducting gain-of-function research, that they were passaging coronaviruses through humanized mice, and on top of that there was a Chinese military component associated with the Wuhan lab, it follows that the most likely and simplest explanation is a lab leak. And it’s not like lab leaks don’t occur, especially when most of the lab was operating under P2 conditions when these should have been P4 ones.
Too many science journalists see their role as being to report for science, not about science. In other words, it is a tribal matter for them. Unfortunately the truth is only a secondary consideration in these circumstances.
Obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that it was a laboratory accident. The research originated in America but was so controversial because it involved ethnic minorities, that it could not continue there. It was handed over to the research laboratory in Wuhan where it could secretly continue. That laboratory was funded by the French and originally operated by the Americans. Because of this it had a grounding in safety procedures which were thought to still be in place. One might note that the Principle was replaced some months before this virus became known. One wonders whether there was any connection. Probably there was and the accident actually happened a while before it became known outside the laboratory. Obviously this was such a large, widespread and damaging problem to so many individuals and organisations that it had to be kept quiet. There would have been some very widespread ramifications if the history of the research and reasons for its continuation were to become common knowledge. We live in a complicated world and we are where we are. Periodically there will be odd emergencies such as the pandemic and now we have Putin who is terminally ill and stuffed full of steroids surrounded by pathetic sycophants. He looks ill and I’m sure any doctor would agree his face has the hallmarks of steroid effects.
It is increasingly difficult to perceive the New York Times as a credible journal. It fits stories to its predefined narrative.
Very good article, which does weaken the credibility of those new preprints.
There is one point still to consider: The Chinese article reports that two different COVID strains were found at the market. The other preprints make the point that this would require two overspill events, which makes it less likely that the cause was a laboratory leak. It also makes it less likely that the source was far away, since that would require two transport events to get it to the market.
We clearly do not know what happened, and it would indeed take a thorough investigation to try to find out. Regrettably all the crucial information is under the control of the Chinese authorities, and they have even more to lose and less credibility than the international virology community. In fact, one could wonder if a Chinese article would deliberately downplay the likelihood of transmission within the market, because they want to keep open the possibility of the disease emerging far away from China, e.g. in Laos or in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
But do we trust a Chinese article in the first place.
Not necessarily, that is the problem. But we cannot have it both ways. The preprints used the Chinese data to conclude the evidence pointed to the market, but are being blamed for going against the conclusions of the original ChInese authors. If we chose to rely on the Chinese conclusions, we can hardly at the same time refuse to believe their data.
With China though (as opposed to countries with democracies and relative freedom of press – Canada obviously excluded), it is reasonable and logical to believe things critical of the government stance, as opposed to those views parroting the government stance.
Just because the government is totally untrustworthy it is not necessarily wrong *every* time – just like just because you are paranoid it does not mean some of your enemies are not real. My guess is that they would have slapped the lid on, pulled the databases off line, etc. just beause they would not risk anything that might possibly make them look bad – without even knowing or caring if there was anything there to find. There might be a lot of damning evidence for a lab leak, or proof of spreading through the wet market, or nothing at all, but since they would likely hide it anyway there is no way of knowing.
Your point is well made. I would like to know from where it came, because it is important for prevention of new/similar outbreaks. I’m not interested in any sort of “blame-game” though, and this is where the problem arises, for as long as the Chinese government resists any true investigation suspicions will always remain, especially among those who are interested in playing the “blame-game”.
The ‘blame game’ to you, is ‘the truth’ for many others. Unless you know the truth, you cannot mitigate against this happening again. Logic 101.
You think that the Chinese would be more truthful if somehow “blame” was not on the table?
I actually don’t know, but it might be worth a try.
The fact is that just as in a murder investigation where the chief suspect is the spouse, the same is true here. The chief suspect is the Wuhan lab until proven otherwise. That is by far the simplest explanation given that they were working on corona viruses, had a collection of 1000s of infected bats, were passaging those viruses using humanized mice, and were conducting gain-of-function research. As for the NIH involvement, it makes no difference whether the NIH grant was for gain-of-function research or not, because all incoming funding is co-mingled, and hence can and will be used for all projects within the lab. In addition, we also know that there was a military component present in the Wuhan lab. So, from my perspective, anybody who comes up with some alternative, far-fangled, complicated explanation involving natural transmission in the wild or in the Wuhan wet market displays a complete and total lack of common sense and street smarts. Indeed, it defies belief how apparently credentialed people can fall for some rubbish, unless those people are involved in some sort of cover-up of their prior activities.
Whether the virus escaped from a lab, or from a wet market, China is equally to blame. Actually, I can see a case for why the latter is worse: wet markets, with live and wild animals, are highly hazardous, and highly unnecessary – and an easily remedied situation.
This is simply a question. i realize it’s been asserted that wet markets are highly hazardous. Do we really know this and is there any actual real evidence that they are indeed hazardous. That they are inhumane towards the animals is not in question.
I am not an expert, but I suppose that intermingling peoples and animals, hitherto separated, is how communicable diseases get transferred. Whether it’s the conquistadors in Americas, zoos, or markets.
Well, this explains the BBC podcast earlier this week which confidently asserted that it was now definitely proven that it was the wet market wot done it.
I was confused at the time, having not much more recently listened to another excellent podcast with Matt Ridley.
Needless to say, the BBC programme did not mention the preprint.
While it is very likely true that lockdown was not the best policy response to the first wave, it was an understandable reaction to the presence of a new virus that many feared was an artificial pathogen that would kill a significant proportion of our population.
The scandal here is the suppression and vilification of actors that raised contradictory opinions: the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration; the proponents of lab leak theory; the voices saying that vaccines would not suppress virus spread, that lockdown was not associated with a reduced overall death rate, that the virus would naturally become more infectious but less deadly, that school closure would cause more harm than good and that rudimentary cloth and paper masks were unlikely to reduce viral spread.
The censorship (or resulting self-censorship) caused by the actions of OFCOM, newspaper regulators, and social media owners is very concerning.
So many YouTubers announced they were limiting their comments as they feared cancellation or were leaving the platform because of this issue. So many of these opinions have turned out to be broadly correct -although some remain controversial. Ivor Cummings and Professor Sunetra Gupta are good examples of such suppressed voices. Their views can still be found on uncensored platforms.
Important piece, although I take issue with one point at the outset:
“But this virus has now killed over 6,000,000 people across the planet”.
No, 6m have died with Covid, not of Covid. Those who have died with it have an average of four co-morbidities.
That’s why it’s reasonable to state the most damaging effects of the pandemic has not been the virus but the policy response to it: lockdowns and mass vaccinations, which will have huge long term impacts.
And that’s why the fact that it originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and that there is an attempt to deny this – is so important.
Something is not right. At all.
Anyone interested the lab leak evidence, I recommended Joe Rogan episode #1640 with Josh Rogin.
You guys are misusing poor Occam. His razor means that if you have two equally good, comprehensive explanations, you should prefer the simplest. It does not mean you should jump to conclusions on the basis of a single striking coincidence when you do not know what happened. It is certainly important evidence that the outbreak happened to be in Wuhan. It is also important evidence that other outbreaks – recently – have been through direct animal-human transfer, that the first cluster was around the market, etc. My personal guess is about 5:1 against the lab hypothesis. Your mileage may vary, but you can hardly get out of the fact that we do not know and there are at least two plausible alternatives.
Yeah, a lab in a secretive autocratic country with no freedom of press, studying coronaviruses with some dodgy funding, gain of function research and questionable safety protocols – next to a wet market. It must be the wet market.
Given the documented history of leaks from labs and bio weapons facilities, it seemed unreasonable to dismiss, as was done, a possible leak from the very start. And given instances of cover ups that were later exposed, it also seems unreasonable now.
The original dismissal was indeed unreasonable. It did not help the cause that it was championed by known conspiracy theorists, or that people (probably deliberately) were blurring the distinction between a lab accident, a bioweapon development accident, and a bioweapon release. But still. My current estaimate is about 5:1 against the lab leak, and it has been higher. That is not dismissing it.