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The theory that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab was considered a debunked conspiracy theory, but some experts are revisiting it amid calls for a new, more thorough investigation. Paul Thacker explains the dramatic U turn and the role of contemporary science journalism<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For most of 2020, the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, was treated as a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. Only conservative news media sympathetic to President Donald Trump and a few lonely reports dared suggest otherwise. But that all changed in the early months of 2021, and today most outlets across the political spectrum agree: the \u201clab leak\u201d scenario deserves serious investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understanding this dramatic U turn on arguably the most important question for preventing a future pandemic, and why it took nearly a year to happen, involves understanding contemporary science journalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Scientists and reporters contacted by The BMJ<\/em> say that objective consideration of covid-19\u2019s origins went awry early in the pandemic, as researchers who were funded to study viruses with pandemic potential launched a campaign labelling the lab leak hypothesis as a \u201cconspiracy theory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A leader in this campaign has been Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation given millions of dollars in grants by the US federal government to research viruses for pandemic preparedness.1<\/a> Over the years EcoHealth Alliance has subcontracted out its federally supported research to various scientists and groups, including around $600\u2009000 (\u00a3434\u2009000; \u20ac504\u2009000) to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.1<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after the pandemic began, Daszak effectively silenced debate over the possibility of a lab leak with a February 2020 statement in the Lancet<\/em>.2<\/a> \u201cWe stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin,\u201d said the letter, which listed Daszak as one of 27 coauthors. Daszak did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The BMJ<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s become a label you pin on something you don\u2019t agree with,\u201d says Nicholas Wade, a science writer who has worked at Nature<\/em>, Science<\/em>, and the New York Times<\/em>. \u201cIt\u2019s ridiculous, because the lab escape scenario invokes an accident, which is the opposite of a conspiracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the effort to brand serious consideration of a lab leak a \u201cconspiracy theory\u201d only ramped up. Filippa Lentzos, codirector of the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King\u2019s College, London, told the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, \u201cSome of the scientists in this area very quickly closed ranks.\u201d3<\/a> She added, \u201cThere were people that did not talk about this, because they feared for their careers. They feared for their grants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daszak had support. After he wrote an essay for the Guardian<\/em> in June 2020 attacking the former head of MI6 for saying that the pandemic could have \u201cstarted as an accident,\u201d Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and co-signer of the Lancet<\/em> letter, promoted Daszak\u2019s essay on Twitter, saying that Daszak was \u201calways worth reading.\u201d4<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Daszak\u2019s behind-the-scenes role in orchestrating the statement in the Lancet<\/em> came to light in November 2020 in emails obtained through freedom of information requests by the watchdog group US Right To Know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPlease note that this statement will not have EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person,\u201d wrote Daszak in a February email, while sending around a draft of the statement for signatories.5<\/a> In another email, Daszak considered removing his name from the statement \u201cso it has some distance from us and therefore doesn\u2019t work in a counterproductive way.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Several of the 27 scientists who signed the letter Daszak circulated did so using other professional affiliations and omitted reporting their ties to EcoHealth Alliance.3<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n For Richard Ebright, professor of molecular biology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a biosafety expert, scientific journals were complicit in helping to shout down any mention of a lab leak. \u201cThat means Nature<\/em>, Science<\/em>, and the Lancet<\/em>,\u201d he says. In recent months he and dozens of academics have signed several open letters rejecting conspiracy theory accusations and calling for an open investigation of the pandemic\u2019s origins.7<\/a>8<\/a>9<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s very clear at this time that the term \u2018conspiracy theory\u2019 is a useful term for defaming an idea you disagree with,\u201d says Ebright, referring to scientists and journalists who have wielded the term. \u201cThey have been successful until recently in selling that narrative to many in the media.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lancet<\/em>\u2019s editor in chief, Richard Horton, did not respond to repeated requests for comment but, after The BMJ<\/em> had sent him questions, the Lancet<\/em> expanded Daszak\u2019s conflicts of interest on the February statement and recused him from working on its task force looking into the pandemic\u2019s origin.10<\/a>11<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Lancet<\/em> letter ultimately helped to guide almost a year of reporting, as journalists helped to amplify Daszak\u2019s message and to silence scientific and public debate. \u201cWe\u2019re in the midst of the social media misinformation age, and these rumours and conspiracy theories have real consequences,\u201d Daszak told Science<\/em>.12<\/a> Months later in Nature<\/em>, he again criticised \u201cconspiracies\u201d that the virus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and complained about \u201cpolitically motivated organisations\u201d requesting his emails.13<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n That summer Scientific American<\/em>, one of the oldest and best known popular science magazines in America, published a complimentary profile of Daszak\u2019s colleague, Shi Zhengli, a centre director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been funded by EcoHealth Alliance.14<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology earned additional sympathetic reporting after the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) cancelled its grant to EcoHealth Alliance in April last year\u2014allegedly on President Trump\u2019s order\u2014because of its ties to Wuhan, a decision protested by 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies.15<\/a> (The NIH has subsequently awarded EcoHealth Alliance new funding.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Efforts to characterise the lab leak scenario as unworthy of serious consideration were far reaching, sometimes affecting reporting that had first appeared well before the covid-19 pandemic. For example, in March 2020 Nature Medicine<\/em> added an editor\u2019s note (\u201cScientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus\u201d) to a 2015 paper on the creation of a hybrid version of a SARS virus, co-written by Shi.16<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wade explains, \u201cScience journalists differ a lot from other journalists in that they are far less sceptical of their sources and they see their main role as simply to explain science to the public.\u201d This, he says, is why they began marching in unison behind Daszak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the end of 2020, just a handful of journalists had dared to seriously discuss the possibility of a lab leak. In September, Boston<\/em> magazine reported on a preprint that found the virus unlikely to have come from the Wuhan seafood market, as Daszak has argued, and that it seemed too well adapted to humans to have arisen naturally. However, the story failed to garner much attention, similarly to a little noticed investigative report by the Associated Press in December that exposed how the Chinese government was clamping down on research into covid-19\u2019s origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In January this year, New York<\/em> magazine ran a sprawling story detailing how the pandemic could have started with a leak from the lab in Wuhan. The hypothetical scenario: \u201cSARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist\u2019s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine.\u201d Scientists and their media allies swiftly criticised the article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But mainstream outlets from the New York Times<\/em> to the Washington Post<\/em> are now treating the lab leak hypothesis as a worthy question, one to be answered with a serious investigation. In a recent interview with the New York Times<\/em>, Shi denied that her lab was ever involved in \u201cgain of function\u201d experiments (box 1<\/a>) that enhance a virus\u2019s virulence. But the newspaper reported that her lab had been involved in experiments that altered the transmissibility of viruses, alongside interviews with scientists who said that far more transparency was necessary to determine the truth of SARS-CoV-2\u2019s origins.17<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two major events are probably responsible for the media\u2019s change in tune. First, Trump was no longer president. Because Trump had said that the virus could have come from a Wuhan lab, Daszak and others used him as a convenient foil to attack their critics. But the framing of the lab leak hypothesis as a partisan issue was harder to sustain after Trump left the White House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, after months of negotiation the Chinese government finally allowed the World Health Organization to come to Wuhan and investigate the pandemic\u2019s origin. But in January 2021 WHO, which included Daszak on the team, returned with no evidence that the virus had arisen through natural spill-over.18<\/a> More worryingly, members were allowed only a few hours of supervised access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The White House then released a statement making clear that it did not trust China\u2019s propaganda denying that the virus could have come from one of the country\u2019s labs. \u201cWe have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the covid-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them,\u201d said the statement. \u201cIt is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following month the Washington Post<\/em> editorial board called for an open and transparent investigation of the virus\u2019s origins, highlighting Shi\u2019s experiments with bat coronaviruses that were genetically very similar to the one that caused the pandemic.19<\/a> It asked, \u201cCould a worker have gotten infected or inadvertent leakage have touched off the outbreak in Wuhan?\u201d The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, citing a US intelligence document, recently reported that three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were admitted to hospital in November 2019.20<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n To follow any US financial ties and to better understand how the pandemic started, Republicans have launched investigations of government agencies that fund coronavirus research, and one investigative committee has sent a letter to Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance demanding that he turn over documents. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans and Democrats have started to discuss an independent investigation of the virus\u2019s origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A hard truth to swallow<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The growing tendency to treat the lab leak scenario as worthy of serious investigation has put some reporters on the defensive. After Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, appeared on CNN in March, Scientific American<\/em>\u2019s editor in chief, Laura Helmuth, tweeted, \u201cOn CNN, former CDC director Robert Redfield shared the conspiracy theory that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.\u201d The following day, Scientific American<\/em> ran an essay calling the lab leak theory \u201cevidence free.\u201d And a week later a Nature<\/em> reporter, Amy Maxmen, labelled the idea that the virus could have leaked from a lab as \u201cconjecture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Helmuth did not respond to questions from The BMJ<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some media outlets have attempted to justify their past reporting about the lab leak hypothesis as simply a matter of tracking a \u201cscientific consensus\u201d which, they say, has now changed. Vox<\/em> posted an erratum noting, \u201cSince this piece was originally published in March 2020, scientific consensus has shifted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cscientific consensus\u201d argument does not sit well with David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University, California. \u201cWe can\u2019t even begin to talk about a consensus other than a consensus that we don\u2019t know [the origins of SARS-CoV-2],\u201d he recently told the Washington<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Post<\/em>.21<\/a> A year lost<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n While the narrative took months to change in the media, several high profile intelligence sources had treated the lab leak theory seriously from early on. In April 2020, Avril Haines joined two other former deputy directors of the Central Intelligence Agency to write an essay in Foreign Policy<\/em> asking, \u201cTo what extent did the Chinese government misrepresent the scope and scale of the epidemic?\u201d22<\/a> A week later, one of the former intelligence officials who wrote that essay gave similar quotes to Politico<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ignoring these early warnings led to a year of biased, failed reporting, says Wade. \u201cThey didn\u2019t question what their sources were saying,\u201d he says of the reporters who helped to sell the conspiracy theory narrative to the public. \u201cThat is the simple explanation for this phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the news media scramble to correct and reflect on what went wrong with nearly a year of reporting, the episode has also highlighted quality control issues at the ubiquitous \u201cfact checking\u201d services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prominent outlets such as PolitiFact<\/em>23<\/a> and FactCheck.org24<\/a> have added editor\u2019s notes to pieces that previously \u201cdebunked\u201d the idea that the virus was created in a lab or could have been bioengineered\u2014softening their position to one of an open question that is \u201cin dispute.\u201d For almost a year Facebook sought to control misinformation by banning stories suggesting that the coronavirus was man made. After renewed interest in the virus\u2019s origin, Facebook lifted the ban.25<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether a credible investigation will be made into the lab leak scenario remains to be seen. WHO and the Lancet<\/em> both launched investigations last year (box 2<\/a>), but Daszak was involved in both, and neither has made significant progress.Excerpted from<\/em>https:\/\/www.bmj.com\/content\/374\/bmj.n1656<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The U turn<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
An impartial, credible investigation?<\/h6>\n\n\n\n