‘I still believe my Covid lab theory was the right one – and it could happen again'

Independent

23-03-2025

Five years ago today, Britain woke up to a world few had ever experienced. People were ordered to stay at home, permitted to leave for essential purposes only, such as buying food or for medical reasons. Laws were passed that prevented them from travelling outside their local areas and all 'non-essential' high street businesses were closed. By May 2020, people were permitted to leave home for outdoor recreation (beyond exercise) and a month later, people were permitted to meet outside in groups of up to six people.
The reason was the world was in the grip of a global pandemic which would take the lives of nearly two million people by the end of that first year. And it was under these circumstances in early 2020 that I became notorious for raising the possibility of a laboratory origin of Covid-19. But five years on, the origin of the Sars-CoV-2 virus which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and went on to infect the populations of 229 countries and territories, taking over seven million lives, is still fiercely disputed.
At the time, I was a little-known early career scientist (a postdoc) at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. The backlash I experienced for raising this was disproportionate and personally targeted - I was called everything from a 'race traitor' to a conspiracy theorist. It was as if the slightest sign of deviation from the official scientific consensus that the virus had come from sick animals in a wet market had to be slammed down and made an example of.
Collaborators of the Wuhan scientists accused me of seeking attention by riding the waves of wild conspiracy theories. But it didn't make sense for me to do that. No sane scientist would have sought the type of attention I received. I was simply stating the fact that a laboratory origin was plausible, no matter how likely or unlikely.
As I looked into the available evidence relevant to the origin of the virus, I continued to point out instances where Chinese scientists had not been honest or forthcoming. The harassment by fellow scientists grew. Some reached out to my employer to get me fired or disciplined – terminating a postdoc was an easy thing to do. Thankfully, I kept my job.
In 2021, I accepted science writer Matt Ridley's invitation to write a book together laying out the clear arguments and evidence for both a natural and laboratory origin of Covid. At the time, I was terrified of what might happen if we wrote such a controversial book. It would provoke the Chinese government that had successfully squashed a children's book in Germany just for linking the pandemic to China and threatened publishers with filing criminal charges. I knew that it would also offend many scientific leaders and influencers.
For months, I had been a lightning rod for the lab leak hypothesis. My family members and friends feared for my safety and advised me to change my name if I ever wanted to travel back to Asia. But, ultimately, I felt that someone had to tell the story of how the pandemic might have started and highlight the contributions of the few heroic scientists, journalists and sleuths who had dared to push back against the prevailing narrative. I believed it was important for me as a scientist to step up, despite the risks.
Our book, VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, was published at the end of 2021 and updated in 2022. I felt immense pride for having completed the book in under a year. We had worked on it literally day and night since Matt Ridley and I lived in different time zones, and I wrote obsessively into the early mornings – knowing that angry virologists would descend on us once the book was published (and they did).
Our argument for the lab leak hypothesis is as follows: the scientists in Wuhan were doing exactly what they said they were doing. To study viruses that might pose a threat to humans, they collected tens of thousands of samples from bats, wild animals, and even sick villagers or wildlife traders. In 2013, they discovered a novel lineage of Sars-like viruses from a mine in Yunnan province where workers had sickened and died from a mysterious respiratory infection. The scientists grew novel coronaviruses in the lab, experimenting with and genetically engineering them in ways that sometimes enhanced their ability to infect human cells and jump across species. Their work with live viruses was conducted at low biosafety, shocking even their close collaborators.
The year before the pandemic, the Wuhan scientists and their US partners planned to insert a unique feature called a furin cleavage site into novel Sars-like viruses. Of hundreds of Sars-like viruses known today, only Sars-CoV-2 possesses this special feature, which is what makes it a pandemic pathogen.
Despite the efforts of numerous research groups to find evidence for the origin of the virus in the wildlife trade, there have been no signs of an infected animal source or any evidence that such viruses circulate in Wuhan markets or its supply chain.
In 2019, a virus matching the 2018 experiments by Wuhan-US scientists, well-adapted for spreading in humans and other animals, appeared abruptly in Wuhan and none of the other thousands of large population centres in the region not even two years after they concocted this plan, leaving no trace along its thousand-mile journey from the bat caves where Wuhan scientists frequently collected such viruses.
Influential scientists were advocates for risky research where viruses are enhanced in laboratories. Years before Covid-19, they said such 'gain-of-function' research was a risk worth taking. When the virus spilled out of Wuhan, home to the largest novel Sars-like virus laboratory in the world, many of these leading scientists privately speculated that the Wuhan lab had conducted dangerous experiments at low biosafety.
Yet, instead coming out to the public with: 'Yes, the novel coronavirus might have escaped from a laboratory by accident. As responsible scientists, we will investigate and hold our colleagues accountable. And, even if the virus did emerge naturally, the fact that it could have come from a lab means we must implement measures to prevent catastrophic research accidents', they did the opposite.
These leading names organised and co-signed prominent letters for public consumption, ruling out and condemning suggestions of a laboratory origin as conspiracy theories.
Our book was meticulously fact-checked and has more than 300 references so that readers can look into the evidence surrounding the origin of the pandemic.
I received a great deal of fan mail, including from several virologists at top institutions who could not speak out publicly about the origin of the virus out of fear of retaliation and ostracisation by their peers. VIRAL had broken past the blockade at scientific journals and popular media, which continued to push the idea that Covid had come from the Wuhan market and that the case was closed.
Since VIRAL was published, the case for a laboratory origin of Covid-19 has only gotten stronger. Last year, I worked with The New York Times to visually present the case for a lab leak hypothesis. The opinion piece was fact-checked and reviewed for accuracy by experts on this topic.
It was published on the day that the US Congress questioned Dr Anthony Fauci, who had been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, on whether his institute had supported risky virus experiments at the Wuhan laboratory suspected of causing the pandemic.
Five years since the pandemic began, biosafety standards are not stronger, clearer, or enforceable even within the US, not to mention globally
I had half-expected my article for The New York Times to be ignored. I thought that people were by then bored of talking and hearing about the pandemic. I was completely taken by surprise by the overwhelming response to the piece, which racked up 1,597 comments in a day, occupied the cover of the Sunday Opinion print, and was praised by many respected journalists and scientists. Sean Spicer, a former White House press secretary, tweeted, 'Someone at [ The New York Times ] is probably getting fired for publishing this.'
As far as I know, no one at The New York Times has been fired for publishing the piece. In fact, a growing number of experts now publicly favour the lab leak hypothesis. In January, the CIA released the assessment they had made under the Biden administration favouring a laboratory origin of the virus, albeit with low confidence. They join the US Department of Energy and FBI who also assessed a laboratory origin with low and moderate confidence, respectively. These are arguably the three US intelligence agencies with the strongest scientific expertise.
More recently, news broke that the German foreign intelligence service, BND, has long held that Covid likely originated in a laboratory. Their latest assessment based on public and non-public information was made with a certainty of 80-95 per cent. The recent head of Germany's Robert Koch Institute, a federal agency tasked with disease control and prevention, also believes a laboratory origin to be more likely. There are rumours that the UK government will also adjust its position on the issue to back the lab leak hypothesis.
A common question I get is how it feels to be vindicated. I am relieved that efforts to cast the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory have ultimately failed (although the personal attacks from virologists continue). And I am deeply grateful to the wonderful and brave scientists, journalists, advocates, and sleuths with whom I crossed paths during the search for the origin of Covid-19. There were many points in this journey where I felt close to breaking down and it was only through their support that I managed to stay positive.
However, I am also depressed that many scientific leaders continue to insist that there is no evidence for the lab leak hypothesis and therefore no need for a significant reform of oversight over pathogen research with the power to upend civilization.
The outcome of their refusal to acknowledge a plausible laboratory origin of Covid has meant that zero new measures have been put in place to prevent future catastrophic lab leaks. Five years since the pandemic began, biosafety standards are not stronger, clearer, or enforceable even within the US, not to mention globally. This month, two prominent virologists sounded the alarm that their Wuhan counterparts continue to work with potentially dangerous pathogens at inadequate biosafety.
The prestigious scientific journal that published the experiments said it was up to each research institute to set their own rules and so they did not violate journal policy. Still, no independent entity, even within the US, has been tasked with tracking, regulating, and investigating research with the potential to cause pandemics. There is no systematic tracking of the pathogens discovered, created, and enhanced in laboratories.
The legal consequences for the creation of pandemic pathogens and their accidental or deliberate release remain unclear. Contrast this with the response from atomic scientists who founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945 to inform the public about the consequences of nuclear weapons, and the creation of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Congress in 1974.
After publishing VIRAL, I approached the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the end of 2021 to suggest the convening of an international, cross-disciplinary task force to generate new recommendations for research with pandemic risk. I offered to bow out before the task force was even assembled, worried that my reputation would cast a shadow on this important work.
However, the Bulletin insisted that I stay and be part of the project. The task force was half constituted of virologists and infectious diseases experts from around the world. And some of my favourite people were virologists! Our recommendations were published last year, emphasising common-sense, bare-minimum measures that should have been enacted by any rational, functioning government and yet still have not.
Leading members of the scientific community were advocates and funders of risky pathogen research for many years. Asking them to acknowledge that Covid likely resulted from a laboratory accident in Wuhan is tantamount to demanding a confession that they were wrong and that the cost of being wrong was millions of human lives and global disruption.
One well-known virologist said in February 2020, 'If it turned out to be true [that the pandemic virus was a lab construct], that would bother the hell out of me, not just because of people dying and so forth, but it's kind of an indictment of the field, right?'