A hypothesis about the origins of COVID-19 has, in the space of a few weeks, gone from a seemingly debunked conspiracy theory to a plausible explanation in the eyes of some in the media.
The idea that the virus could have originated in a Wuhan virology lab and spread accidentally through a lab worker, known as the lab leak hypothesis, has been reported on by outlets including the Washington Examiner repeatedly through the past year.
But in other parts of the media, the hypothesis has only now gathered steam thanks to an essay from a former New York Times reporter who laid out the scientific and circumstantial signs pointing to a lab leak.
Reflecting the media’s fresh look at the possibility of a lab accident, left-leaning outlet Vox on Monday attached an editor’s note to an article from last year that called the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy and a “distraction.”
“Since this piece was originally published in March 2020, scientific consensus has shifted,” Vox wrote.
The original article cited a letter signed by scientists and published in the Lancet, a scientific journal, in February 2020 as evidence that the lab leak “rumor” was a “dangerous conspiracy theory.”
That letter served as the basis for much of the media and many public officials dismissing the lab leak hypothesis when the pandemic began to spread. With little scrutiny of the hypothesis, commentators blamed the existence of the hypothesis on everything from former President Donald Trump, who floated it, to outright racism.
The letter cited by Vox and other outlets created the false impression that the scientific community had ruled out the hypothesis when, in reality, it had not even been properly investigated.
What’s more, while the author of the letter was deeply involved in coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory studying COVID strains in the very town where the outbreak began, he did not disclose his ties to the project in an effort to give the letter more weight.
Peter Daszak is president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a research nonprofit group that has steered grant money from the National Institutes of Health to the Wuhan lab for coronavirus research, in which Daszak has long been involved. The EcoHealth Alliance has documented research ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists collaborated there on studying the coronavirus in bats.
The EcoHealth Alliance received at least $3.7 million from NIH from 2014 to 2020 and sent at least $600,000 in NIH funding to the Wuhan lab.
Emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit group, show that Daszak organized the Lancet statement last year denouncing the lab leak hypothesis that would have invited scrutiny to his organization’s work by recruiting prominent scientists to sign on to it.
“Please 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,” Daszak wrote in an email to some of the scientists he and his employees had asked to back the statement, which denounced the possibility of a lab accident.
In another email obtained through a public records request, Daszak suggested he would not sign the letter personally “so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way.” He did attach his name to the statement in the end but in a way that made him look like another signatory, not as the organizer.
The signatories of the Lancet letter claimed their statement was “further supported” by a previous letter, written 13 days earlier, by the three presidents of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. That letter, like Daszak’s subsequent one, also downplayed the likelihood of a lab accident.
Daszak was, however, one of the seven experts consulted for that letter from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, according to the footnotes. In the emails about drafting the Lancet statement, Daszak wrote of his desire to release the supposedly independent Lancet statement after the science academies letter came out in order to use it as a reference point — even though he personally helped shape that denunciation of the lab leak hypothesis as well.
Daszak cautioned another scientist named Ralph Baric against signing the Lancet statement as well.
He wrote that his group planned to “put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”
Baric, another prominent coronavirus researcher, agreed that he, too, would not sign the letter because “otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
Baric has worked extensively with Chinese scientists known to have been studying coronaviruses taken from bats at the Wuhan lab.
But Baric has been the subject of glowing media coverage in his home state, portrayed in local news articles as an unsung hero of the search for a COVID-19 treatment in the early months of the pandemic.
An article in Nature Medicine published in 2015 following a study by Baric and others discussed studies on Chinese horseshoe bat populations, concluding that “our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.” An “editor’s note” added to the article in March 2020 claimed, “We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered.”
Baric was among the many scientists who signed a letter in Science magazine this month arguing that “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”
The media took the statements that Daszak helped shape at face value for months afterward.
Despite the conflict of interest created by his position in a company that conducted coronavirus research at a lab in the hometown of the pandemic, Daszak went on to serve on the joint China-World Health Organization investigative team.
Despite Daszak’s history with the Wuhan lab, the WHO-China report contended that there was no conflict of interest, saying that “all declared interests were assessed and found not to interfere with the independence and transparency of the work.” Daszak dismissed the lab leak hypothesis during a 60 Minutes appearance in March and admitted the WHO team had just taken the word of Chinese scientists when they denied a leak. He defended his spot on the joint mission despite his connection to the Wuhan lab, saying, “I’m on the WHO team for a reason. And, you know, if you’re going to work in China on coronaviruses and try and understand their origins, you should involve the people who know the most about that. And, for better or for worse, I do.”
Dr. Shi Zhengli, known as “bat lady” for her work with coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab, denied her lab has been conducting research with the Chinese military during an online presentation for Rutgers New Jersey Medical School in March. During the presentation, she thanked Daszak and NIH.
During the early days of COVID-19, Shi told Scientific American that she originally asked herself, “Could they have come from our lab?” But she later told Chinese state television, “there could not possibly have been a lab leak.”
The WHO-China investigation lasted 28 days, and the final report published by the team in March only further weakened the case for an animal-to-human trajectory of COVID-19.
For more than a year, the media and public officials had parroted the hypothesis that the virus had spread from an animal in a wildlife market in Wuhan to a person in late 2019 before sweeping the globe.
An extremely thorough search in China for the natural origin of the virus, which included testing more than 80,000 different animals from across dozens of Chinese provinces, did not find a single case of COVID-19 in nature. Nor did the team find any evidence of the virus in the market after “extensive testing” of its animal products.
Yet the WHO report reached a final conclusion that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway” for the pandemic to have begun, despite unearthing virtually nothing that supported the natural origin claims.
Top Biden administration officials have expressed dissatisfaction with the results of the WHO investigation.
Daszak called the Wuhan lab’s decision to take down a public database containing thousands of viral samples “absolutely reasonable” in March and claimed it was the fault of “anti-China political rhetoric” in the United States that resulted in China blocking an investigation for a year. He previously criticized the Biden administration for appearing skeptical of the WHO’s preliminary findings in February and defended China to Communist Party-linked outlets. U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns in 2018 about lax biosecurity at the Wuhan lab.
A lack of cooperation on a search of the virology lab from Chinese officials and a lack of evidence to support the prevailing origin story began to raise questions about the lab leak hypothesis outside largely conservative circles and certain scientific circles for the first time.
A State Department fact sheet released in January contended that Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)” and that the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.”
“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the State Department fact sheet said, arguing that “this raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
The fact sheet also said that the Wuhan lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
The Biden administration has thus far not weighed in publicly on that intelligence.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in recent days, expressed skepticism of the natural origin claims for the first time.
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But scrutiny of the NIH’s role in funding research that may have led to an accidental release of a manipulated version of the coronavirus could put Fauci in a difficult position as media attention to the lab leak hypothesis grows.
Fauci and Daszak, as experts in their fields, have spoken at multiple events together, and Fauci has appeared alongside other senior staff from the EcoHealth Alliance as well.
Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO group which investigated the coronavirus’s origins, said in late February that “we didn’t do an audit of any of these labs, so we don’t really have hard facts or detailed data on the work done” at the Wuhan lab.
In March, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, said the possibility of a lab leak needed further study despite it being deemed “extremely unlikely” by the team.
The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy contributed to this report.
