How the Conspiracy Theory Label Shuts Down Dissent and Steers Narratives

Conspiracy Theories, Power & Accountability: Part 4

Lab Leak or Smokescreen? 

The utility of any label lies not so much in its literal meaning as it does in its impact. For example, if I were to label a person an idiot, or a compulsive liar, it could have the functional effect of delegitimizing anything that that person might say. What’s the sense of taking seriously an idiot, or a compulsive liar, or anything that such a person might say? None at all. I’m better off refocusing my attention elsewhere. 

And so it is with the rhetorical function of the term “conspiracy theory.” As a label, its impact is to limit engagement with a particular line of questioning. Just like an ad hominem attack, the term can be applied tactically as a form of censorship to dismiss and undermine claims that have substance. 

Take for example, the evolving representation of the Lab Leak hypothesis for the origin of Covid-19 by the scientific expert class and the mainstream media, over the course of two US administrations. What was categorically dismissed back in 2020 as a right-wing conspiracy theory propagated by anti-Asian, racist Trump supporters has since transformed into a legitimate theory of the pandemic’s origins. In February 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy revised its assessment to favour the lab leak theory as a potential origin of COVID-19, joining the FBI which had previously given weight to this hypothesis. A month later, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for further investigation into Covid-19’s origins, stating that “All hypotheses for the origin of the virus remain on the table.” 

The shifting representation of the lab leak by scientists, politicians and the press is complex, having been shaped by geopolitics between the U.S. and China, censorship by the Chinese government and by an orchestrated campaign to steer the media portrayal of gain-of-function (GoF) experimentation on SARS-like coronaviruses so as to protect the controversial field (and its funding) from public scrutiny.

But before we begin spelunking into bat caves, it’s important to understand that the lab leak hypothesis is less a rabbit hole than it is “a whole underground cave system”. For the purposes of this article, we’ll narrow our focus to the efforts of DRASTIC, a motley crew of scientists, researchers and analysts who took to Twitter to turn the tide of public opinion on the lab origin theory.

Location, location, location

As people around the globe were grappling with the personal and socio-economic chaos unleashed by the “Wuhan virus” – or Sars-CoV-2 as it came to be officially known, a class of scientists were working to get their stories straight. How did the novel coronavirus emerge in the modern metropolis of Wuhan, China, home to the Huanan Seafood Market and the Wuhan Institute of Virology? 

There was something fishy about the Huanan Seafood Market, one of tens of thousands of wet markets across Asia that, in addition to selling seafood, meat, eggs and produce, traded in live animals like civets, marmots, weasels and raccoon dogs. The close proximity of diverse wildlife species to humans in the absence of strict hygiene and biosecurity measures represented an ideal environment for potential zoonotic viruses to jump between species. It’s worth noting that the market did not sell bats, the animal considered to be the virus’s original reservoir host, as the consumption of bat meat is not a typical dietary practice in Wuhan or the surrounding Hubei province.

Of the first 41 cases identified in Wuhan, 27 of those had “direct exposure” to the Huanan Seafood market. All fingers were pointing to the Huanan Seafood Market as the likely epicentre of the pandemic. Contrary to initial assumptions, the virus samples collected from the Huanan Seafood Market aligned genetically with the SARS-CoV-2 variant already circulating in humans, and no animals at the market tested positive for the virus, undermining the zoonotic spillover theory. Significantly, despite extensive investigations, no ancestral or intermediate viral strain has been identified that exhibits the mutational signatures indicative of an ongoing adaptive process to human hosts, neither at the Huanan Seafood Market nor in any other potential animal host or environmental source. 

Across the Yangtze River in Wuhan’s Zhengdian district stands the newest campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Built in 2018, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory represents a different kind of epicentre: a global centre for coronavirus research with a focus on bat coronaviruses. One of at least two institutes in Wuhan actively studying bat coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, the WIV hosts one lab with a biosafety level of 4, the highest standard in biocontainment required for the storage and handling of the planet’s deadliest pathogens, in addition to BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs. 

For many scientists, proactively monitoring the risks posed by unknown and emerging zoonotic viruses capable of jumping from animals to humans is a crucial safeguard against future pandemics. In search of lurking threats, research teams from the WIV and other scientific institutions would regularly travel more than a thousand kilometres to Yunnan Province in Southern China to sample bats for deadly viruses, as there were no known bat coronaviruses in urban Wuhan, or the surrounding Hubei Province. On multiple occasions these missions were successful and the WIV accumulated a substantial collection of bat derived coronaviruses.

Back in the lab, the virus would be genetically sequenced, isolated and cultured in order to understand and assess its capacity for human infection. Scientists would also create chimeric or hybrid viruses by fusing or swapping virus components from more than one animal species using techniques like gene splicing to fuse genetic segments. Significantly, such seamless engineering can leave little to no trace of the scientific manipulation, potentially resulting in a new virus that could be mistaken for a natural product of zoonotic evolution. 

Transgenic or “humanised” non-human cells or lab animals like mice that have been genetically engineered to express human proteins or genes that are necessary for the virus to enter and replicate, would be infected with the live virus. The live virus would be “passaged” or serially transferred through multiple rounds of replication in a host system of humanised non-human cell cultures or humanised animals in order to force the virus’s evolution. 

Repeated passaging allows scientists to study viral mutations that might occur in nature to determine, for example, if a virus is capable of evolving from a disease incapable of infecting humans to one adapted to human-human transmissibility. One potential outcome of such Gain-of-Function (GoF) research is the artificial creation of a viral pathogen adapted for efficient human-to-human transmission. Should that enhanced human-transmissible virus accidentally escape the lab because of faulty waste sterilisation, cross-contamination from improper protective equipment removal, or because a scientist becomes infected through an animal bite, or needle prick, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Accidents happen. And it’s not like it would be the first time. Incidents of documented lab leaks are plentiful. Between 2002 and 2004 multiple outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were triggered when lab workers accidentally became infected with the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) due to breaches in safety protocols. In one Beijing lab, a refrigerator containing a live SARS virus that hadn’t been properly deactivated was moved into a hallway. A graduate student removed the sample from the fridge to view it under an electron microscope, kickstarting a SARS outbreak. Moreover, in 2018, concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s own biosecurity measures had been communicated to the US government via cables sent by American science diplomats who visited the WIV BSL-4 lab. One of those cables sent on January 19th, 2018 documented “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” Who then could help but to raise an eyebrow when ground zero for a novel coronavirus turned out to be the very city that is home to a gain-of-function research centre tasked with storing and experimenting on novel coronaviruses?

As Jon Stewart so poetically put it:

“There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?  And then they ask the scientists, like, ‘How did this — so, wait a minute. You work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen?’ And they’re like, ‘A pangolin kissed a turtle? Hurrrm. … Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chilli — and now we all have coronavirus.’ Come on!” 

Driving the point home, he continues:

“There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do ya think happened? ‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?’ Or it’s the f—-ing chocolate factory! Maybe that’s it!”

Damage Control

If comedian Jon Stewart took flak for expressing his concerns about the WIV’s potential role in Covid-19’s origin (and he took plenty), you can only imagine the kind of reception awaiting scientists who dared to point a finger at the GoF research taking place in Wuhan. And you would have to imagine it because scientific experts who expressed such concerns were swiftly censored or dismissed as conspiracy theorists. 

The stakes were high. Not only was it possible that a lab accident could have kickstarted the pandemic, the risky GoF research on bat coronaviruses taking place at Wuhan was being funded between 2014-2019 by the NIH via EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based research organisation that had been awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), an institute within the NIH, under the leadership of Director Anthoni Fauci. The collaborations undertaken between EcoHealth Alliance and WIV focused on the genetic modification of bat coronaviruses to make them more transmissible and pathogenic using GoF technology. 🍿 The scientific community needed to cover its ass – and fast.

Separately, Anthony Fauci and EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak took steps to define the narrative around COVID-19's origins. On February 18th, 2020, Daszak drafted and organized the influential "Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China" signed by 27 prominent scientists. The statement strongly condemned the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy” and asserted that the virus likely emerged naturally. Daszak's central role in orchestrating this statement was only later revealed by a Freedom of Information group called U.S. Right to Know. Including Daszak, five of the signatories held positions in EcoHealth Alliance, although this conflict of interest was not disclosed by the Lancet. A year later Daszak travelled to Wuhan, China as the only American member of the 10-person WHO expert team tasked with investigating COVID-19's origins. Daszak’s prominent inclusion and alleged steering of the WHO origins investigation was highly controversial given his obvious conflicts of interest and public dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis.

For his part, Fauci covertly coordinated the publication of the seminal “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature on March 17th, 2020. This landmark paper helped establish the framing and narrative that guided scientific discussion and media representation of COVID-19's origins as a natural zoonotic spillover event. Later Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) releases showed that despite publicly dismissing lab leak theories, the scientists involved privately expressed concerns about a potential lab accident in emails with Fauci. Moreover, the emails revealed deliberations over specific wording to incorporate into the paper, so as to minimise any suggestion of a potential lab escape.

The Nature Medicine paper and Lancet letter proved effective in manufacturing consensus amongst scientists and the press that the lab escape origin hypothesis was the stuff of “conspiracy”. As evolutionary biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein observed in Spring 2020,

“something about the incentives that surround mainstream virology at the moment has caused the entire field to line up behind a story that is incorrect: that [the] lab leak is not worth considering as a hypothesis.”

As Daszak and Fauci’s engineered narratives were infecting public discourse, the WIV scientists were stitching together their own chimeric story.

Like a Bat Out of Hell

On February 3rd, 2020, “Bat Woman” Shi Zhengli, virologist, lead researcher specialising in bat-borne coronaviruses and Director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the WIV, together with her team, published an influential paper in Nature. “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin” identified the new coronavirus emerging in Wuhan on December 12th, 2019 and compared its genomic sequence to those of SARS-CoV-1 (the virus that causes SARS) and BatCoVRaTG13, a bat-derived coronavirus from China’s Yunnan province. While the genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2’s and SARS-CoV-1 bore a 79.6% similarity, the genomic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 were 96.2% identical. RaTG13 was thus identified as SARS-CoV-2’s closest phylogenetic relative and indicated that SARS-CoV-2 likely originated from bats.

More important than the information featured in the article, was the information that was withheld. Information that would be painstakingly recovered by curious scientific researchers and internet sleuths, i.e. ‘conspiracy theorists,’ working diligently and at great social cost to puzzle together a complete picture of the WIV’s role in the pandemic. 

A collective of more than 20 guerrilla-style online investigators known as DRASTIC, short for “Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19,” can be largely credited for advancing the case for a full investigation of the lab leak hypothesis, which is now recognized as a legitimate theory for the origins of covid-19. Operating mainly via Twitter and online forums, DRASTIC members sifted through published research and other publicly available information to fill in the blanks in the WIV’s account of covid-19’s emergence. It is only because of their independent research that we now know the undisclosed history of RaTG13 and its importance to the unravelling mystery of the pandemic’s origins.

RaTG13¹

The story that Shi Zhengli and the WIV researchers failed to disclose in the February 3rd Nature article starts back in April 2012 at a defunct copper mine in Mojiang county in Yunnan province. Three miners were tasked with removing loads of bat-guano up to 150 metres high, much of which was covered with fungus, from the bat-infested mineshaft. All three men working in the poorly ventilated mine became sick and were replaced with three new miners to complete the dirty job. Those three workers also fell sick. All six were hospitalised. Their symptoms were dry coughs, fever, headaches, muscle aches and fatigue. Their bodies all showed signs of immune system damage and none of them responded to treatments with antibiotics and antifungals. One man improved after being treated with anticoagulants and was released four months after being admitted to the hospital. The older the men, and the longer the duration they spent in the mine, the more severe their illness. The four oldest men suffered respiratory failure and three of them subsequently died. None of the men’s family members or attending health care workers became sick. 

While at least one doctor suspected the mysterious pneumonic illness might be caused by a fungal infection, it was Dr. Zhong Nanshan, nationally famous for his work during the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic, who determined that a viral infection was the cause and advised that the types of bats in the mine be identified. Under Zhong Nanshan’s instruction, samples from the then four surviving patients were sent to the WIV for testing for the SARS virus and antibodies. The results indicated that the miners had been exposed to a novel bat-borne coronavirus, closely related to SARS-CoV-1. News of the pneumonic outbreak was buried, never making its way into the international press outside of two scientific papers. The first was a 2014 article in Science magazine on the discovery of a novel rat-borne henipavirus in the mineshaft by scientists out of Beijing seeking the cause of the miners’ deaths. (It wasn’t the rats it seemed.) The second paper was a 2017 article in Nature explaining the mechanism by which the same rat-borne henipavirus infects host cells.

In the months after the outbreak, teams of researchers from the WIV travelled multiple times to the mine in Mojiang County, also in search of the pathogen that infected the miners, with a focus on bat coronaviruses. Between August 2012 and July 2013 and 2014-2015, they collected numerous samples, some of which turned out to include bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. For example, BtCov/4991, a partial genomic sequence of a novel SARS-like coronavirus was detected in samples from intermediate horseshoe bats taken from the mine and identified in a 2016 publication by Shi Zhengli and her team. While Zhengli’s 2016 paper identified the source of the sample as the mineshaft in Mojiang county, it failed to mention the outbreak of the mysterious SARS-like coronavirus and the subsequent death of the three miners, which had prompted the sampling expedition in the first place. As for the February 3rd, 2020 paper, no references to BtCov/4991, the mine in Mojiang county, the miners, or their SARS-like illness were made.

Such curious omissions might have gone undetected if not for a paper published two days later by scientists from Wuhan University. Their findings identified SARS-CoV-2’s closest phylogenetic relative as BtCoV/4991, a viral genomic sequence containing an ORF1b gene that exhibited a remarkably high 98.65% similarity to the ORF1b gene of SARS-CoV-2. According to the WU paper, BtCoV/4991 came from intermediary horseshoe bats in Yunnan. RaTG13 was not mentioned as it was unknown outside of Shi Zhengli’s most recent research. 

These two new publications raised a few questions for microbiologist Rossana Segreto. For one, if RaTG13 came from a 2013 sample, why was its existence only made public in late January 2020, after the onset of the covid-19 pandemic? Segreto was also intrigued by the parallel references to SARS-CoV-2’s closest relatives, RaTG13 and BtCoV/4991, and curious to understand their relationship to one another. 

To find out more, Segreto ran BtCoV/4991 through BLAST, an online bioinformatics tool that functions like a search engine to enable the comparison of unknown or newly discovered genetic sequences against extensive databases of known sequences. BtCoV/4991 was a 100% match with RaTG13. It was in fact the same virus. BtCoV/4991 was just a smaller fragment of RaTG13, which represented the virus’s full genome. She posted her findings as a comment on a virology blog on March 16th, 2020.

Researchers Yuri Deigin and Dean Bengston were also grappling with the confusion surrounding RaTG13’s connection to BtCoV/4991, both publishing their concerns about the potential obfuscation of RaTG13’s identity by WIV scientists in April, 2020.

The question about the virus’s two different names was addressed on Twitter by EcoHealth Alliance President and long term WIV collaborator Peter Daszak on May 9th, 2020:

The confusion boiled down to a change in the naming convention. As “obvious” as this might have been to “people working in virology,” outsiders like Segreto found it curious that no references were made to either the new naming system, or to the fact that a partial sequence of the same virus (as BtCoV/4991) had been identified in Shi Zhengli’s own 2016 paper. Her failure to cite the earlier paper was particularly surprising. As Luigi Warren pointed out on Twitter, “You would think she might take a bow for having discovered 4991 and having brought it back to Wuhan way back in 2013.”

Something smelled off to DRASTIC members, who began scouring the web for whatever was causing the stink. The trail led them quickly to bat shit. Both BtCoV/4991 and RaTG13 were found in faeces samples from intermediate horseshoe bats in July 2013. While the location of the guano that contained RaTG13 was listed only as Pu’er City, Yunnan province, the source of BtCoV/4991 was attributed in the 2016 paper more specifically to guano in an abandoned mineshaft in Mojiang county, also in Pu’er City in Yunnan province. The hunt was on for more information about the mine. Could it be the source of both sequences?

DRASTIC member Luigi Warren provided one missing puzzle piece when he surfaced a profile on Shi Zhengli in a Scientific American interview published a few months earlier on March 11th, 2020.

According to the piece,

“[In 2012] Shi’s team had been called in to investigate the virus profile of a mine shaft in Yunnan’s mountainous Mojiang County—famous for its fermented Pu’er tea—where six miners suffered from pneumonialike diseases and two died. After sampling the cave for a year, the researchers discovered a diverse group of coronaviruses in six bat species. In many cases, multiple viral strains had infected a single animal, turning it into a flying factory for new viruses.

‘The mine shaft stunk like hell,’ says Shi, who, like her colleagues, went in wearing a protective mask and clothing. “Bat guano, covered in fungus, littered the cave.” Although the fungus turned out to be the pathogen that had sickened the miners, she says it would have been only a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine had not been promptly shut.”

Two discrepancies stand out in the Scientific American account of events in 2012: only two of the miners died and their pneumonic affliction was attributed to a fungal infection. Was this correct?

Luigi Warren’s thread laid bare the many red flags waving all over Shi Zhengli’s representation of the source and identity of Covid-19’s closest relative that she and her team personally uncovered. It was as if with each subsequent publication on the sequence, Shi Zhengli took a step further away from its connection to the miners’ illness and death, even going so far as to change the sequence’s name. Or maybe, Luigi Warren considered, if the miners’ pneumonia had in fact been caused by fungus, as reported in Scientific American, that she and her team simply lost interest in BtCoV/4991, thereby deemphasizing its connection to the miners. Having exhausted the handful of scientific articles containing relative information, DRASTIC was out of clues.

Enter the Seeker²

A 28 year old former science teacher in India, operating anonymously on Twitter under the handle @theseeker268, was deeply invested in unravelling the mystery. An adept researcher, the Seeker combed the web for information on the miners and the mysterious 2012 pneumonia outbreak. He turned his attention to publicly available Chinese resources, poring through published research on CNKI, a Chinese database of scientific journals. As he doesn’t speak Chinese, he used Google translate to enter various combinations of the search terms “Mojiang,” “SARS,” “bat,” and “WIV,” turning up thousands of results. After several chai-fuelled nights of unsuccessful trawling, he was about to give up until finally, on May 18th, he hit the mother lode: a master’s thesis from Li Xu, a student at Kunming Medical University called, “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses.” Over the course of its 60-pages, the thesis detailed the miners’ treatments and diagnosis, attributing their illness to a “SARS-related coronavirus (SARSrCoV) from bats” and urging for the bats in the mine to be investigated. The Seeker posted his findings as a reply to Luigi Warren’s thread, poking holes in Shi Zhengli’s claim in Scientific American that a fungal infection had killed the miners. 

One day later he struck again, this time unearthing a 2016 doctoral dissertation from a grad student from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing. According to the dissertation, the WIV tested blood samples from the four then surviving miners, all of which tested positive for SARS virus antibodies. In addition to reaffirming the information presented in Xu’s 2013 Master’s thesis, the doctoral dissertation gave the geographic coordinates for the Mojiang mine’s exact location. Prior to being posted to Twitter, neither the Master’s or doctoral theses had made it onto the international scene, having never before been translated into English. Notably, the CMKI database’s access controls were modified following the Seeker’s publication of his findings.

If there was any doubt about Shi Zhengli’s knowledge of the viral cause of the miners’ illness and death, it was settled one year later when the Seeker surfaced three theses from the WIV written under the supervision of Shi Zhengli herself. The earliest of these, written in 2014, helped put the issue to bed:

"Three miners died from pneumonia in Mojiang… we investigated the virus carried by bats in this cave… it is likely that the six miners were infected with the pathogen carried by bats." 

While the 2014 thesis marked the first documentation of BtCoV/4991, the specific actions taken by the WIV researchers in studying the novel virus (either its partial sequence BtCoV/4991 or its full sequence RaTG13) following its 2013 discovery remained unknown. Peter Daszak, in a 2020 Wired article, offered a seemingly dismissive account of the WIV's handling of RaTG13:

“At the time, we were looking for SARS-related viruses, and this one was 20 percent different [from SARS-CoV-2]. We thought it's interesting, but not high-risk. So we didn't do anything about it and put it in the freezer.”

Data scientist and DRASTIC member Francisco de Asis de Ribera shattered Daszak’s account when he discovered metadata tags accidentally uploaded by the WIV when they published the genetic sequence of the RaTG13 virus to a publicly accessible international database. According to his findings, which he posted to Twitter in June 2020, WIV researchers had indeed handled or worked with the sequence on multiple occasions in 2017 and 2018. Given the inherent biosafety risks of handling novel viral pathogens, it would have been crucial for WIV researchers to transparently disclose each of their interactions with the sequence. After all, each manipulation or procedure carried the risk of a potential accident or exposure that could have triggered a lab escape. With this latest revelation, DRASTIC had yet again laid bare the WIV's persistent pattern of obfuscation and secrecy surrounding the origins and activities involving RaTG13, the closest known relative to the virus causing COVID-19. 

Conspiracy Theory no longer

This wouldn’t be the last of DRASTIC's revelations, which proved pivotal in dismantling the official narrative surrounding COVID-19's origins. The group’s push for a probe into a potential lab escape gained significant traction from a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report, which revealed that three WIV researchers had been hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19, mere weeks before the first confirmed cases emerged in Wuhan. Although the mainstream media was initially sluggish in acknowledging the group's findings, DRASTIC's relentless investigative efforts ultimately compelled a reassessment of the lab escape hypothesis as a credible theory deserving of rigorous examination. Despite lacking an incontrovertible "smoking gun," the remarkable lack of data pointing to a zoonotic spillover event has bolstered the plausibility of a lab leak scenario. What was once dismissed as a fringe 'conspiracy theory' propagated by amateurs and outsiders could no longer be ignored, owing to the substantive evidence unearthed through DRASTIC's dogged citizen-led inquiry into the pandemic's origins.

Reflection Questions

• In your view, what factors lend credibility to someone presenting a narrative: institutional titles or positions, public identification using their real name, professional credentials or affiliations with expert organizations?

• Conversely, which factors tend to undermine the perceived credibility of a person putting forth a narrative: anonymity, being smeared as a "conspiracy theorist" by authorities, or sharing information via social media?

• Based on your above answers, in what ways might you be susceptible to being misled or manipulated by narratives coming from either official or unofficial sources?

• How might power structures, conflicts of interest, or protecting reputations incentivize the dismissal of dissenting theories as mere "conspiracy theories"? 

What distinguishes the evidence and reasoning put forth by DRASTIC from the belief system of Flat Earthers (discussed in Part 3)? While both groups dissent from mainstream narratives, how do their processes for evaluating information and formulating theories differ? 

Thanks very much for taking the time to explore a few rabbit holes with me. ⚫️🐇

Further reading recommendations

This article only scratches the surface of the lab escape hypothesis and the many revelations unearthed by DRASTIC members. To deepen your exploration, please consider diving into the following resources:

Must reads!

Baker, Nicholson. (2021, January 4). The lab-leak hypothesis: For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …? Intelligencer/New York Magazine.

Jacobsen, Rowan. (2020, September 9). Could COVID-19 have escaped from a lab? Boston Magazine.

Eban, Katherine. (2021, June 3). The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins. Vanity Fair.

More about DRASTIC

Birrell, Ian. (2021, April 13). The Covid dissidents taking on China: Beijing's science stooges are being unmasked by an international team of online sleuths. Unherd.

Ryan, Jackson. (2021, April 15). How the coronavirus origin story is being rewritten by a guerrilla Twitter group. CNET.

Jacobsen, Rowan. (2021, June 2). Exclusive: How amateur sleuths broke the Wuhan lab story and embarrassed the media. Newsweek.

Revelations about Peter Daszak's involvement with the WIV

Birrell, Ian. (2023, April 12). Why did Peter Daszak change his mind? New documents reveal he warned against risky research. Unherd.

Lerner, Sharon, & Hibbett, Maia. (2021, September 23). Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research. The Intercept.

Lerner, Sharon, & Hvistendahl, Mara. (2022, March 11). Peter Daszak answers critics and defends coronavirus research. The Intercept.

Deep Dives

Chan, Alina, & Ridley, Matt. (2021). Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. HarperCollins.  

Deigin, Yuri. (2020, April 22). Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research. Medium.

Videos

Reason TV. (2021, November 18). Was It a Lab Leak? The Mysterious Origin of COVID-19 [Video]. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. YouTube. 
Accompanying Transcript. 

Weinstein, Bret. (Host). (2020, June 9). Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin: Did Covid-19 leak from a lab? [Video podcast episode]. Dark Horse Podcast. YouTube. 

1. When not otherwise cited, the information in this section “RaTG13” comes from “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, some of which is available to read for free as a sample on Amazon. Do consider purchasing and reading the entire book, as it’s a compelling account of the Herculean efforts of “outsider” scientists and citizen journalists to demonstrate the legitimacy of the lab leak hypothesis.

2. When not otherwise cited, the information in this section “Enter the Seeker” comes from a fantastic article by Rowan Jacobson's “Exclusive: How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media” for Newsweek Magazine.