Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information.
The hollow sound of our footsteps echoed through the boundless darkness; a solemn silence had befallen us, like in a temple. Our cave guide held up a single old gas lamp, the only source of light. The flickering flame instilled the unmoving stone walls and pillars with life. Salt crystal veins grew over some walls, pure white, like frozen spiderwebs on a frosty graveyard. Ducking down and crawling through a narrow passage, we entered an underground dome. The constrained light did its best to fight back the darkness, with shadows seemingly chasing, encircling, and reaching for us. Bizarre shapes and figures carved from rock, resembling dogs and cat-like canines, chased us along our way. Some other formations evoked memories of lush forests, candle wax, and mossy grass, petrified here for immortality. Who or what could have created these shapes that played a trick on my eyes? For centuries, these rock formations were subject to interpretation by the locals. Like us, they would see in them animals and plants, contemporary objects, even spirits or stories. Elephants, lotuses, passion fruit, a candle, and a hermit shooting fire out of his eyes were among the objects they perceived. Clearly, what our guide stated as a matter of fact, or whatever elements others had perceived in the past, would not necessarily be intuitive to us. These figments were haunting yet oddly bewitching; the scars in the rocks were the perfect vehicle for the scars in our minds: tortured figures, painful convolutions, death, and decay.
A jovial mechanical skeleton that stood at the entrance to Chiang Dao Cave, shaking and waving hands at tourists, rushed back into my mind. “It’s a reminder that we should laugh at death,” Peter Daszak said, pointing out its purpose. He had seen similar things all over Thailand, especially at cave entries. There was, of course, a cultural history. Ajahn Mun, a monk credited with forming the Kammaṭṭhāna, or the Thai forest tradition of Buddhism that subsequently spread throughout Thailand, was known to seek out secluded places in the wilds to mediate. The reclusiveness of caves was meant to help eliminate the defilements in the mind, develop detachment from material things, and thus deepen Buddhist practice. He is said to have attained anāgāmi — the breakage of being reborn into the human world — after meditating for three years in the Sarika Cave in Ratchaburi, not too dissimilar from Chiang Dao. At first, the local villagers wouldn’t take Ajahn Mun to the cave because of a local legend. They believed a terrestrial deva (a spirit or deity) was occupying the cave and killing intruders. This was supported by serial accounts of monks stricken with fatal illnesses after residing in the cave. And indeed, on the fourth night of staying there, Ajahn Mun would fall sick to the point of passing blood. No herbal medication would help; only surrendering to the Buddhist path would save him, so the retelling goes. Many myths contain a kernel of truth, and the occurrence of a mysterious illness befalling humans in caves is certainly not unheard of. In fact, these stories are usually what motivate scientists like Peter Daszak and others to investigate caves in the first place. But not today. We were trying to understand a different enigma, one no less worthy of investigation.
¨What is the reason we tend to perceive patterns that are not real? It is a question that has fascinated me for a long time, because much of our behavior comes down to our quick inferences, not careful analysis.
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In early February 2020, a WeChat message appeared:
The novel 2019 coronavirus is nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits. I, Shi Zhengli, swear on my life that it has nothing to do with our laboratory. …I advise those who believe and spread rumors from harmful media sources, as well as those who believe the unreliable so-called academic analysis of Indian scholars, to shut their stinking mouths.
The Chinese bat researcher Shi Zhengli, who I will get to know as a very kind and polite person, finally had enough. She was at the end of her wit. Not only had she become known as the “Batwoman,” she had also become the target of conspiracy theorists, hate mobs, foreigners, and fellow countrymen alike just a week prior to posting this message. Her instinct was to fight rumors. Her mistake? She was too honest at the wrong time. Both now and a week earlier.
When the dramatic lockdown in Wuhan on January 23 drew worldwide attention to the outbreak, few outside of science realized another remarkable event on the same day. Zhengli and her team had uploaded a scientific publication to a preprint server. It was their own analysis of the new viral genome, compared to other SARS-related coronaviruses her lab had specialized in. Fifteen years of trying to figure out where SARS came from had yielded a sizable collection of bat samples for analysis. From thousands of samples, mostly bat saliva, urine, or poo, they would extract RNA — the less stable little brother of DNA — and send it to sequencing over the years. Their goal, like a DNA test we humans might do today, was to catalog the wider SARS-related viral family. With most samples, they could only look for a mere fingerprint of the degraded viral genomes, as most viral particles would be chewed up by enzymes, inactivated, or otherwise rendered dysfunctional in these samples. Naturally, they also wanted to have complete viruses. Shi Zhengli’s lab continuously attempted to isolate intact virus particles from some of these samples to grow and study them in the lab. But even after a decade of hard work, all they ever managed to isolate and grow were three bat viruses, all related to SARS. Virus isolation was incredibly challenging work. Other groups, in the US and elsewhere, had gone years without ever isolating bat viruses for cultivation. Cataloging these fingerprint sequences, even whole genomes, was much easier.
That is why Zhengli had hundreds of cataloged samples in the lab database by the time she went to look for family members of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan. She found a cousin. Formerly annotated as Sample 4991, collected from an old copper mine shaft seven years prior, the sequences would be re-christened and given the proper virus name of RaTG13: Ra for the bat species, Rhinolophus affinis; TG for Tongguan, the town where it was found in Southern China; and the number 13 for the year of its discovery. Collected from bats in 2013, this cousin exhibited up to 96% similarity to the new virus, making a compelling case that SARS-CoV-2 came from bats. She rushed to get the results published, and by January 23, she would upload the manuscript on a preprint server to give the world early access to her findings. A preprint server — an online repository without peer review — provides an early view of new analyses before they are submitted to scientific journals for thorough quality control checks. This mostly ensures that trivial and basic mistakes, sloppy science, or unsound and unscientific ideas are challenged before final publication.
During the pandemic, many researchers used preprint servers to quickly share new analyses with the wider community, but it also led to many half-baked ideas getting undue publicity. For example, on January 17th, a preprint implied that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from snakes, animals not really associated with CoVs in the first place. Zhengli’s paper, outlining a likely bat origin, was much more credible, and it was immediately taken up for peer review and published in the journal Nature on February 3rd. However, by the time it was published, Zhengli was already under fire.
We mentioned last chapter that on January 30th, a group of Indian researchers used the RaTG13 sequence from Zhengli’s preprint to conduct a trivial peptide analysis, the equivalent of a Google search for amino acid motifs. They reported finding an “uncanny similarity” to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Their preprint — which was never peer-reviewed and later withdrawn for its mistakes — would explode into the info sphere mere hours after it was announced on social media.
I was curious what made this innocuous preprint from Indian researchers, none of them with any expertise in coronaviruses or overall virology, go viral?
One of the answers is timing; the other goes by the name of Eric Feigl-Ding and the social media dynamics of rumors. The first of many COVID-influencers, the Harvard-educated epidemiologist had a sense for the sensational — to “move fast and break things,” as McGill University would later characterize his modus operandi. He believes that many academics are too reluctant to speak out and wait too long for an abundance of evidence before making public statements. He is certainly cut from a different cloth. Opening his viral tweet in all caps, a tweet that would reach millions, he wrote:
“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD — the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad — never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career. I’m not exaggerating…”
But he was doing precisely that. The problem is not only that Feigl-Ding is “clickbaity”, but that he also communicates facts not always accurately. The R0 calculation he was referencing had already been estimated downward to 2–2.5 before he shouted it into the world. He also claimed the new virus was eight times more infectious than SARS, which was not accurate. Later, he would claim that kids had the same risk of dying as the elderly. Another blunder, unsupported by data. “I was just trying to get people to turn their heads, not necessarily to listen to me… I’m not a messiah. I do not have the perfect messaging. Clearly, my delivery was not perfect, but my point was for people to pay attention.” He would later defend his alarmism, some of which may have aged well given how terrible the pandemic turned out, but most of it was inappropriate given the data at the time. Science is rarely as fast with answers as we would like it to be.
Following a crazy week of viral origin conspiracy theories about bioweapons, Feigl-Ding weighed in, stating on January 28th that, while he did not want to be seen promoting conspiracy theories, the “official” story of the Huanan market outbreak might not be the whole story. On January 31st, the announcement of an obscure preprint about HIV inserts caught his eye. Staying true to his sensationalist brand, he decided to highlight some of the author’s claims in a less-than-measured manner.
“WHOA- the authors said the finding was ‘Unexpectedly’ related to genes from the HIV virus. Notably, there were four gene insertions… What a bold paper… I don’t know what to say.”
The interesting thing about social media is that it is not necessarily what is being said but who says it. If a Harvard-educated epidemiologist with hundreds of thousands of followers amplifies a preprint, even critically questioning it and with appropriate caveats, it will garner attention. While Eric notably did say that the findings would need to be replicated as soon as possible, he still gave the preprint enough wind in its sails to be noticed by other scientists. While most of them critically dismissed it, the mere fact that reputable scientists had a public discussion about it amplified the preprint anyway. That is the attention economy.
Of course, Feigl-Ding was not the only amplifier who spotted that alarming preprint. On the other side of the planet, another scientist, author, and media commentator named Anand Ranganathan got the jump on Eric, tweeting on the same day as the preprint was announced:
“Oh my god. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed [“not fortuitous’]. Scary if true.”
He shared this with his hundreds of thousands of followers, and his message rippled far and wide, from the Chinese diaspora to the China-averse Indian social media sphere to Eric Feigl-Ding, who quoted the Indian influencer to bolster his own suspicions. Sense-making on Twitter often runs like this: a rumor spreads, and others in the network start cross-commenting, and the more people decide to talk about the rumor, the more credibility it seems to get.
I think this is because our brain evolved to work with little data to provide a coherent picture of the world. Our biology constantly prompts our minds to connect the dots, to find similarities and relations we can leverage for our understanding, especially when information is scarce or the need to make sense is dire. Our brains are, to some abstraction, prediction machines that hate dealing with ambiguity or uncertainty. It is a cognitive strain that feels physiologically unpleasant, like a hand on a hot stove. The sooner we can make sense of our current circumstances and identify the relevant patterns, the quicker our metaphorical hand comes off the hot stove. Is it any surprise we got so good at finding patterns even with so few dots to connect?
Yet, while astonishingly powerful, we know today that these pattern recognition algorithms are not always accurate. Seeing animals, spirits, and tortured figments in the cave’s rocky formations is one such example. Our minds tend to impose a meaningful interpretation on nebulous perceptions (pareidolia) that jive with our expectations and understanding of the world. This is why locals would see elephants, bamboo trees, or deities in the same ambiguous rocks when I’d see a bear with a stick or a broken-off mountain range. Although context matters, everyone saw more in these rock formations than there was because of the same cognitive mechanisms.
Some researchers posit that there are good evolutionary reasons to perceive patterns beyond what is justified by the available information. It’s simply better for survival. Was it the wind that moved the tall grass, or could it be a lion’s stalk? Does the stranger hide a weapon, or is that something else in his hands? Those who waited for sufficient evidence to make the right call might not have had the same chances at procreation as their more suspicious peers. For most of human history, missing a pattern could’ve cost you your life. Seeing a pattern when there is none? Not so much. As a result, our brain’s neural networks would’ve been smart enough to trade at least some accuracy for speed. Especially when the survival stakes seem high, our ancestors might have benefited from false but actionable certainty (identifying predators or other threats) over action-impairing uncertainty. So at least the theory.
Within half a day, the obscure HIV preprint from no-name researchers doing a trivial and flawed analysis had become one of the most shared and visited scientific manuscripts of the early pandemic, and it spelled misery for Shi Zhengli. Various rumors about her lab’s supposedly poor biosafety, about alleged military connections, and about close bat ancestors that could have been used to create the new virus had already reached too many people. Now, Zhengli had published RaTG13, a cousin of SARS-CoV-2 that was largely identical but for some suspicious “insertions” that looked like they came from the much-feared AIDS-causing HIV. Had she inadvertently given away a secret? Miles Guo and Steve Bannon had just spread an article about how officials would admit the virus came from the Wuhan lab. Could this be her confession?
The internet abhors an information vacuum, and our brains are quick to connect dots. Whether we want it to or not. Just like the tortured faces in Chiang Dao Cave, a monster arose and took shape in the minds of many. An unholy experiment gone awry, a chimera emerging from behind the shadows of scientific ivory towers, and Chinese military ambition. How else could we explain what our digital eyes would show us? What about the unprecedented lockdown of 30 million people in China? The cancellation of pro-civil rights protests and hawkish restrictions in Hong Kong? The dramatic tone of breathless commentators all around the world? Was our life in danger too?
Fear creates hate, and Shi Zhengli, previously outspoken on social media and having always stood her ground in discussions, could not deal with the irrationality and fact-free insults coming her way. She began to fight back, not realizing that feeding the online trolls would only increase their influence and drag her down into the mud with them. She exposed herself more, and it ended predictably: her vehement denial achieved the opposite effect of what she wanted people to hear and believe. Online agitators would highlight her tone, misrepresent what she said, decontextualize, selectively amplify, and fake being outraged. Why the harsh words? Why does she not answer legitimate questions? What is she hiding? Can the denials of a person who calls others uncivilized and wants them to “shut their stinking mouths” really be taken seriously? She certainly looks guilty to me. These “discussions” would go on and on.
Scientists are not known for receiving media training, and few ever get into the hot seat of public outrage like Zhengli suddenly found herself in. Doxxing, harassment, hacking attempts, and even death threats, much of it had started with Miles Guo’s group of influencers but had now become a thousand times worse. From UK tabloids and the right-wing blogosphere to the Murdoch media empire, from overeager Indian scientists and the Chinese diaspora to the Falun-Gong propaganda outlet, The Epoch Times, everybody developed an interest in the Batwoman. Soon, anti-vaxx conspiratorial communities, self-proclaimed independent investigators, biosafety cranks, and fake bioweapon experts would join the chorus. Everybody seems to suddenly point the finger at Zhengli’s work and laboratory. She was not doing okay, and neither was her team. On an institutional level, nobody felt the need to come out in support of her either — not the Chinese Academy of Science, not the Chinese or international media, not even the usually censorious Chinese state. Why was nobody speaking up on her behalf?
For good and bad, scientists have an allegiance to truth, not people. Somebody’s word counts for little; only verifiable evidence matters. Despite all the absurd conspiracy theories from Canadian spies to secret bioweapons using HIV inserts, a laboratory origin per se was not a scientifically unreasonable hypothesis. A novel coronavirus could have come from a lab studying bat coronaviruses.
When uncertainty is large but data is sparse, it becomes easy to connect the dots, to assume an underlying pattern from the few impressions we get. Just like in a dark cave, every bit of information we get connects to a larger picture.
The interesting thing for me is that as soon as we recognize a pattern, regardless of whether it is true or false, it becomes much more difficult to forget it again. Our brain finds it difficult to let go. In Chiang Dao Cave, there was one particular formation where I couldn’t stop seeing a human face in the tortured rock once my brain made that connection. Absolutely no one is immune to recognizing false patterns from time to time and having trouble shaking them off.
As we will see, not even very accomplished scientists are immune to falling into this perception trap — especially if they already had a rough idea of the coronavirus work on the WIV in their heads.
“Eddie, can I discuss something with you? I think I have seen something… I need to talk it through… to pull me back from the edge.”
This is how Eddie Holmes would summarize the time when his friend Kristian Andersen approached him on January 31st, 2020. And when Kristian calls, Eddie listens.
Kristian Andersen is a renowned evolutionary virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California. By 2023, our paths had intersected a few times over the last months, but this time, I did not want to talk science but history with him. While at a conference in Switzerland, he submitted himself to my friendly interrogation — certainly friendlier than the witch hunt the US Congress had in store for him (at the time of our interview, he was to be deposed in hearings soon). He still managed to carry the weary strain of repetition with patience, even three years in. A slight dimple graced his chin, a charming punctuation in his otherwise stern facade. When it comes to emerging disease outbreaks, he knows what he is talking about. However, his voice echoed with fatigue, an audible testament to the countless recollections of his early work he’d been compelled to recount. His early curiosity into the origin question would put a target on his back, lead to character assassinations mercilessly pursued by the highest halls of power and media… but more on that later.
Like many, Kristian had first heard about the new outbreak via the proMED mail at the very end of 2019. When the first genome sequences became available to researchers, many emerging disease experts started taking a closer look, including him. Kristian had been working on emerging diseases like Ebola and Lassa fever in West Africa or Zika in South America previously, so when he heard about the outbreak in Wuhan, he and his colleagues immediately started with the basics of their craft. They tried to place 2019-nCoV among the wider viral family tree by comparing it to previously found viruses, including SARS, WIV1 — a SARS-related virus published by WIV — and, of course, the 2018 bat viruses from Zhoushan. “We basically took all available sequences from GenBank,” Kristian explained. When a few more samples of 2019-nCoV trickled in, he spent some time cleaning up the sequencing data for possible errors and contaminations, a necessary step when trying to do some precision work later before he created a phylogenetic tree of the outbreak. It would allow him to date back to the time of the outbreak, and of course, under many assumptions, he ballparked using SARS as a proxy. “That [dating] was the first focus. This is what I have done a lot,” he reiterated as he explained the timeline to me. Dating is crucial to get a sense of how quickly the numbers grow and when the outbreak started, which could be weeks, months, or even years in some cases. The records of his early thinking are still available online on Virological, a website that is a combination of message board, discussion forum, and preprint server for virologists. I double-checked his early entries. Coincidentally, he had estimated his time for the first human infection around November 2019, a date that still holds up today. It was good science and pretty standard for his line of work; by no means was it controversial.
All that changed when, on January 30th, Kristian Andersen received an email from a colleague from his department: “Is there anything in the sequences you have done that could definitively rule out gain-of-function studies that have been carried out in labs as a source of 2019-nCoV? I won’t quote you; I am just interested,” it read. The circulating rumors had certainly not passed him by. However, the two scientists have a very jovial relationship, so Kristian replied a bit tongue-in-cheek: “You are a tinfoil hat, but sure, I’ll take a look.” He further inquired if there was a specific reason to look deeper, and his colleague replied, “As usual, the conspiracy theories… are going over the top on nCoV. It would be good to just focus on the science to see where it leads.” Kristian was in a favorable position to do so; he had already set up alignments — sequence-matched comparisons — of closely related virus genomes to figure out what genetic elements might make 2019-nCoV so unusual. Trying to understand new viruses is often done in relation to ones already known. Following his exchange with respected colleague, he decided to use a fine-tooth comb and go through all the genomic oddities he could find that might point to laboratory manipulation or unexplained genetic elements given related viruses.
He noticed multiple oddities, and we have to indulge the technicalities a little bit. For instance, Kristian observed that there was a high rate of mutations at amino acid residues — specific positions within the larger spike protein — that would lie within the protein’s receptor-binding domain (RBD). This was the part that allowed the viral protein to target the human ACE2 receptor and enter our cells. These mutations could be a sign of selection pressure in a human host or an adaptation to our biology. He even discovered an amino acid residue in the 2019-nCoV receptor-binding domain that was similar to SARS but not RaTG13, which could be a natural reversion but also a possibly purposeful introduction. Maybe somebody wanted to make the receptor-binding domain more SARS-like because SARS is known to infect humans, whereas most bat viruses cannot? It’s a possibility he considered. Additionally, he found a common restriction site at the end of the spike protein sequence. This is a sequence motif that molecular biologists sometimes introduce to shuffle genetic elements in and out of larger sequences. This was followed by a drop in overall sequence diversity. Something subtle like this might indicate that the upstream diversity in the spike protein was spliced in artificially.
Most dramatically, a comparison of nCOV-2019 with SARS and MERS showed that the new virus had acquired a short genetic element called a “furin cleavage site” (FCS) at the S1/S2 position. This where the spike protein gets cut in order to open up and harpoon itself into a host cell membrane. It was suspicious because RaTG13 and other related bat viruses lacked that short amino acid motif in that position, and it was a functional element that possibly implicated transmission dynamics. In his sequence comparisons, imagine the FCS standing out like a llama in a flock of sheep.
None of these oddities was a smoking gun, but on that day, it was enough to get Kristian worried. He was roughly aware of the work conducted at WIV and the biosafety level at which they operated with bat viruses. He would frantically rush through all their publications to get up to speed on their research, and by that evening, he had reached out to Eddie Holmes. “Can I discuss something with you? I think I have seen something… I need to talk it through… to pull me back from the edge.”
Kristian was unaware that Eddie was already primed for suspicion. He had chatted just before with his longtime friend Jeremy Farrar, then head of the UK Wellcome Trust, a powerful funding organization. He was independently wondering if this virus could have escaped from a lab, given the conspiracy theories and chatter online, as well as the fact that Shi Zhengli had just released RaTG13, the closest known cousin of this new virus. Nobody could escape connecting the dots given the news cycle. At Jeremy’s request, Eddie had looked at Zhengli’s publication but did not find anything suspicious. However, when Kristian called and showed him all the oddities he had discovered from his sequence comparisons, including the acquisition of a furin cleavage site that looked like it was inserted, Eddie became agitated. “Call me now,” he wrote to his friend, Jeremy Farrar. For Jeremy, it was late, and he replied, “What? Now…?” to which Eddie responded, “NOW.” When Jeremy called, Eddie explained what Kristian had told him, and Jeremy went “from 0 to 100 in like two seconds,” Eddie recalled from their exchange. Everything just seemed to be coming together: the closest viral relative from the WIV lab, the explosive growth in cases in Wuhan requiring a city-wide lockdown, Kristian Andersen reaching out with some odd features that look potentially engineered, and a possible furin cleavage site insertion not found in related viruses.
After discussing the situation with Kristian, Jeremy contacted Eddie again. He and Eddie were thunderstruck, wondering what the next steps were. They wanted to assemble a group of people who could discuss this clearly, and they started spitballing names. Experts like Ron Fouchier, Christian Drosten, and Marion Koopmans came to mind. They didn’t invite Ralph Baric, a pioneer in CoV research who collaborated with Zhengli, because he was too close to WIV. “Let me tell you now, Ralph did nothing wrong. But we wanted to make this a proper investigation and felt he was too close to the work,” Eddie explained their reasoning. Jeremy contacted Anthony Fauci. Jeremy also told Eddie that he needed to reach out to the Australian intelligence services, while Jeremy contacted the British intelligence services and Kristian, the American officials. Within three hours, Eddie was on the phone with the Australian spy chief. “How the hell did you manage that?” I asked him. His idea was to reach out to the then Chief Medical Officer of the Government, Brendan Murphy, via a colleague at the University of Sydney who knew him. “I told them it was urgent, and Brendan called me within the hour, which is impressive for Saturday morning.” After they hung up, less than an hour later, his phone rang again. It was Nick Warner, then head of the Office of National Intelligence. They went over the possibilities of a lab-created virus. Eddie felt that it had been a nerve-wracking Saturday in Australia, but he felt that he had told “everyone that needs to know within a few hours of finding out.”
It was Friday night in the UK. Jeremy Farrar, who had been in meetings all week with the American CDC under Robert Redfield, the NIH/NIAID under Anthony Fauci, and the WHO to hear updates from George Gao on the situation in Wuhan, reached out to Dr. Fauci. “Tony… I would really like to speak with you this evening. It is 10 pm now in the UK. Can you phone me?” Soon after, the two would talk, and Jeremy advised Anthony to contact Kristian as well. Exhausted, Jeremy went to bed. Not long after waking up on Saturday, he would find an email from Dr. Fauci in his inbox:
Jeremy:
I just got off the phone with Kristian Anderson and he related to me his concern about the Furine site mutation in the spike protein of the currently circulating 2019-nCoV. I told him that as soon as possible, he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to carefully examine the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly, and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA, this would be the FBI, and in the UK, it would be MI5. It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern from experts in the field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology. In the meantime, I will alert my US government official colleagues of my conversation with you and Kristian and determine what further investigation they recommend. Let us stay in touch.
Best regards,
Tony
Following Eddie and Kristian’s recommendation, Jeremy sent out the invitations for the first conference call. Among those invited were Christian Drosten, a renowned CoV virologist and SARS-1 veteran from Germany; Mike Ferguson from the Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research in the UK; the Dutch virologist and gain-of-function expert Ron Fouchier; emergent disease veterinarian and MERS veteran Marion Koopmans; evolutionary virologist and phylogenetics expert Andrew Rambaut; virologist Robert “Bob” Garry from Tulane University; Stefan Pöhlmann, a virologist at the German Primate Centre in Göttingen; and a range of institutional leaders such as Tony Fauci from NIAID, Francis Collins from NIH, and Paul Schreier and Josie Golding from the Wellcome Trust in the UK. By 2 p.m. Washington time, the group would convene.
The content of this teleconference on February 1, 2020, has subsequently become a staple in man-made mythology as the “place where it happened,” so to speak. This was an international cover-up by high-ranking public officials and key virologists if one were to believe the many false fictions told today. I guess experts discussing important topics in small circles are known to invite the public’s imagination. How come Kristian Andersen and other scientists, once so alarmed, came to change their minds? Why did he, together with Eddie Holmes, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and another author, publish a paper a few weeks later stating, “…[W]e do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”? Was there foul play? Did grant money change hands?
By all indications, what really happened was much more mundane. We know this inside story quite well because all their communications have since been leaked, released, or made public via FOIA requests. I have also heard about the event multiple times from different scientists, and I saw their communications and emails from the time. To me, there is no big mystery about what happened. Here is my reconstruction:
They had some technical troubles trying to get everybody connected at first. Jeremy Farrar would give an introduction about the meeting; Kristian would deliver a PowerPoint presentation showing the oddities he had found, and then they would discuss what they thought of it. The coronavirus experts were more skeptical about Kristian’s suggestion, having seen very similar things in other viruses. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins were mostly silent, letting the experts raise points. The supposed HIV-like insert analysis that the Indian preprint had laid out was discussed and discarded as flawed rather quickly. They also tackled Kristian’s oddities one by one.
Andrew Rambaut compared the level of mutations between the original SARS virus and its closest bat relative, as well as SARS-CoV-2 with RaTG13; they were in the same range, so the diversity was certainly possible to come about through natural processes. He was, however, unsure about the furin-cleavage site. Ron Fouchier noted that bat coronaviruses generally do not have furin cleavage sites, but human coronaviruses do. These viruses entered human populations decades, if not centuries ago, so they certainly were not engineered or tinkered with. As a result, natural evolution could not be ruled out. Ron also noted that the single amino acid substitution in the receptor binding domain, a likely reversion from RaTG13 but identical to SARS virus, is generally absent in bats and could be a sign of adaptation to a host, for example, in mice. However, for lab experiments, it would not make much sense, as one would work with a characterized virus to test these adaptations, not an unknown bat virus. Christian Drosten was more dismissive, viewing the oddities as some cherry-picked coincidences that were not inconsistent with anything he knew about coronaviruses.
Kristian and Eddie maintained that 5 out of 6 amino acids in the receptor binding domain — shown to be critical in SARS virus binding to humans — were altered between bat virus RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2. This apparent adaptation to bind to human ACE2 required an explanation. Additionally, the insertion of a furin cleavage site still looked very suspicious to them, and others agreed. They were also not satisfied with the coronavirus experts dismissing the predicted O-linked glycosylation (sometimes, specific amino acids in proteins have exposed sites where complex sugar molecules can get attached to by the cellular machinery) surrounding the furin cleavage site because Kristian and Eddie believed it might be significant. Glycosylation on virion particles can contribute to a variety of things, from immune system evasion to facilitated cell entry, and it sure seemed like the inserted furin cleavage site was opening up the protein for glycosylation in three nearby places. Isn’t that relevant?
Kristian confided in me that he became a bit obsessed. He was quite convinced of a laboratory origin, and he thought if he would just go through old publications and databases containing sequence information, he would certainly find proof. “All I needed to do is basically find genetic pieces of this virus before the pandemic.” He has also discussed this topic with his fellow Scripps Research professor Mike Farzan, who spawned the idea in Kristian that serial passage — the consecutive infection of cells or animal models with the virus to study how it mutates and adapts to a host — of viruses can select for furin cleavage sites. This is because trypsin, a protease similar to furin, is required for passaging in cell cultures to allow the infected cells to be harvested from the dish by breaking away their connection to the culture dish. “Maybe using trypsin facilitates selection for such cleavage sites in viruses?” Kristian speculated. He could laugh about it today. It turns out that the whole thing wasn’t true. Maybe he misunderstood Mike; he wasted days looking for papers that reported on this phenomenon, but he found no evidence to support it.
Rummaging through their old private emails, I was reminded of the dark Chiang Dao cave a bit. Clearly, Kristian, Eddie, and Jeremy could not unsee the figments they thought they had recognized. Even Bob Garry could not explain how the furin cleavage site came about through natural processes. Just like in the cave, when the data is just too limited, and the need to understand is dire, our expectations shape our perceptions. In a way, trying to make sense of a novel genome is not too different from wandering along a sparsely lit cave, clinging to what is familiar and wary of the ambiguous. Some scientists, in the haste of the moment, might see a man with a pipette in those rock formations of genetic letters or even perceive fragments of an entirely different beast, like the Indian researchers did with their uncanny HIV/AIDS similarities. The coronavirus veterans, Ron and Christian, coming from different backgrounds with different expectations, would be more of the “looks like another mirage to me” persuasion.
“Everything that seems counterintuitive with CoVs is actually logical when you work with them a few times.” Jasnah Kholin’s words rang in my ear. She had been amused by the false shadows Kristian had been chasing, but this was, of course, with the power of hindsight. At a hastily arranged teleconference, our perceptions and intuitions can mislead us, and in the fever of the situation, who would turn out correct was not a given. “I am honestly 50:50 on this,” Jeremy Farrar would write after the conference, “and Eddie is like 60:40 for a lab origin.”
While the overall feeling from the experts was that deliberate engineering could likely be ruled out, the idea that serial passage in a lab could bring forth such strong adaptation to human ACE2 was compelling. Even Tony Fauci asked about serial passage in hACE2 mice, lab animals where the mouse gene encoding the ACE2 receptor had been exchanged for its human version. Could this have been what was done? Adaptations during serial passage are likely indistinguishable from natural selection, at least on a superficial level. Without more time for science to sort out the kinks, especially without more data coming from an increasingly reluctant China, this was the best they could do.
Science is much slower than our imagination. In the meantime, Indian newspapers would report excessively about “HIV” similarities, and the press in Israel would quote dubious Israeli and US intelligence experts about supposed biological warfare. Soon, US Senator Tom Cotton would openly implicate WIV and get into a public spat with the Chinese ambassador. At this point, social media was like a zoo. Every amateur sleuth, every wannabe scientist, every crank, contrarian, and conspiracy theorist would write long Twitter threads, Facebook posts, or Medium blogs reporting about the evidence they had “unearthed,” usually via a Google search or Google Translate, to a hungry and enthusiastic audience. For many trained and even more untrained eyes, everything seemed to coalesce around a common theme: something was not natural about this new virus.
That’s how our brains work in the information age. The more we search for suspicious connections, the more spurious connections the search engines will deliver to us. The internet abhors an information vacuum, and our brains can’t help but connect the dots we are shown. Like we’ve seen with the blogger Zerohedge, a chimera of various overlapping ideas — from weak biosafety and secret military ambitions for coronavirus research to bat researchers at WIV making hybrid viruses with HIV — would eventually rise out of the sensemaking wetware we call our pattern-recognizing brains. Once we believe we have spotted a worrisome pattern, it becomes difficult to unsee it. We seem to be wired this way. For most of human history, missing a predator could’ve cost our lives. Seeing a pattern when there is none? Where is the harm? Under threat, we are especially prone to trade accuracy for speed, and in 2020, there was a virus exploding like nothing we have ever witnessed before. Is it really surprising that many saw man-made malice behind the ravaging beast?
Yet one important thing I learned in Chiang Dao Cave was that even the most convincing faces lurking in the shadows might just turn out to be a weirdly shaped rock when visited closer. We humans are not hopelessly irrational; our overoptimized primate brains sometimes just need a little more light to get it right. This illuminative act, in essence, is the role of the scientific process: to gradually close in on a murky problem until we see it in full, to offer a new perspective or vantage point. The only drawback is that the scientific process is too slow to be of immediate relevance. At least usually.
Eddie Holmes had mentored a lot of great students and postdocs over his career, and one of them had just reached out on his most stressful weekend. “Hey Eddie, I got some wildlife samples that seem to be really cool for SARS-CoV-2… they are from a coronavirus in pangolins…” Tommy Lam, a bioinformatician and computational virologist at the University of Hong Kong, would ask, “Can we have a chat about this?” His specialty is developing new tools for sequence databases to allow better genomic analysis, and these tools came in handy for finding and analyzing some intriguing sequencing samples with high similarity to parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. They originated from the Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center, which had received 21 live Malayan pangolins (protected animals resembling walking pine cones with hard scales often used in Chinese medicine) from the Anti-Smuggling Customs Bureau. Most were in dire health, their bodies covered with skin eruptions. Sixteen died even after extensive rescue efforts by caretakers, their lungs swollen with a frothy liquid. Researchers from the Guangdong Key Laboratory of Animal Conservation had taken samples for metagenomic sequencing and published a paper finding an infection with an unspecified coronavirus. Tommy Lam had written to the data repository SRA archive to make those sequences public, and after checking them out, he found they resembled, in part, 2019-nCoV.
He immediately reached out to his former mentor, Eddie, so they could take a look together. Independently, a US bioinformatician named Matt Wong had also found the sequences and put a quick post about them on the Virological website. After a hectic weekend of phone calls and teleconferences, Eddie finally had time to look at the Virological post and talk to Tommy about the pangolin sequences. He almost fell out of his chair. The pangolin coronavirus had a receptor-binding domain that was almost identical to the one of SARS-CoV-2. And those mysteriously adapted amino acids that are so relevant for human ACE2 binding? The pangolin virus had all six of them, while the closest bat relative, RaTG13, did not. How the hell did a divergent pangolin coronavirus come up with an almost perfectly matched genetic puzzle piece shared by SARS-CoV-2?
Kristian had been obsessed with finding any genetic piece of SARS-CoV-2 used by any lab to prove that the virus might have escaped from one. Suddenly, one of those pieces appeared — not in a lab, but in one of the most smuggled animals on the entire planet. This discovery dramatically changed the opinion of scientists, and a week later, by February 8th, Eddie Holmes and most others had already come to see that a natural origin was much more likely given these developments. Kristian needed a few more days to digest. He was still searching more in the literature, trying a few ideas, and following up on the weird glycans surrounding the furin cleavage site. In the weeks after the teleconference, Kristian, Eddie, Bob Garry, Andrew Rambaut, and emergent disease immunologist and SARS and MERS veteran Ian Lipkin continued working on the viral genome and origin question as a team. Eventually, Kristian, the last lab origin hold-out, could not justify keeping his obsession alive, given that the scientific evidence told a very different story.
And that is a good thing. In times of existential threat or uncertainty, our brains tend to overfit patterns to speed up our sensemaking. It becomes hard to unsee something we think we have recognized, and once our beliefs harden, we rarely ever revisit them but rather opt to justify and defend what we hold true. The scientific method is antithetical to this aspect of our human nature. It prompts us to constantly seek to overcome the pitfalls of our intuitions, the fervor of our beliefs, the unholy pull of our fears, or the sweet biases of our wishful thinking.
The newly discovered pangolin sequences were an opportunity to challenge intuitions, and as a trained scientist, Kristian overcame seeing the false figments he once believed true. The same was true for Eddie Holmes and the others. Shared deliberation about what the evidence truly suggests, varied expertise and backgrounds, time to work on a problem, and the opportunity to go on wild goose chases are all part of that process. Science is not about having the perfect proof to answer every question; it is about using evidence to better approximate the boundaries of our knowledge and dispel the myths of our preconceived notions. There is rarely perfect certainty or evidence. We still don’t know how the hell these pangolin viruses came to share a hitherto unseen key genetic element with SARS-CoV-2. Just as the appearance of these genetic pieces would have been a smoking gun for a lab origin had they appeared in some previous coronavirus work, their appearance in trafficked pangolins meant there was a much larger laboratory somewhere out there that we know all too little about. But we will get there in due time.
Kristian Andersen and the others ended up collecting their deliberations and findings into a scientific publication, the seminal paper “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” In normal times, it would have been a cure for our societal pareidolia of a man-made virus. Instead, after its publication, all hell would break loose.
While the scientists were investigating the virus, American President Donald Trump was doing his damnedest to ignore it. First, he praised Xi Jinping for his pandemic response and downplayed the pandemic risk at home. Maybe he was hoping, despite the mounting evidence, that he would not need to act; after all, just a handful of nCoV cases were officially confirmed. The bitter reality of his misjudgment quickly came crashing in. The US was flying blind. The CDC, under Robert Redfield, could not keep track of cases. Surprisingly, they failed to produce a simple diagnostic PCR test after a month of trying, while the Chinese CDC, researchers in Hong Kong, Germany, Korea, Japan, and the WHO all managed to do so in the first weeks of January. The US administration, maybe too proud or too shortsighted, did not want to import tests from other nations. Incompetence soon led to finger-pointing. And that was just the tip of the iceberg of problems the US would face. Nobody needs me to recount the many failings and falsehoods of President Trump, which were obvious to anyone paying attention at the time.
I think it is more fascinating to investigate what pull President Trump exerted on our various media ecosystems, especially Twitter, where he still dominated in 2020. Over the next few months, to distract from domestic problems and deflect from the often-malicious incompetence of an erratic leader in the president’s office, many right-wing pundits, sycophantic partisan politicians, and even the State Department and White House opted into a strategy of blaming China for releasing a so-called man-made virus. In February, the hashtags #CCPvirus or #chinesevirus gained more and more popularity despite the WHO’s warning that they were stigmatizing. Anti-Asian hate was on the rise. One study analyzing almost 800,000 tweets with the #chinesevirus hashtag found that more than half contained anti-Asian sentiment. Things had gotten out of hand quickly, as they tend to do when public officials instigate fear and hate. Subsequently, anti-Asian hate crime events reported to the DOJ more than doubled, most occurring in March and April 2020, following COVID prevention measure announcements. It was a traumatic time for public health scientists in many countries. Remarks from the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lamented, “At WHO, we’re not just battling the virus; we’re also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response.”
“We condemn conspiracy theories that the novel coronavirus could have come from a lab”
Peter Daszak had written in a draft of an open letter in early February 2020. He had a front-row seat to the rise of anti-Asian hatred because of his collaborators in China. “The original idea was to do a petition and put it on the web,” the British zoologist said as he showed me an early draft version. “Looking back at it, it was so naive politically.” Using his diary and email records, we tried to reconstruct what had happened in those weeks that prompted him to write the now controversial document. He had reached out to Shi Zhengli’s group after she published RaTG13 because he had a very academic worry: did the NIH provide funding for the discovery of the closest ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 but not receive credit for it? Zhengli’s discovery was a major paper bound to be highly cited, as he assumed at the time. However, the virus from Mojiang was collected in unrelated projects that were not sponsored by the NIH, so there was not much to be done.
It was during that call at the end of January that his diary shows he first heard about the attacks on Zhengli by conspiracy theorists from a collaborating junior researcher. It would only get worse in the days that followed. When Shi Zhengli told him a week later that she received death threats and that people claimed she created a bioweapon, he was outraged. Zhengli and her team were being maligned publicly despite being completely innocent, as best he could tell from years of working with them. Scientists are a minority in every country they are in, and Zhengli had no institutional help. Nobody was on her side or felt the need to defend her. Peter had been outraged, he explained to me, and he wanted to do something to bring the discussion back to facts, so a petition from scientists seemed to make sense.
By coincidence, as Peter was searching to find signatories for his statement of support, he found himself on a plane right next to Jeremy Farrar on the 12th of February. They had both been at the WHO in Geneva. They started chatting about the harassment of Chinese scientists and how unbelievably bad it has gotten with conspiracy theories around this topic. Jeremy, in turn, explained to Peter that Eddie Holmes and others had looked deeper at the genome, and they would soon publish an analysis showing that this virus was most likely not engineered. Peter, who had a decent familiarity with Zhengli’s work, was not surprised. They both realized the need for scientists to speak out publicly, given the lack of political leadership in too many countries that had let hate rise. “It was to show solidarity with our colleagues in China,” he explained to me. He had circulated the petition draft among emergent disease experts he knew and tried to get renowned colleagues from all over the world to sign it, including collaborators in Asia and Europe, members of the WHO, and basically anybody he could reach. After their conversation, Jeremy happily signed Peter’s statement of support, as did two dozen other emergent disease experts.
On February 19th, the loose statement draft turned into a letter of support for Chinese scientists, and it was published by 27 leading public health scientists in the journal The Lancet. It expressed that, during a crisis, Chinese scientists working on the frontlines of the pandemic response had found themselves unjustly under attack, and scientists worldwide should support them. “We have a choice whether to stand up and support colleagues who are being attacked and threatened daily by conspiracy theorists or to just turn a blind eye,” Peter Daszak told journalist Jon Cohen at the time. The Lancet authors also stated that they “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Little did Peter expect in those early days that his actions to defend his collaborators and Chinese scientists in general against abuse — to do all he could to find signatories and condemn baseless conspiracy theories — would later be interpreted as an attempt to stifle debate or even organize a scientific cover-up.
Despite popular narratives to the contrary today, best I can tell, all of his efforts made little difference either way. With online signing, the letter garnered somewhat over 20,000 signatures but failed to make a dent in the prevailing wave of hate. It barely got any media coverage at all; the only thing it truly achieved was the ire of conspiracy theorists, who would now turn their attention to Peter Daszak. Soon, they would find mighty allies against him in the press, anti-science pressure groups, and even the White House. Within two months, Peter would find his organization defunded by the most powerful man in office. Despite the best efforts of the WHO’s director general and the Lancet letter from the experts, the media discourse about a man-made virus continued unabated. Geopolitically, it had reached the highest offices.
After senator Tom Cotton claimed that a bioweapon from China could not be ruled out (a claim some still cling to), the US State Department, led by Mike Pompeo, trotted the same line, directly pointing the finger at Beijing. Soon they would be claiming that there was “tremendous evidence” that the virus came from the lab. China hit back. On March 12, Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of China, used CDC director Robert Redfield’s public admittance of failure to do proper PCR tests and tracing virus deaths to go on the offensive with deflective falsehoods:
When did patient zero begin in the US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!
While the political representatives were spitting out falsehoods for their domestic audiences, the virus spread uninhibitedly.
Eventually, public health scientists had to step up to fill the political vacuum. They had to stick their necks out to offer painful advice to reluctant local decision-makers. Flatten the curve at almost any cost, or face chaos and death, like in Wuhan or Northern Italy. On March 16, New York City was reporting over 10,000 infections, and schools across the US were closing down. Citizens were scared. In response, President Donald Trump started calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” in press conferences. The implication was that if American bodies piled up, that was on China, not him, flying in the face of WHO reports about stigmatization and to the outrage of many. Citizens felt, justifiably, that the president had been asleep at the wheel. Many wanted to hold him accountable — a heated environment in an already tense election year.
On March 17, during this fever of finger-pointing, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper called “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the peer-reviewed analysis and work of Kristian Andersen and his co-authors. It contained a dramatic conclusion for the current media environment and #Chinavirus panic:
Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.
This scientific assessment hit the circulating origin suspicions like a bombshell. The “proximal origin” paper offered some hard evidence against the popular man-made theories, leading to wide media coverage. Yet the attention it received within the scientific literature paled compared to what was happening outside of it. It went viral. I believe this amplification was not a reflection of the explosivity of the scientific findings but rather of the polarized and politicized environment. After all, reporting on this paper would not just be interesting on its own; it also served as a timely and arguably necessary slap in the face of the Trump administration, which acted so detached from reality.
The administration, paralyzed by ineptitude and make-belief, seemingly devoted all their energy to a #CCPvirus blame game as the pandemic went out of control in the US and the first bodies started piling up in New York City. Even media outlets that never cover science would pick up the scientific study as a kind of receipt for having caught Trump and his crew of opportunistic misfits in yet another lie. Snappy headlines followed, from niche to mainstream media alike. ABC News even ran an article titled, “Sorry conspiracy theorists. The study concludes COVID-19 is ‘not a laboratory construct.’” Using “proximal origins” as a tool for political accountability against a lying administration, journalists and news outlets awarded dramatic amplification and visibility to the paper. Within days, it has garnered tens of thousands of downloads — almost unheard of for any scientific paper — and way more coverage than that regarding its conclusions in the news cycle. The message of “proximal origins” reached many millions. But all this media attention and instrumentalization of science to attack Trump also elicited reactions and malice towards science in some corners of the political electorate.
For some, virologists had made their president look stupid. For others, “proximal origin” sabotaged the higher goal of being hawkish about China and biological warfare. For the majority of conspiratorially-minded people, the science did not square with all the op-eds, blogs, and articles they have been reading the last few weeks about all the suspicious connections this virus allegedly had with the lab, with the Chinese military and with HIV. “Given the amount of completely nutso emails I received today, I am not sure we convinced all the conspiracy theorists out there,” Kristian noted dryly to his coauthors on March 19. The agitation was palpable; the virologists had stirred the hornet’s nest, and politicians do not like being stung.
It was a bit of a watershed moment. From this point forward, the man-made idea, which had its roots in crowd-sourced myths by influencers, our own intuitive biases, and the political calculations of various anti-China activists, soon became a lightning rod for conspiratorial ideation and signaling political affiliation alike. An ordinary, albeit inconvenient, scientific paper had put all virologists, as well as science in general, in the crosshairs of motivated actors, influencers, and true believers who did not take “no” for an answer. Revenge plans were put into action, and many scientists would be sent on a torturous journey.
Subsequently, the authors of the “proximal origin” paper, the authors of Peter Daszak’s Lancet letter supporting Chinese scientists, and, of course, scientific leaders such as presidential advisor Dr. Fauci or Dr. Tedros and the whole of the WHO were seen as either shills for China, part of a scientific cabal, or both, and that they were engaged in a cover-up trying to stifle or shut down scientific inquiry into the virus. Their early actions put a target on their back, with sleuths and activists digging deeper into the history, motivation, and connections of these scientists. Eddie and Jeremy reaching out to the intelligence services, sharing Kristian’s initial suspicions, and their teleconference call with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins from NIAID and NIH would later be discovered by FOIA requests and portrayed as the “place where it happened.” The moment when international scientists got instructions from the “higher-ups” to allegedly suppress the idea of a man-made virus.
For me, these were not plausible suppositions, regardless of whether the scientists in question were motivated to disprove Trump, mistaken on the science, or even guilty as charged (for the record, they were neither of those things). The simple reality is that nobody has the power to orchestrate a scientific cover-up on any larger issue. The scientific community is not a monolithic society; they do not take marching orders, and they certainly do not let anybody tell them what they can and cannot study. Academic scientists are not part of some big company or secret cabal; they don’t profit from upholding any status quo, and there is no “big virology” organization either. The NIH might award grants to US scientists, but overall and especially globally, virology all largely decentralized: small-scale, spaced out over 100 different nations, and thousands of universities with various cultural and political backgrounds. It is hard to imagine who or what could pull the strings behind such a setup, even theoretically.
On a more personal note, I believe most scientists, certainly those virologists, their students, and collaborators I met, tend to be quite fiercely idealistic and inquisitive. Scientists encourage criticism, skepticism, and dissent, and professors reward their own students for out-of-the-box thinking. Any PhD student could potentially blow off the roof on any scientific opinion if they find compelling evidence, and usually this would be celebrated by their peers. That has, at least, been my experience. That doesn’t mean scientists are flawless; far from it. We are only humans after all, shaped and driven by our own ambitions, morals, egos, and idiosyncrasies like everybody else. The only difference, if any, is that most scientists, most of the time, feel bound by the idea of approximating ever closer truth through the scientific method of open inquiry and evidence-based reasoning. That is what is sacred to us, if I dare offer this loaded term.
§
Before we left Chiang Dao Cave with Peter Daszak, I couldn’t help but notice that all the shrines and statues were chock-full of figurines and little gifts that visitors left as offerings to whatever they felt were the spirit of the cave. Remarkable places in our natural world have always inspired a sense of sacredness. Whether you are a traveling monk, a visiting tourist, or an Indigenous local, few seem to leave the experience unmarked.
I guess our predilection to mysticism comes from a desire to understand: who or what built this sanctuary of stone and its many eerily familiar forms? Humans have visited and worshiped here for more than two thousand years. An untold number of contemporary stories and beliefs must have come and gone. They all might, however, have suspected larger forces at play; how else could we explain what our senses picked up in the cave? Who could carve the tormented figures out of the stone if not someone powerful?
Especially when a nightmarish figure stares us in the face, natural processes, paired with our overzealous pattern recognition, is not an emotionally satisfying explanation. An evil agent is more intuitive to us. I believe an outbreak of a novel pandemic virus that would bring sickness, death, and despair, supposedly right next to a laboratory studying such ugly invisible creatures, will for many seem like a pattern too obvious to unsee. It is true; there is a question to be asked, and we need to get to the bottom of it.
I just believe we have to keep an open mind for explanations that go beyond our intuition and are based on meticulous research and scientific knowledge about our world. To give ourselves, and science, a bit of time. After all, today, we understand that only water and time, not some ephemeral agent, have acted together to shape the rock layers and carve out the mountain cathedrals.
Does this realization mean science has made Chiang Dao Cave less sacred or precious just by giving us an answer? Did science take away the solace of our beliefs in higher forces and a grander hidden world? For some, maybe it does. There is the opposite effect; I find more satisfaction and beauty in knowing the real, unintuitive answer. A drop of water might appear powerless, insignificant, or useless. And yet, with time, a sacred monument is built from its steady drip that conscious beings like us come to worship. Without science, how could we ever hope to gain an appreciation for something so unfitting to our human intuition? How else could we experience a true sense of the grandiose vastness of time and the cumulative impact of a little force applied over eons? Aren’t we truly worshiping the unyielding persistence of the water droplets in those cathedrals birthed from rock layers? Did we gain something more by having to imagine an intermediary deity, agent, or spirit in between? And if so, what does that tell us about our human predisposition and, ultimately, the human condition?
For me, the scientific process is a lot like that relentless water droplet. Each study, any nugget of insight, and every experiment that failed or succeeded has a small, almost imperceptible, impact on our understanding of our complex universe. A growing body of knowledge that propagates forward over time. The patterns it finds, the blurry images it develops, and the cathedrals of knowledge it eventually builds offer us a new perspective, not only into the world but also into ourselves and our role in it. Science may not always have a quick or satisfying answer that is as compelling or emotionally satisfying as the stories of good and evil, of bioweapons and killer viruses and Chinese secrecy. Nor can science hope to offer the misleading comfort of easy answers, magical explanations and grand narratives. Yet science offers an invitation to truly partake in the wonder and vastness of the world that we are privileged to inhabit together. A chance to observe the exquisite patterns of existence that surround us. An opportunity to connect with the most likely reality of our circumstances. Without the scientific method to make sense of it all, are we not forever doomed to helplessly chase the false myths and frantic mirages of popular zeitgeist or our needy imaginations?
Especially when some information combatants have learned to abuse our very intuitions and overfitting pattern recognition for ruthless personal gain?
Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.
Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.
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