Soon after the start of the pandemic, as Covid-19 spread its trail of death and devastation around the planet, I came across the draft of a scientific paper online.
Couched in cautious language and written by little-known biologists, it challenged the overwhelming consensus on the origins of this sinister new virus.
The implications were explosive. The paper asked if the virus could have come from a laboratory rather than an animal, infected by a bat virus, on sale in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The authors said it was ‘surprising’ the virus seemed ‘already pre-adapted to human transmission’ and suggested all possible routes for transmission of the virus from bats should be examined – including the theory that Covid resulted from a laboratory leak.
It seemed like common sense. The disease erupted far from the habitats of infected bats – and Wuhan was home to a secretive institute with the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses where scientists carried out risky research.
Yet such theories were, at the time, condemned by many experts and much of the media as ‘racist’ and part of a ‘Right-wing conspiracy’ to blame China for the pandemic. Zoonotic spillover – transmission of a virus from an animal to a human – was promoted as far and away the most likely cause.
My story raising the possibility of a lab leak was published in May 2020 by The Mail on Sunday. Eight days later, Chinese officials confirmed the Wuhan wet market was a spreader – not the original source – of Sars-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
This catapulted one of the paper’s authors into the centre of a toxic debate on Covid’s origin simply for stating an obvious truth: that scientists should follow all the evidence.
My story raising the possibility of a lab leak was published in May 2020 by The Mail on Sunday. Pictured: Disinfection of a residential community during Covid lockdown in 2022 in Shanghai, China
Alina Chan (pictured), then 31, a Canadian molecular biologist, was daring to challenge some of the biggest names in science
The paper asked if the virus could have come from a laboratory rather than an animal, infected by a bat virus, on sale in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan (pictured in 2020)
Alina Chan, then 31, a Canadian molecular biologist, was daring to challenge some of the biggest names in science – including veteran US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci and the bosses of the biggest US and UK research funding bodies.
‘I was a nobody with maybe 200 friends on Twitter. But my take as a scientist was never to lie,’ she told me when we met over lunch in Boston last month.
Then she laughed. ‘That sounds so basic, doesn’t it – but now we know lots of scientists do lie and spread misinformation. Who could have known there was a real conspiracy among very powerful scientists to bury the lab leak hypothesis?’
In an explosive Mail on Sunday interview earlier this month, the expert who led the key US public health body when the pandemic erupted accused Fauci of leading a group of scientists in pushing the debunked theory of zoonotic spillover. Robert Redfield, a world-renowned virologist, says they sought to distract focus from US funding for controversial ‘gain of function’ research (in which an organism’s genes are altered to boost infectivity or other characteristics). Federal funding for this was banned in America between 2014 and 2017.
He said he is now ‘one hundred per cent’ convinced Covid-19 was the result of bat virus researchers becoming infected at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He alleged also that security services in the West colluded in a cover-up to protect agents inside China’s military-linked laboratories.
Now Redfield’s charges have been reinforced by Mail on Sunday revelations that former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove told Downing Street early in the pandemic that the virus was engineered in Wuhan – only for his claim to be reportedly squashed by Lord Vallance, the chief scientific adviser since appointed as Labour’s science minister.
As Redfield says, this debate over Covid origins helped corrode public trust in science in the pandemic. Yet Alina Chan has emerged as one of the few heroes by standing her ground in defence of science against the likes of Fauci, who was rattled enough to publicly criticise her as ‘a pretty fuzzy person’.
Her stance led to death threats, attempts to get her sacked from a prestigious institution and a torrent of online abuse inflamed by the Chinese dictatorship. She refused to yield, although at one point she thought about changing her name to avoid Beijing’s revenge. ‘It was really scary. I was labelled a race traitor. China’s government hates people of Asian descent who speak out against them.’
In an explosive Mail on Sunday interview earlier this month, the expert who led the key US public health body when the pandemic erupted accused veteran US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci (pictured) of leading a group of scientists in pushing the debunked theory of zoonotic spillover
Robert Redfield (pictured), a world-renowned virologist, says they sought to distract focus from US funding for controversial ‘gain of function’ research
Bizarrely, however, her greatest foes were a cabal of prominent Western scientists pushing the theory of zoonotic spillover at the Wuhan market through patsy media and journals – leading to frequent clashes with Dr Chan on social media.
It has since emerged several had links to Fauci – then head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the world’s biggest biomedical research agency – and Sir Jeremy Farrar, the chief scientist at the World Health Organisation who at the time led the Wellcome Trust, Europe’s biggest medical research charity.
‘The Chinese government could not have asked for better co-operation from the West in their cover-up,’ said Dr Chan bluntly.
Today she has tens of thousands of social media followers, has published a book with British science writer Matt Ridley on the search for Covid origins, and often appears in the media.
Yet when the pandemic exploded, she was setting out on her academic career as a post-doctoral fellow at a gene therapy lab at Broad Institute, a research unit linked to both Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Like many scientists, she was intrigued by this arrival of a new virus. She did not expect the pre-print – a common practice in science to publish the draft of an article – she co-authored to get much attention. But then she posted a thread explaining their analysis on Twitter, which led to my Mail on Sunday story.
‘Suddenly there were so many scientists attacking me, saying I wrote the pre-print for attention. Nothing could have been further from the truth,’ she said.
The intensity of the furore led to sleepless nights. ‘I was terrified. I’d never met any of these people and they were all piling on me for simply laying out the facts and saying both natural and lab origins should be on the table.’
Now Redfield’s charges have been reinforced by Mail on Sunday revelations that former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove (pictured) told Downing Street early in the pandemic that the virus was engineered in Wuhan
His claim was reportedly squashed by Lord Vallance (pictured), the chief scientific adviser since appointed as Labour’s science minister
She is right: it made no scientific sense to squash the lab leak theory given the lack of evidence for the alternative. Yet she had stepped into a minefield by challenging the powerful consensus pushed by Fauci and his circle.
Dr Chan fought back on social media. Her tweets became a catalyst for the ‘Drastic’ group of internet sleuths who dug out evidence to support the lab leak theory, such as a Chinese medical thesis discovered by an Indian former science teacher called Prasenjit Ray. This detailed how, in 2012, three miners died of a strange respiratory disease, eerily similar to Covid, caught while clearing bat droppings in a cave network in southern China.
They were among six miners infected seemingly with a Sars-like virus in an abandoned copper mine where scientists from WIV had sampled the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.
Dr Chan – who had ten years of schooling in Chinese after growing up in Singapore – read and translated this thesis, along with other key documents, as her obsession to find the truth took off.
‘I thought, ‘Holy s***: there’s terrible stuff happening here that Wuhan scientists are not letting on’. The closest relative to Sars-Cov-2 was from this mine and they were not telling us about it.’
The lab leak theory grew stronger with each new piece of evidence.
First, the virus was found to have a feature that made it ultra-infectious to humans, yet was not found on hundreds of most similar coronaviruses – seen as a ‘smoking gun’ pointing to engineering by some experts’.
Then came discovery WIV had sought US funding to insert this defining feature into Sars-like viruses in 2018 – one year before the virus emerged in their city. The request was rejected as too risky, but WIV’s top bat researcher refused to comment when asked if they pushed ahead anyway.
Today Dr Chan has tens of thousands of social media followers, has published a book with British science writer Matt Ridley on the search for Covid origins (pictured), and often appears in the media
She said:Â ‘I thought, ‘Holy s***: there’s terrible stuff happening here that Wuhan scientists are not letting on’. The closest relative to Sars-Cov-2 was from this mine and they were not telling us about it’. Pictured: Security personnel outside Wuhan Institute of Virology in February 2021
In March 2020, The Lancet published a notorious letter condemning ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’. It was signed by 27 scientists – including Sir Jeremy Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues.
It was later found to have been organised by Peter Daszak, a British zoologist whose US-based EcoHealth Alliance channelled US taxpayer dollars to WIV and assisted their research.
That same month, a commentary signed by five leading scientists was published in Nature Medicine dismissing the plausibility of ‘any laboratory-based scenario’. Then it emerged Fauci and Farrer were behind this influential article, following a call they organised that involved Lord Vallance.
Yet even as they were putting their names to it, one author privately told others a lab link was ‘so friggin’ likely’. And Farrar highlighted ‘Wild West’ biosecurity in Wuhan to a colleague.
‘This showed there was a conspiracy,’ said Dr Chan. ‘The cover-up was not just a China issue – and it was morally repugnant.’
Her foes tried to get her fired. Then she was warned by her bosses to be extra vigilant about security because of all the threats she was receiving.
‘Not only was I saying a lab leak was plausible, but I was daring to say what everyone knew to be true: that Chinese scientists were not being straight with us. We’d seen they were hiding things. They live in an authoritarian regime.
‘I feel more pity for the Chinese scientists – because they have no choice – than the Western scientists who acted like they did.’
In March 2020, The Lancet published a notorious letter condemning ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’. It was signed by 27 scientists – including Sir Jeremy Farrar (pictured)
At first Dr Chan simply thought the lab leak hypothesis should not be discounted without sufficient evidence, but now she is almost certain Covid resulted from a research accident. Pictured: Firefighters preparing to conduct disinfection in Wuhan in April 2020Â
At first Dr Chan simply thought the lab leak hypothesis should not be discounted without sufficient evidence, but now she is almost certain Covid resulted from a research accident. ‘It is not quite case closed – I would say it is 99 per cent certain.’
The CIA, many experts and much of the public now share her suspicion – yet Dr Chan saw job opportunities and collaborations vanish in the aftermath of her intervention. ‘Lots of doors were closed in my face,’ she said.
Now she is leaving academia to focus full-time on biosecurity. ‘We need to confirm the origins of a pandemic that killed 20million-plus people to gain enough energy on this issue to change policy to prevent future lab outbreaks.’
She says it has been shocking to discover ‘a lot of people in science are not on the side of truth.’ Sadly, Dr Chan is right – and that’s why her fight over Covid origins is so important in the struggle to salvage public trust in science.
Although Dr Fauci, Lord Vallance, and EcoHealth Alliance were approached for comment by the Mail prior to publication, no response was received.
The WHO, where Sir Jeremy Farrar is now chief scientist, says its position has not changed on the debate over Covid origins: ‘WHO has always and consistently stated that, to advance knowledge on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, we needed and still need studies – and WHO continues to call on China to share all information it has on the origins of COVID-19, so that all hypotheses can be investigated.’
Dr Fauci has previously insisted he was ‘proactive’ in making sure the Chinese lab leak hypothesis was probed and that claims he used grant money to influence scientists on the issue were ‘preposterous’. He has strongly denied suppressing the lab leak theory, telling a US House of Representatives panel last June that he never influenced research on the origins of the virus. He has been praised by medical leaders for his commitment to evidence-based science.
Lord Vallance told a Commons committee in May 2023 he believed Sars-CoV-2 was ‘most likely’ to have spilled over naturally from bats. He added that he believed gain-of-function research to be ‘incredibly important’ for science.
