Conspiracy theories

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak.html

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories,

the world has experienced four or five pandemics

1977 Russian flu

Almost certainly a research mishap.

https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Escaped-Viruses-final-2-17-14-copy.pdf

Scientists quickly suspected the odd 1997 Russian virus

2020, speculation about a laboratory accident - kooks and cranks.

Mad / eccentric / pick fights to feel superior / fantastic / insane

Many, public health officials, prominent scientists - conspiracy theory
A nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance

Lost a grant, planning risky research into bat viruses at

Wuhan Institute of Virology, lax safety standards

But

77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend EcoHealth Alliance

Consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices,

and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/03/26/new-york-times-donald-mcneil-wuhan-lab-leak-theory/

Mr Donald McNeil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being “dropped” for a year.

Wuhan laboratory’s research, details now emerged - safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Is this just history?

If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out, Cell

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092867425001448

Researchers, (past and present) Wuhan Institute of Virology workers,

describe taking samples of viruses found in bats,

and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells,

and pose a pandemic risk.

“insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.”

You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match.

And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.

Why haven’t we learned our lesson?

Admitting its risky now – must have always been risky?

And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.

When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats,

and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses,

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/

you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide.

It did not.

Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2025/02/18/covid-19-how-a-group-of-amateur-investigators-pushed-the-lab-leak-theory_6738298_8.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html

The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

(Nature Medicine, 2020)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

‘we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible’

But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/how-private-slack-messages-have-sparked-claims-of-a-wuhan-lab-leak-cover-up-7jdfdqq3x

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-republicans/

https://reason.com/2024/06/18/anthony-faucis-inner-circle-initially-thought-covid-came-from-a-lab/

Evolutionary biologist, Kristian Andersen, (Slack messages)

“The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone

https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/jeremy-farrar-book-extract-spike-burner-phones-and-clandestine-meetings-the-inside-story-of-covid-9wq0cl0c6

Burner phones are prepaid phones purchased with cash for privacy reasons, often associated with avoiding authorities.