COVID disinformation has threatened research—and lives. Failure to demarcate conspiracy theories from scientific investigation results in public confusion, insufficient action from leadership, and the harassment of scientists.
Whenever scientific findings threaten people’s sense of control over their lives, conspiracy theories are never far behind. The emergence of novel viruses is no exception. New pathogens have always been accompanied by conspiracy theories about their origin. These claims are often exploited and amplified—and sometimes even created—by political actors. In the 1980s the Soviet KGB mounted a massive disinformation campaign about AIDS, claiming that the U.S.
Zoonotic Origins The ostensible lab-leak hypothesis is not a single identifiable theory but a loose constellation of diverse possibilities held together by the common theme that Chinese science institutions—be it the WIV or some other arm of the Chinese government—are to blame for the pandemic. At one end is the straightforward possibility of WIV lab personnel being infected during fieldwork or while culturing viruses in the lab.
The RBD and FCS are central to initial virological arguments by expert proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis. Such arguments are based on the supposition that neither the RBD nor the FCS “appears natural” and therefore that they can only be the product of lab-based engineering or selection. Nobel laureate David Baltimore, an early proponent of the lab-leak hypothesis, referred to the FCS as a “smoking gun” that points to a lab origin.
This research sketches a clear zoonotic path to the emergence of the RBD and FCS. Although some evolutionary gaps along this path persist, their number and size have been dwindling. A detailed analysis in late 2021 further strengthened the link to the Huanan markets as the point of origin of the virus and the initial source of community transmission. This rapidly growing body of evidence for a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 creates increasing difficulties for the lab-engineering hypothesis.
The e-mails were publicly misrepresented as a result of an unsolved hack, but top scientists and health officials also have seen their correspondence become public through Freedom of Information Act requests by groups with long histories of attacking scientists. The organization U.S. Right to Know honed its FOIA tactics against food scientists before turning its sights on virologists.
Being closely related to SARS-CoV-2 and being present in the lab at the WIV made RaTG13 a perfect candidate for a precursor that was engineered into SARS-CoV-2. In the short time since the pandemic took hold, however, several related viruses have been discovered that are closer in sequence to SARS-CoV-2 over much of the genome. Moreover, despite being related to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13 has been found to occupy a separate phylogenetic branch.
Motivated reasoning based on blaming an “other” is a powerful force against scientific evidence. Some politicians—most notably former President Donald Trump and his entourage—still push the lab-leak hypothesis and blame China in broad daylight. When Trump baldly pointed the finger at China in the earliest days of the pandemic, unfortunate consequences followed. The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes.
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