(Erin Scott/Reuters)
A scientist who recently endorsed the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese lab has revealed that she and some of her colleagues waited to legitimize the hypothesis until President Trump left office so as not to be “associated” with him.
Alina Chan and 18 fellow scientists published a letter in the journal Science last month demanding a thorough inquiry into the virus’s origin, including the possibility that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The document was one of the catalysts that helped reinvigorate debate around the lab-leak theory, which was dismissed for more than a year as a conspiracy theory by much of the mainstream press and censored as disinformation by social media giants.
Researchers said the scientific evidence remained relatively unchanged but noted that “the context and circumstances of the origin debate have changed,” NBC reported. One of the most notable changes in the “context” of the debate, according to Chan, was Trump’s departure from the White House.
Chan told NBC that some scientists had apprehensions about publicly discussing the lab leak possibility out of concern that their statements would be manipulated to suggest they were endorsing “racist” language about COVID’s origins in China — an apparent reference to Trump’s use of the phrase “Wuhan virus.”
“At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to become a tool for racists, so people didn’t want to publicly call for an investigation into lab origins,” Chan said in the interview.
Chan’s comments come as more revelations surface about the major players involved in the early days of the pandemic, including some who deliberately helped ensure the lab-leak theory remained underground.
President of the research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance Peter Daszak, who helped funnel millions in NIH money to the Wuhan lab to fund research of bat coronaviruses, organized a statement published in the medical journal The Lancet in March 2020 calling the possibility of a lab-leak a “conspiracy theory.”
The Lancet letter likened the theory to the “xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism” and “effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began,” Vanity Fair reported as part of a deep investigation into how the narrative around COVID’s origins was formed.
Emails acquired by the watchdog group Right to Know also indicated that Daszak attempted to obscure his role in whipping support for the statement among fellow scientists, six of whom later became members of the WHO investigative team which dismissed the lab-leak theory as “extremely unlikely.”
Gilles Demaneuf, a New Zealand–based data scientist who objected in a February letter to Daszak’s lack of intellectual honesty and transparency, was one of the first scientists to speak out against the silencing of dissent and articulate what a real investigation into COVID’s origins might entail. Demaneuf was disturbed by Daszak’s failure to disclose his conflict of interest and the way he appointed himself chief representative of the independent investigative team, painting a false picture of unanimous consensus among them, and he vocalized it.
“He had a conflict of interest and then he acted on this conflict of interest,” Demaneuf told National Review in reference to Daszak. “This is someone with a conflict of interest acting in a very specific way, which is basically to shut down a line of investigation.”
Demaneuf joined senior Atlantic Institute fellow and WHO adviser Jamie Metzel and 24 fellow scientists in writing their own letter calling for a thorough investigation of the lab-leak theory.
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