Donald McNeil Jr., a former New York Times science reporter whose Covid coverage helped the paper earn a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2021, recently accused some of his sources of having misleadingly minimized the possibility that the virus leaked from a laboratory. (He made those charges in his new book, The Wisdom of Plagues, which was published in January, but media didn’t take much notice until March, when Semafor summarized the accusations.) “I was,” McNeil writes, “the victim of deception in the pandemic’s earliest days.”
As McNeil tells it, in February 2020 he asked Kristian G. Andersen, of Scripps Research, and Andrew Rambaut, of the University of Edinburgh, whether there was any truth to rumors that “the U.S. government is trying to seriously investigate the possibility that the nCoV came out of the Wuhan Virus laboratory rather than out of a wet market.” They denied it. What they didn’t mention was that they themselves had suspected a lab origin early on, something the public began to learn in late 2022, as journalists used the Freedom of Information Act to force the NIH to release relevant communications. Revelations were accelerated in July 2023, when House Republicans held a hearing on the subject. “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened,” Andersen wrote in an email to a colleague on February 1, 2020, “because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” Drawing on leaked Slack chats, McNeil points out that as of February 6, Andersen and co.'s “suspicions about viral engineering were still very much alive.” But by February 16, Andersen had become lead author of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature. “Our analyses,” he and his coauthors wrote, “clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
At the time, that was taken to more or less settle the question, unless you were a conspiracy nut. Would it have seemed so compelling if the scientists had been forthcoming with reporters like McNeil about their initial concerns back in 2020? Would the public have accepted the volte-face between February 1 and February 16 as the outcome of a disinterested scientific process? Was it disinterested? On February 2, Rambaut wrote to Andersen about “the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release.” Andersen responded: “I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.”