Isegoria

Five years ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus shut down the world and changed it forever:

While initial reports suggested that the virus had jumped from wild animals to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, others pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the only lab actively experimenting with closely related viruses. Since these viruses have never been found naturally within 1,000 miles of Wuhan, a local outbreak made little sense — yet questioning this brought swift political and institutional backlash from scientists worried about risking their careers and their work. But while working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, scientist Alina Chan kept publicly questioning the official story, despite attempts from influential scientists and the media to cast the hypothesis as a conspiracy theory.

[…]

So back in 2020 when I interviewed you for Boston, you were basically a postdoc with a Twitter account. Since then, you’ve published a book as well as influential opinion pieces in Science magazine and the New York Times, and have shifted to work on the challenges relating to research that can cause pandemics. How has your life changed?

My gosh, five years, that’s a lot to cover. I mean, almost everything has changed.

[…]

Has your confidence that the pandemic resulted from a lab incident changed since 2020?

Back then, I was pretty agnostic. I was about 50/50. To the rest of society, that seemed insane because all of the top scientists were saying that this was a racist, anti-scientific conspiracy theory.

Yes, and now we know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that they were colluding to suppress discussion of the lab-leak theory and were secretly trying to get you disciplined or fired. How did that make you feel?

Scientists are people. They have a lot of different pressures in their lives. Pressures to keep their labs running, to publish, to advance in their career. These virologists were not speaking scientifically. They were speaking from a very motivated standpoint, trying to shut down something that they thought would hurt their interests. Even in a situation where millions of people were dying. That shocked me.

What finally convinced you that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the likely cause of the pandemic?

For me, the thing that really shifted the balance of evidence was the discovery of a 2018 research proposal called Defuse that was submitted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their U.S. collaborators that specifically said, “We’re gonna look for novel SARS-like viruses in the wild, we’re gonna put in these novel furin cleavage sites and see what happens, and we’re gonna test these viruses in human cells to see how these features can impact their ability to replicate and cause disease.” And then, barely two years later, exactly such a virus causes an outbreak in their city, very far away from where these viruses are found naturally. To me, that extreme coincidence was too much to ignore.

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