Covid Lab Leak Headlines Over Time

(Originally Done in late-2022; Work in Progress)

No one believed the Covid Wuhan lab leak theory — then the world changed its tune
Idea that the virus escaped from Chinese city used to be widely dismissed, but is now becoming ever more plausible

When Covid-19 first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, many pointed out that the outbreak was close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Of all the cities in the world, a deadly coronavirus had popped up just eight miles from laboratories where scientists were importing and tinkering with deadly bat coronaviruses.

Even Wuhan scientists themselves were concerned. Dr Shi Zhengli, WIV virologist, told Scientific American that she remembered thinking if coronaviruses were behind the outbreak “could they have come from our lab?”

It should not have been so controversial. Laboratory leaks are fairly common, with smallpox, swine flu, anthrax, and foot and mouth disease all known to have escaped from facilities in recent decades.

In 2004, the Sars virus leaked from a high-containment research laboratory in Beijing at least three times, causing local outbreaks - so such a scenario was far from unprecedented.

— The Telegraph 8 March 2023

German spy agency 'believed Covid likely started in lab'

Germany's foreign intelligence service believed there was a 80-90% chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, German media say.

Two German newspapers say they have uncovered details of an assessment carried out by spy agency BND in 2020 but never published.

— https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

By Zeynep Tufekci

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like 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. And as for that Wuhan laboratory's research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

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Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. 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, 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.

Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.

The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no "laboratory-based scenario" for the pandemic virus was 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. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the 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."

... The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?

— New York Ties March 16 March 2025