Media Truth and the Lab Leak
How a run-amok media buried the biggest story in a generation.
It’s April 1986, high radiation levels set off alarms at a nuclear power plant in Sweden. The Swedes quickly determine that the radiation most likely originated in Ukraine. After several weeks of denials, the Soviets admit that a large meteor with an unusually large quantity of uranium has crashed near the city of Pripyat in the north of the country.
Coincidentally, this is near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The Soviets, of course, deny that there’s been an accident at the plant, but won’t allow outside observers to examine the plant or any evidence from a meteor nor to question or examine any of the victims of the impact.
Western media organizations dutifully report the Soviet version of events, especially after Ronald Reagan, the U.S. President, floats a “nuclear meltdown” theory. Respected nuclear scientists in the west also publish letters of support for the Meteor Theory, advancing the implausibility of a nuclear meltdown scenario at a power plant, and that any release of radiation must have come from a natural source.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the U.S. government advance the possibility that there indeed was a nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Some of the more conspiratorial ones claim there was a military weapons program at the plant which went awry.
At the same time, Democrats, media companies, and elite institutions refer to such claims of a meltdown at Chernobyl as “racist conspiracy theories”, “anti-science”, and “disinformation”. While TV and Radio broadcasts ban reporting on the Chernobyl Leak Theory.
Thousands of people in Europe subsequently die of radiation poisoning, governments mandate lockdowns to keep people in-doors while medical researchers try to come up with a vaccine for the radiation poisoning. While skeptical protestors are ridiculed as “cherbydiots.”
Of course the events depicted above did not happen, and the Russians copped to an accident at the Chernobyl power plant the same day the Swedes detected the radiation. While an adversarial Western media challenged the Russians on their lack of transparency on the accident.
But just imagine if the West had responded in such a way to claims by the Russians of a “meteor impact.” In other words, imagine that in 1986 Western media would have responded the way they did during the Covid outbreak of 2020: taken the side of a totalitarian government in its PR war to essentially cover-up a man-made disaster, especially after that government banned access to the site of the disaster, any evidence or material from there, or any of its victims.
It’s hard to do so.
1.
At first glance, it’s easy to see the immediate appeal of a natural-origin theory for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid): it’s uncomplicated. The natural world is host to a multitude of deadly pathogens always at the ready to cause mayhem for the human race. Previous, though less-deadly pandemics have begun from a natural origin.
In fact, the 2002-2003 SARS epidemic started in China and was genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan province. And similarly to 2020, the Chinese government obfuscated the extent of the outbreak. So the supposition, especially amongst epidemiologists, virologists, and public health officials, that Covid would turn out to be of natural origin is understandable.
What’s not understandable is that given the lack of a smoking gun, the unusual spread of the virus in China and once the circumstantial evidence for a Covid lab-leak started to accumulate, (fairly quickly) after the pandemic started spreading around the world, that the elite media would cling so ferociously to a defense of a natural origin. But more than that, that they would show so much contempt for a lab-leak theory, especially given the likelihood for it being nonzero, is hard to comprehend.
For scientists involved in virology and epidemiology the skepticism is at least understandable. They’re more aware of the possibility of contagion from wild animals, they’re more familiar with lab safety protocols, etc. However, they are not a disinterested party and have a conflict of interest in defending a natural-origin hypothesis. They are intimately familiar with the advanced genetic manipulation and gain-of-function techniques available to modern virology researchers which could be used to concoct a virus like SARS-Cov-2
So it is ironic that knowing both the advanced techniques available and how a lapse in safety-protocols and pushing the envelope on virology research could easily lead to a lab-leak and cause a global pandemic, that these scientists would be so invested in pushing a natural origin theory. It’s almost as if they were looking for an alibi.
Less understandable is the contempt and skepticism of the elite-media to a lab-leak theory. Journalists are usually trained to be skeptical, especially if a party has a vested interest in pushing a narrative. Obviously scientists, virologists, and researches had a vested interest in promulgating a natural origin theory. If there was even a 1% chance that Covid leaked from a lab, their funding would dry-up, scientists would be blamed for causing one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in history, and their life’s work would be that much harder to undertake and justify.
2.
To a skeptical person, the immediate possibility of a lab-leak accident in Wuhan is readily apparent for several reasons. 1) The first cluster of cases in China, that we know of, centered around the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan, a mere 16 miles north of the Wuhan Institute of Virology—one of the foremost corona virus research centers in the world. Covid, of course, is a corona virus. 2) The virus itself was entirely novel, meaning unknown to scientists, but so too was SARS-CoV in 2002. There is also a question of the virus’ rare structure—the insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 boundary in the SARS-CoV spike protein, which allows it to so easily infect humans. It came into the world “fully formed” as it were. 3) In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant application titled “Project DEFUSE” to DARPA. It proposed experiments to introduce furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses. Furin cleavage sites are an attribute found in some viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, that can help make these viruses more infectious. But importantly almost never found in naturally-occurring coronovirii.
The reasons for this contempt are almost puerile, especially for what are supposed to be serious news organizations. The lab-leak hypothesis was, from the very beginning, associated with Donald Trump and his allies. And that was essentially enough.
It’s worth sitting with that for a moment. A hypothesis about the origin of a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide was dismissed—not on its merits, not after rigorous investigation, not because the evidence pointed decisively elsewhere—but because the wrong people were saying it. The heuristic was breathtakingly simple: if Trump says it, it must be wrong. If Tom Cotton raises it in the Senate, it’s a conspiracy theory. If Steve Bannon amplifies it, it’s disinformation. The proposition wasn’t evaluated; the proposers were.
This is, of course, a textbook genetic fallacy—judging a claim by its source rather than its substance. First-year philosophy students are taught to identify and avoid it. And yet it became the operative editorial framework at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and virtually every other prestige outlet in the country for the better part of two years.
The irony is almost too neat. These same organizations had spent the Trump years building an institutional identity around being the “adults in the room,” the sober, fact-driven counterweight to populist recklessness. They branded themselves as the arbiters of truth in an era of “post-truth politics.” And when confronted with a genuinely consequential empirical question—one with life-or-death implications for billions—they defaulted to the laziest form of tribal reasoning imaginable: our team says natural origin, their team says lab-leak, therefore natural origin is correct.
There’s a deeper pathology here, too. By 2020, the elite media had developed a reflexive deference to credentialed expertise that was, paradoxically, deeply anti-intellectual. They didn’t engage with the science; they deferred to scientists—specific scientists, with specific institutional affiliations and specific conflicts of interest.
When Peter Daszak organized his Lancet letter declaring that the lab-leak was a “conspiracy theory,” that was treated as dispositive. No mainstream reporter, at least initially, thought to ask why the man whose organization had funneled NIH money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was being treated as a disinterested authority on whether that same lab might have been the source of the outbreak. The conflict of interest was glaring, and yet it went unremarked upon in newsrooms that supposedly pride themselves on following the money.
This wasn’t deference to science. It was deference to authority—exactly the kind of uncritical, hierarchical thinking these institutions claim to oppose. Real scientific skepticism would have demanded more investigation, not less. It would have treated the absence of an intermediary host as a significant data point. It would have noted the remarkable coincidence of a novel coronavirus emerging miles from one of the world’s foremost coronavirus research laboratories. It would have asked hard questions about the WIV’s database going dark in September 2019, months before the official start of the outbreak.
Instead, what the public got was something closer to a protection racket for the scientific establishment. Reporters who wouldn’t dream of taking a pharmaceutical company’s press release at face value somehow found it perfectly acceptable to take virologists at theirs—virologists who stood to lose everything if the lab-leak turned out to be true: their funding, their reputations, their freedom to conduct the very research that may have caused the catastrophe in the first place.
And the enforcers weren’t subtle. When journalists like Josh Rogin at The Washington Post or science writer Nicholas Wade published careful, evidence-based treatments of the lab-leak hypothesis, they weren’t met with counterarguments. They were met with social opprobrium. The message from the media establishment to its own members was clear: pursue this line of inquiry and you will be placed in the same bucket as QAnon adherents and anti-vaxxers. It was a staggeringly effective form of peer pressure, and it worked precisely because journalists, like most professionals, care enormously about their standing among colleagues.
The result was a kind of informational monoculture at exactly the moment the world needed intellectual diversity most. Millions of people were dying. Governments were making sweeping policy decisions. And the institutions theoretically tasked with holding power accountable—including the power of the scientific establishment—chose instead to function as that establishment’s public relations arm. Not because they’d investigated and found the natural-origin theory convincing on the evidence, but because endorsing it was socially safe, and investigating the alternative was not.
3.
In March 2018, EcoHealth Alliance submitted a grant proposal to DARPA under its PREEMPT program (PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats). The proposal, titled "Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses," or Project DEFUSE, laid out a multi-year research plan that, in retrospect, reads less like an abstract academic exercise and more like an inadvertent engineering specification for SARS-CoV-2.
The DEFUSE proposal included several goals: Collect and catalog hundreds of bat coronavirus samples from cave sites across southern China, building a library of novel SARS-related coronaviruses. Construct chimeric viruses—synthetic hybrids assembled from genetic material of multiple different coronaviruses—to test which spike protein configurations were most capable of infecting human cells.
Drafts and notes obtained through FOIA requests revealed that Baric had already generated chimeric spike proteins from bat virus strains that do not appear in any published scientific literature, suggesting preliminary work was underway before the grant was even submitted.
The most consequential of these was to insert furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein of thes virii. A furin cleavage site is a specific molecular feature that allows the spike protein to be cut by furin, an enzyme abundantly present in human cells. This cleavage dramatically enhances the virus’s ability to enter and infect human tissue—it is, in effect, the molecular key that made SARS-CoV-2 so devastatingly transmissible.
The DEFUSE proposal, outlined a process requiring “stitching” together DNA fragments and included plans to introduce “human-specific cleavage sites” (such as the furin cleavage site) into bat viruses using a specific restriction enzyme, BsmBI. BsmBI is part of the “type IIS” restriction enzyme family used in Golden Gate Assembly, which is ideal for such insertions.
Critically, SARS-CoV-2 is the only known virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that possesses this feature. The DEFUSE proposal explicitly described plans to introduce precisely this kind of modification, at precisely this location, into bat coronaviruses.
A 2022 preprint analysis determined that SARS-CoV-2 itself appears to have been assembled in six fragments using this very same enzyme—a correspondence that proponents of natural origin have struggled to explain as coincidence.
Then there is the lack of an Intermediary Host. With SARS-1, researchers identified the intermediary host (civets, then traced to bats) relatively quickly. With COVID, despite years of searching and testing tens of thousands of animals, no intermediary host has been found, and no progenitor virus in nature has been identified. This absence of evidence isn't proof, but it's a conspicuous gap for a virus supposedly originating in nature.