Welcome to Entanglements. In this episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild explore a hot-button question: Is it likely that the Covid-19 pandemic was sparked by a lab leak? The question has circulated in online fights, opposing opinion essays, and more. Can our hosts cut through the rancor?
To find out, they invited two experts with differing opinions to share their points of view, in an effort to find some common ground. The point isn’t to both-sides an issue or to try to force agreement. Instead, the show aims to explore the nuance and subtleties that are often overlooked in heated online forums or in debate-style media.
Their guests this week are John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, and Alina Chan, a scientific adviser at the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. New episodes drop every Monday through the end of the year. You can also subscribe to Entanglements at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Brooke Borel: Welcome to Entanglements, the show where we wade into the most complicated scientific debates in the news today. I’m Brooke Borel, articles editor at Undark magazine.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m science journalist Anna Rothschild.
Well Brooke, some people are going to say that we absolutely, positively should not be doing this episode.
Brooke Borel: Yes. And that’s because we’re diving into the origins of Covid-19 and asking: “Is it likely that Covid-19 came from a lab leak?”
Anna Rothschild: Right. This is the idea that Covid came from a lab in China. There are various flavors to the lab leak hypothesis.
Brooke Borel: Mm, flavors. Delicious.
Anna Rothschild: Yes, but a common one is that virologists trying to prevent a pandemic accidentally released this new disease into the world. And the lab leak idea has been branded by many scientists as a conspiracy theory. So we had a bunch of conversations about if and why we would take this on.
Brooke Borel: Right, and ultimately, we decided to do it for a few reasons. First, multiple polls have found that over 60 percent — 60 percent! — of Americans believe that Covid came from a lab. And this spans political affiliation. It’s a more common belief among Republicans. But a March 2023 YouGov poll, found that just over 50 percent of Democrats believe it’s definitely or probably true that a laboratory in China was the origin of the virus.
Anna Rothschild: You know, of course, just because the public believes something doesn’t mean it’s true. Obviously.
Brooke Borel: Yes. Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: And there’s an extremely vocal group of well-respected virologists and immunologists who say that we have enough evidence to think that Covid very likely had a natural origin. And not just any natural origin — they think it came from a market selling live animals. But many of them would also say that they can’t rule out a lab origin.
Brooke Borel: So, we thought that there was some merit in trying to have a civil discussion about this. One where, as always, we try and find points of agreement rather than division.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, but as I discovered, this was way, way easier said than done.
Brooke Borel: Oh no.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, maybe I should just jump in and share the first interview with you, rather than keeping you and the audience in suspense.
Brooke Borel: Sure, sounds great.
Anna Rothschild: Alright. Well, let’s meet our natural origin proponent.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that it’s likely that the Covid-19 pandemic was sparked by a lab leak?
John Moore: I think it’s fair to say that like me, most virologists think that the evidence for the zoonotic wet market origin is by far the stronger, which is why we lean that way.
Anna Rothschild: This is John Moore. He’s a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. He runs an HIV vaccine and virology research program. Given his background, John has the expertise to read and react to the papers published on Covid. But I do want to be clear that he is not an author on any of the Covid origins research we’ll discuss today. But more on that in a moment.
Anna Rothschild: If you had to narrow it down, what is the single most persuasive piece of evidence for a natural spillover that you have seen?
John Moore: Well, firstly, let’s look at precedent. There is essentially no dispute that the 2002, 2003 SARS-1, uh, epidemic started in a wet market in China.
It was not at the time and it’s not been since a matter of dispute. Uh, also, the MERS virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, also a coronavirus, spread to humans from camels in the Middle East.
So there we have another example of a coronavirus that is, again, spread to humans from animals. So there’s ample precedence for this.
Brooke Borel: I feel like for those who don’t know, we should define a few things.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, totally. Do you want to start us off?
Brooke Borel: Sure. So, lots of viruses that cause human diseases started out in animals. HIV, Zika, bird flu, they originated in animals and spilled over into people.
Anna Rothschild: Right. And Covid comes from a family of viruses called coronaviruses.
Brooke Borel: Yeah so, CO-VID, corona-virus-disease.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. And to hammer home the point that John’s making here, in just the 21st century, we’ve already seen two deadly coronaviruses — SARS and MERS — jump from animals into people.
Brooke Borel: Yup. No Good.
Anna Rothschild: And in the case of Covid, John thinks that “jump” happened in a market where live animals are sold, which is sometimes called a “wet market.”
John Moore: Sampling in the wet market was conducted by the Chinese authorities swabbing surfaces, et cetera, before the Chinese authorities then, uh, disinfected the market.
Which is a standard public health measure, and we would have done the same thing. So the samples that were collected and have been analyzed clearly show the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the Covid virus, in stalls where animals were housed and the same samples contain various animal DNAs.
Anna Rothschild: We’re gonna talk about this wet market for quite a bit. So, why don’t I set the scene for you.
Brooke Borel: Sure, that would be great.
Anna Rothschild: Cool. So, it’s called the Huanan Seafood Market, and it’s on the west side of the Yangtze River in Wuhan, China. It sold seafood, as the name suggests. But some stalls illegally sold live mammals as well. Things like civets and raccoon dogs.
Brooke Borel: Raccoon dogs?!
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, they’re fox-like creatures that we now know are susceptible to Covid.
Brooke Borel: OK super cute. The fox-like creatures part, not the Covid part.
Anna Rothschild: Totally, we’re on the same page. They are actually very, very cute. Civets, we now know, are also susceptible to Covid as are a few other animals sold at the market. And that makes some scientists think one of them could be the “intermediate host” of the virus. So basically, that’s the animal from which Covid spilled over.
Brooke Borel: Got it.
Anna Rothschild: The idea here is that the virus may have originally come from bats, but it made its way into another species through the animal trade, and then from there it jumped into people. This is what happened with SARS-1, the first SARS. In that case, the intermediate host between bats and humans was a civet. Does that make sense?
Brooke Borel: Yeah, totally. But we still don’t know for certain that this happened, right?
Anna Rothschild: Right, exactly. In part because, as John said, officials disinfected the market as soon as there was a suspicion that Covid came from there. And, the word “disinfect” is a bit of a euphemism here I will say. I mean, they did disinfect it. But the authorities also killed all of the mammals.
Brooke Borel: OK so a major disinfection.
Anna Rothschild: Yes. A profound disinfection. And because the mammals were removed, we don’t have direct evidence that they were infected. However, scientists did swab the stalls and take environmental samples from places like tables and drains and stuff like that. And in some of the stalls that sold wildlife, like raccoon dogs, the scientists turned up Covid genetic material.
Brooke Borel: Ah, gotcha. But, couldn’t those just be from people who caught Covid and, like, coughed on the stalls?
Anna Rothschild: Yes, absolutely. That is a great point. Yes, we could totally just be seeing contamination.But that is not the only evidence.
John Moore: There are also early tracing of patients who reported sick with Covid or were demonstrated to be infected. The early cases cluster around the wet market.
Anna Rothschild: The first cases of Covid that China reported to the World Health Organization were 41 patients from December of 2019. Sixty-six percent of them had direct exposure to the market. Scientists later mapped a larger data set of cases — 155 of them — and it just looks like a bullseye around the market. And that’s not all. Most of those cases with a connection to the market are from the west side of the market, which is primarily where the mammals were kept.
John Moore: So that and the verified presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA samples in close proximity to animal DNA, is what we consider strong evidence. It’s not proof. Proof is going to be extremely hard to obtain now, possibly never, for either hypothesis, but the balance of evidence impresses virologists, or most of us, in favor of the zoonotic wet market origin.
Anna Rothschild: Is there any point that the other side has made that you think seems plausible or reasonable?
John Moore: Well, you know, again, I’ve never said that the lab leak is inherently unplausible. It is on the table as a hypothesis But it is not supported by actual hard data that is compelling enough for me to believe in it.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: OK Brooke, how are you feeling so far?
Brooke Borel: I mean, I think I need to hear more. But the fact that there is some hard data supporting a natural origin is pretty compelling.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I totally hear you. We are going to come back to John Moore in a bit. But now that he’s laid out the basic case from the natural origins folks, let’s hear from our lab leak proponent.
Brooke Borel: Great. I’m excited and a little scared.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that it’s likely that the Covid-19 pandemic was sparked by a lab leak?
Alina Chan: Yes, I believe that the current evidence, although entirely circumstantial, points squarely at a lab origin of Covid-19.
Anna Rothschild: That’s Alina Chan. She’s a scientific adviser at the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT, where she works in a lab that develops gene therapies.
Alina Chan: During the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to investigate the origins of the pandemic, and that is my claim to infamy.
Anna Rothschild: That’s a — I think that’s a pretty accurate way to put it, honestly.
Anna Rothschild: Many members of the scientific community have called Alina Chan a conspiracy theorist. And something I should mention is that while Alina is a scientist, she is not specifically a virologist or epidemiologist, which is something her detractors are quick to point out.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, I know who she is. She’s probably the most famous supporter of the lab leak hypothesis out there. She wrote that New York Times op-ed laying out five reasons she thinks that Covid probably came from a lab.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, exactly. And, full disclosure, she has written an op-ed for Undark arguing for more investigations into the origins of Covid.
Brooke Borel: Also though, we’ve also run an op-ed from someone who thinks that Covid had a natural origin, too.
Anna Rothschild: If you had to narrow it down, what do you think is the single most persuasive piece of evidence or absence of evidence of a lab leak that you’ve seen?
Alina Chan: If you look at all of the evidence, the Covid-19 pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, and in any of thousands of cities in any year.
But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan City less than two years after the scientists there, sometimes working under low biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of the same design. And so the most compelling evidence to date is that the year before the outbreak, these Wuhan scientists together with U.S. partners had proposed creating viruses with SARS-CoV-2’s defining feature.
Brooke Borel: OK, there’s a lot to unpack there.
Anna Rothschild: Yes, let me do some explaining. So, there is a lab in Wuhan, China that studies coronaviruses. To be fair, there are labs in many places that study coronaviruses, but this is a big one. And it’s located on the other side of the Yangtze River from the Huanan Seafood Market.
Brooke Borel: OK. So, what were they doing with these viruses at the lab?
Anna Rothschild: Yes. So because so many viruses jump from animals to humans, this lab was collecting wild coronaviruses from animals, like bats, and studying them to try to prevent a future pandemic from happening.
Brooke Borel: OK, I mean I like that part.
Anna Rothschild: Yes. I wonder if you will like this next part.
Brooke Borel: Try me.
Anna Rothschild: So, sometimes they’d manipulate viruses and add special features to them to make them better at infecting cells.
Brooke Borel: Ah yeah, I have edited stories on this kind of thing before. I know what you mean.
Anna Rothschild: Nice, in that case do you want to explain why the scientists might possibly be doing such a thing?
Brooke Borel: I would be delighted. OK.
Anna Rothschild: Cool.
Brooke Borel: So, this is usually known as “gain-of-function” research, and what actually counts as gain-of-function is quite contested. But in general, it’s basically what it sounds like — you manipulate a virus in some way to give it extra functions. Scientists might do that to learn how a virus could become more dangerous, so you can have a plan if such a virus in nature ever jumped into humans.
Anna Rothschild: Right.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. The idea is that you need to be able to study these things up close to understand them. So they’re making them so they can actually study them.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. And we now know that they were doing this type of work at biosafety level 2, which is a lower biosafety level than we let scientists do similar experiments in the U.S.
Brooke Borel: So, I know about biosafety levels, but also it’s always a little unclear to me the distinction between one level and another. So, I don’t know how scared this should actually make me.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I mean, biosafety level 2 ain’t nothin’. Scientists in the U.S. work with transmissible pathogens like measles at that level. But, lab leaks, while rare, have happened at higher biosafety levels. So after it jumped into people from animals, the first SARS virus leaked from a biosafety level-3 lab. It only infected lab workers, and it didn’t cause a pandemic, but still.
Brooke Borel: OK, yeah, I’m getting a sense here.
Anna Rothschild: Anyway, OK. Some U.S. scientists wrote a grant proposing to manipulate bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan lab. They would say that they weren’t planning to do gain-of-function research, as you mentioned before, at least not in the way U.S. regulators describe it, because they weren’t working with viruses that were known to infect humans.
Brooke Borel: Right, as I said, it’s a controversial topic.
Anna Rothschild: Totally. But anyway, the feature that they proposed adding to this bat virus is called a furin cleavage site, and it was later found in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid.
Brooke Borel: Well, that kinda sounds suspicious.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I agree. However, other coronaviruses, like MERS, also have this site. So, it’s not unique in nature — that’s why they were interested in it. And crucially, the proposal failed. The U.S. collaborators never got their grant. And we have no evidence that U.S. scientists ever worked on this. But here’s what Alina had to say about that.
Alina Chan: We know that this lab in China was very well funded, and resourced. They very well could have gone ahead without their U.S. partners. And the problem is that until today, even as recent as this year, when approached by journalists, the scientists there refused to tell us if they had started the work.
Anna Rothschild: Can you see a possibility that it could have happened naturally?
Alina Chan: Yes. Yes. So I want to be clear on that is that I’m not ruling out a natural origin. There are clearly still some plausible natural origins hypotheses. So the most well-amplified one, I would say, is the one that it came from a wildlife market in Wuhan.
Anna Rothschild: And, what does Alina think about the data from the market?
Alina Chan: So for scientists, there are two things you have to think about when you see a piece of data. One is the data itself. What does the data say? Is it statistically powerful enough to reach conclusions? And the second is, how was the data collected? That’s almost equally important as the data itself. So what we do know is that in late December 2019, as soon as there were only four cases linked to the market discovered, the authorities at the time decided “We are going to focus our search for cases, even retrospectively only on people with links to the market.”
And so when you look at the data that’s collected today, it almost looks like there’s a big bullseye around the market. Even people who had no links to the market seem to live close to the market. And that’s because they had been searching for cases only in the district of the market, as well as hospitals, very close to the market.
And that’s why even people who hadn’t visited the market seem to live near the market. What this tells us is not that the cases were all surrounding the market, but that rather the search had been strongly biased. And in this case, there are probably lots of false negatives in that sense, lots of cases not linked to the market or not close to the market that were missed.
Brooke Borel: OK, now I really don’t know what to believe.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, this is where it gets really confusing. So, the scientists who support the market hypothesis firmly disagree on this point. They say that these cases were drawn from hospital reports across the city before there was any suspicion of the market. I wrote to the lead author of that paper to comment directly on this, and he did not get back to me. But he did write an entire perspective piece about at least some of this data that I will link to in the show notes.
Brooke Borel: So, how does Alina explain that there were so many cases around the market then? Is she saying that it was a superspreader event, and the virus was … what? Was it already floating around the city before that?
Anna Rothschild: Brooke, you are a genius.
Brooke Borel: Thank you.
Anna Rothschild: Yes. That is exactly right. So ,if it started in December and those were really the first 41 cases, it would have been very odd for the virus to get released from the lab and immediately be found on the other side of the river in and around a market selling live animals in conditions primed for a spillover event, right?
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: But, if the virus was circulating earlier, it’s conceivable that the market could have been the site of a superspreader event.
Brooke Borel: OK, so is there any evidence of that?
Anna Rothschild: Well, there’s a thing called molecular clock data that’s very technical, and I’m hesitant to even get into it here.
Brooke Borel: Uh oh.
Anna Rothschild: But long story short, it can give you a rough date for when a virus emerged. And the molecular clock data shows an emergence as early as October 2019 for Covid. The virologists who support a wet market origin don’t deny this — in fact, some of them are authors on the molecular clock research.
Brooke Borel: OK. So complicated.
Anna Rothschild: So they very much don’t deny this. They would just say that the virus didn’t start spreading widely till later. But Alina disagrees. And she actually claims there’s evidence that the virus was circulating in people as early as November 2019, and there were regional news reports that potentially back up that claim. However, we don’t have positive Covid samples to prove that. We only have what the Chinese government has given us, and they say December 2019.
Brooke Borel: So is this why people call Alina a conspiracy theorist? Is she saying that there was some big cover up by the government to deflect attention from the lab and point it to the market?
Anna Rothschild: So it’s part of the reason. And I asked her about this.
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that essentially there were more than 41 cases scattered across the city and then the Chinese government went in and like, just picked ones that were either close to the market or seemed to have links to the market?
Alina Chan: I really do think that at the time, these scientists, these investigators, were purely led by their assumption that this had come from the market. So, obviously, they’re only going to look for cases linked to the market. And we have to remember that, why are we not seeing all the early cases? It’s because by January 2020, the Chinese government had realized that it would be very bad for the country if it became clear how widespread this outbreak was.
On Jan. 3, 2020, they instructed the hospitals in Wuhan to start destroying patient samples. I’m not saying that at the time they really knew it came from a lab or whatever, but they were trying to suppress data, evidence, that this was an uncontrollable outbreak.
If you turn back time and go back, people were talking about travel bans. It was in their interest to pretend that this was a very small cluster of cases, it wasn’t spreading human to human, and that China would take control very soon.
Anna Rothschild: I just want to jump in here and just make it clear, these are Alina’s speculations about the scientists’ motives and assumptions.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, right. We’re on the same page there. So what about the environmental samples, though? What did she say about that?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, she again says that these results are based on a sampling issue.
She says that a stall that kept mammals was oversampled, which skewed the data. But I wrote to the lead author of the environmental sample paper and she emailed me the following: “Of course the number of collected samples is taken into account in the statistical analysis. We do not talk about a number of positive samples, but a positivity rate. In other words, it’s not about the raw number of positive samples, but about their fraction among all samples.” And I’m gonna paraphrase this next part because she referred to some specific figures in her paper, but she roughly said, in addition, the claim is doubly false because other wildlife stalls were heavily sampled and yet SARS-CoV-2 was not detected there.
Brooke Borel: Ah, OK. We’ve talked a lot about data from the market, and whether it’s good or not. But what about data that Covid came from the lab? Is John right — does no such data exist?
Anna Rothschild: Yes, John is right. There is no hard data that Covid came from a lab. And Alina doesn’t deny that. I will say, there is other circumstantial evidence that we could talk about. But in an effort to keep this podcast at all manageable, I focused on the hard data that we have and at least tried to explain its pros and cons.
Brooke Borel: Right, ‘cause this is a science podcast.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. Exactly. And I need to sleep at some point.
Brooke Borel: We all need to sleep. Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: So to recap: On one side, we have some physical evidence collected by Chinese officials that indicates a market origin. But we have no smoking gun. And on the other side we have zero physical evidence.
Anna Rothschild: What is one piece of evidence that would definitely prove your point of view?
Alina Chan: About lab origin.
Anna Rothschild: Yes, about a lab origin.
Alina Chan: I think there could be many. I mean, the first is the sequence of a precursor virus from that lab before the known outbreak. It could be, it could be a whistleblower. It could be a whistleblower from that lab or someone who had participated in a collaboration with that lab who says, ‘I know that they had that virus,’ or ‘I know that they had started these SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site experiments, before the outbreak.’
So there are many forms of evidence that could point to a lab origin of Covid-19.
Anna Rothschild: Ok. Do you think we’re likely to get that evidence?
Alina Chan: I think that with an event of this scale, where we have lost 20 million people in excess deaths, caused trillions of economic damage just to the U.S. alone, I do think that for an event of this scale, there are surely people who know and might tell us when the time is right.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: I think we should finally get to the other reason that Alina and the lab leak supporters are called “conspiracy theorists.”
Brooke Borel: Yes! Yes. I’ve been waiting for that.
Anna Rothschild: OK. Here we go.
Brooke Borel: Deep breath.
Anna Rothschild: So, back in March of 2020, five scientists published a correspondence in Nature Medicine called “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and it’s about where Covid came from.
Brooke Borel: OK.
Anna Rothschild: Some of them had initially suspected that Covid came from a lab, but they ultimately wrote that they didn’t think that a lab leak was plausible.
Brooke Borel: OK. Well, what made them change their minds?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah so, this is the controversial part. They’ve said they got more information and basically were doing good science — they changed their minds based on new data.
Brooke Borel: OK. That seems reasonable. That’s how science works.
Anna Rothschild: Yes, exactly. However, the lab leak proponents suggest there was more of a suppression campaign to bury the lab leak story. Alina would say that they did this in part to avoid a political situation in China, and also to protect the field of virology, because no one wants to have it be seen like their work could have led to a global pandemic. Right?
Brooke Borel: I mean, I get that. I get that.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty details here, cause it’s just a lot, but basically this has gotten very, very heated. The authors’ private messages have been made public, which is what some lab leak supporters base their opinions on. Some of the authors of the papers have testified before Congress. It’s basically become a whole thing.
Brooke Borel: Yikes. OK.
Anna Rothschild: And one last thing I should note is that some of the authors of that paper are co-authors on some of the research from the market. And so that has cast doubt over that research to some extent.
Brooke Borel: Sure, OK. So, what a mess.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, exactly. Basically, both the natural origins folks and the lab leak folks have faced some pretty extreme nastiness.
Anna Rothschild: How much do you think the direct attacks on the scientists who published proximal origin, and I guess other papers as well, has contributed to the animosity surrounding this issue?
John Moore: Well, some of the lab leak people have grossly abused authors, online, including female scientists who’ve received all the kind of, you know, sexually charged offensive messages online, because they’ve, to speak up and express their opinions. So, you know, that’s had a chilling impact on quite a number of virologists who have essentially ducked for cover because they don’t want this level of abuse.
Forty-one virologists, including myself, co-authored an article pointing out the damage that lab leak is causing to virology research on pandemic related viruses in the future. People, young scientists, are not entering this field because they see it as toxic to themselves personally or professionally.
Anna Rothschild: This article was published in the Journal of Virology. It’s called “The harms of promoting the lab leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 origins without evidence.” In it, John and his co-authors cite a survey of 510 scientists who research Covid in some way — not necessarily just Covid origins. Thirty-eight percent reported being harassed for their work, online or in-person.
John Moore: The net effect has been to drive virologists towards silence to protect themselves. Um, very few of my colleagues would do an interview like this. I personally am not easily intimidated. And if you want to bring it on, bring it on.
Anna Rothschild: So, John is not exaggerating. It was very, very hard to find a natural origins proponent to be a guest on this podcast.
Brooke Borel: Because they’re scared of backlash?
Anna Rothschild: I mean, I think that’s probably part of it. Here’s an email I got from a very well-respected scientist. You ready?
Brooke Borel: Yes.
Anna Rothschild: “Anna: There are a half-dozen papers on the natural origins of Covid, zero on lab leak…because it never happened. The fact that 60% of Americans believe it – it’s because it’s part of the same health disinformation campaign that convinced Americans to shun Covid vaccines causing 200,000 deaths.”
Brooke Borel: OK …
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I’m surprised about that one, I guess first, because he expressed such certainty in saying that a lab leak “never happened.”
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: And second, I’ve reported on vaccine skepticism since before Covid. And while it’s true that many anti-vaxxers also believe the lab leak idea, I don’t know, to me that just feels like painting with an awfully broad brush.
Brooke Borel: Agreed. And the language just is so strong for what is really a nascent area of research and it’s conflating quite a bit. Were there other emails too?
Anna Rothschild: Oh, you know it. So here’s another: “Dear Anna, Thank you for your email. I don’t think it’s helpful, nor do I consider it good journalism to pair published …
Brooke Bore: Woof.
Anna Rothschild: “… subject matter experts with conspiracy theorist – which, unfortunately, is exactly what you are doing here.”
Brooke Borel: Oh jeez. OK.
Anna Rothschild: And here’s the final excerpt: “Anna, why are you doing this? No Thank You.”
Brooke Borel: Did you start to ask yourself the same question?
Anna Rothschild: I mean yes, definitely! I’m not gonna lie. I’ve had many sleepless nights asking myself if this episode was worth doing. But I will also say that in many ways, emails like these have made me more interested in pursuing this question. To be clear, not because I think there’s some big cover up at all. But mostly because it’s planted this question in my brain…
Anna Rothschild: You know, this is like a little bit of a vague question, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently as a science journalist.
Alina Chan: Mhmm.
Anna Rothschild:When I went to journalism school, it was at a time when we as, like, a scientific community had stopped, both-sides-ing the climate issue.
Alina Chan: Yes.
Anna Rothschild: Because there was such a preponderance of data at that point, that it was just, like, not, accurate to both-sides this issue anymore.
Alina Chan: Yes, I totally agree with you on the climate change issue.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. Where do you draw the line, is my question, I guess. Because as I’m sure you know, like, I’ve gotten a lot of pushback by natural origins scientists to even talk on this issue anymore because they feel like it’s, it’s really just done, you know?
Alina Chan: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: And I obviously know that you think it’s still worth talking about.
Alina Chan: Mhmm.
Anna Rothschild: But I’m curious, sort of more abstractly, like, how do you draw the line?
Alina Chan: Yep. So I think what you’ve just told me is extremely important to include in the podcast, because I think a big part of this story is like, how does science work? And when, when do you say it’s done, right? So in the case of, of things like climate change, and “Do vaccines cause autism?” I would say that it’s done. But, we know now there’s such a large body of evidence for each of these topics that it’s quite clear to anyone who looks at the evidence that it points at one thing. But with Covid origins, it clearly was not done in early 2020. We had so little insight. And even till today, we all agree here’s very little insight because the Chinese government is not opening the doors to direct evidence. So in this case, it’s clear that it’s not done but I would argue that even in the cases where things are done, we should still do a both-sides and sort of like portrayal of things, because does it earn the trust of the public if you keep slamming one side down as ignorant?
Anna Rothschild: So, I just want to say here that as a journalist, I don’t think there’s value in “both-sidesing” things that are quote unquote “done.”
Brooke Borel: Yeah, we would never have a climate denier or someone who thinks vaccines cause autism onto this podcast.
Anna Rothschild: Totally. But given that John and many other scientists are at least open-minded to other hypotheses, it made me wonder …
Anna Rothschild: I know you’re not a media specialist, you are a scientist, but, say there was some sort of defector who said, actually, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we had the precursor to Covid, and somehow that could be substantiated by an outside source, and we did find out that it was a lab leak.
Obviously, I’m not saying that that is something likely to happen, but it’s plausible, it’s possible.
John Moore: It’s a plausible scenario.
Anna Rothschild: Sure. If that happened, it seems like there’s been this real icing out of the lab leak hypothesis for reasons that you’ve explained here. But if that happened,I just wonder what the sort of public opinion of scientists would be who were really dismissive of the lab leak idea.
John Moore: Well, I mean, again, I can’t speak for everyone’s, you know, viewpoints. I mean, if the evidence, if you receive an evidence set that is definitive, it’s essentially mandatory for, through scientific training, to take your, to change your opinions. I think that’s the only honest way to be a scientist.
Anna Rothschild: Of course, it’s just about public opinion, and on the one hand right now, you know, you’ve written saying that the lab leak is hurting science.
I guess the question is, how are you supposed to express any uncertainty then? And if you can’t express that uncertainty and the new evidence comes to light, I don’t know, wouldn’t that damage science as well?
John Moore: I mean, the concept of scientists changing their views based on emerging data should not be inherently damaging to science.
Would it damage science?
I don’t know. I mean, this is such a, you know, a hard question. But, you know, again, the polarization is such that there is no middle ground to explore here now. It’s you’re, you’re either on one camp or the other, and the personal animosity that’s being created through social media interactions is now such that you don’t sit down and have polite conversations anymore. It’s just, the animosity is too great.
Anna Rothschild: I mean, that’s what we’re trying to do here, though.
John Moore: Yeah, well, that’s fine. That’s your job. And I’m, I’ve, that’s one of the reasons I agreed to take part in it. But, you know, a he said, she said where neither side is likely to change their position because all the evidence has been out there for so long that everyone, you know, understands it or chooses not to understand it, it’s just not going to change things. I mean, I would never go on a platform debating with an anti-vaxxer. Because the anti-vaxxers are not rooted in science and science and pseudoscience are not equivalent.
Anna Rothschild: I mean I totally understand that about a debate. I do wonder though, if there’s a difference between sitting down with somebody to debate versus sitting down with somebody to really try to understand the other side and understand and diffuse some of the tension and vehemence and animosity.
John Moore: Ah, I don’t know. How do you change something that is so screwed up that it’s just become mired in glue and controversy? I don’t know what the answer to some of these, you know, more metaphysical questions.
I’m not, I’m not trying to duck it, but I don’t know what the solution is. I understand what you’re trying, what you’re getting at, but I don’t have an answer that would be satisfactory to anyone and everyone.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I mean, so just to double check, you wouldn’t consider sitting down with Alina Chan to talk not about the evidence specifically, but to try to find some points of agreement, some points where you, try to break through some of this tension and have like a more, I don’t know, open, good faith conversation to make it less angry and intense.
John Moore: I personally wouldn’t do that. I think it would just be a waste of time. There’s the, the kind of, whatever evidence is out there has been chewed over in print, in media, so many times that unless something changes through the emergence of something definitively new and important, nothing is going to change.
Nobody is going to change their positions. There’s no common ground in that sense. So it would just be a waste of time.
Anna Rothschild: I mean, I do think there are a number of statements that you and Alina Chan would agree on, even if the ultimate conclusion and your read of certain data is pretty different.
John Moore: I don’t know. Um, but it’s not on my agenda. I’ve got, you know, I actually do have a day job.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: So, I never got John and Alina to speak directly to each other.
Brooke Borel: Hmm. That’s too bad.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, Alina was very open to it. But as you can hear, John was not.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, he sure wasn’t. OK.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, that being said, I did get them to react to a number of questions that I thought they might both agree on.
Brooke Borel: OK, that’s something.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, so just to be clear, I asked them the exact same questions but in separate interviews. So, take a listen.
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that there is still some uncertainty about the origins of Covid?
John Moore: There are, and will probably remain for a long time, uncertainties about the origin of Covid because of the absence of definitive evidence that everyone would accept as being factual proof of one hypothesis versus the other.
Alina Chan: Even though I do feel that the overwhelming body of circumstantial evidence points towards a lab origin, there is no way that I can be certain. There is no direct proof.
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that there is value in figuring out where Covid came from?
Alina Chan: Yes, I think that it is imperative that we find out where Covid came from and that this value can be measured in millions of lives and trillions in economic damage.
John Moore: There’s always value in understanding an event that affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, worldwide. So, yes, it is worth looking for any additional evidence that might settle the debate.
I’m just pretty skeptical about whether anything that is truly definitive can ever now emerge.
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that we should be doing gain-of-function research?
John Moore: Under the appropriate safety conditions and following well-crafted, thoughtful regulations, yes, it’s an important area of virology that helps us to better understand how to deal with future pandemic threats. So, you know, yes, under appropriate circumstances.
Alina Chan: Yes, I think that some gain-of-function research should be done, but my caveat is that it should be done at the highest biosafety levels, and ideally not in the middle of a city where there are international flights. Because the thing is, you can have the highest biosafety levels, but human error always exists.
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that scientists have done a good job of communicating uncertainty about Covid’s origins?
Alina Chan: I’d say that the, the loudest scientists on this topic have not done a good job on conveying uncertainty on the origins of Covid-19
John Moore: Well, I’d like to think that I have, um, because I acknowledge uncertainty.
I can’t speak for everyone. I’m sure there are statements that were made, uh, early on that people wish they hadn’t made, or wouldn’t have made if they’d had the knowledge they have now that they didn’t have then. So, you know, we’re all human. People make mistakes, including communication mistakes. It doesn’t make them bad people.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. Okay, last question. Do you believe that people on both sides of this issue have acted unkindly to each other?
John Moore: Uh, I’ve seen stuff on social media that I wish didn’t exist. And, you know, I’m not on social media, so I don’t contribute to that kind of behavior. So, um, what I’ve seen is predominantly from two or three lab leak scientists who’ve just pretty much viciously gone after their opponents.
Now, if there are counter strikes, like I say, I’m not on social media, so no one has sent them to me, and I don’t particularly want to see them anyway.
Alina Chan: It’s there on the internet for everyone to see, so you don’t have to go very far. Even you can just Google some of the names of the main proponents of each hypothesis and you’ll see that there has been a lot of harassment. I think intimidation, threats, that kind of stuff.
Really extremely unpleasant. I think unkind is an understatement.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: All right, Brooke, whatcha thinking?
Brooke Borel: I don’t know. I mean, I do think that this has gotten quite unkind, as Alina said at the end there, and it just surprises me. I realize this is very heated, and I do understand why. And I also understand that if people truly think she’s a conspiracy theorist, not wanting to platform that, right?
But also, this isn’t completely settled science yet, right? And it just kind of surprises me how dug in a lot of these researchers were, where they wouldn’t even speak to her or they wouldn’t even speak to you. I wasn’t surprised that this was a difficult episode, but I was surprised that we couldn’t even get people to even talk to us. Right?
Anna Rothschils: Yeah, it was surprising to me too. And you know, I also get it, like, on one side people are being called conspiracy theorists and on the other side, people’s professional integrity is being doubted. And so I get that it’s a particularly heated issue.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: Out of curiosity, Brooke, I’m wondering if you had any sort of opinion about where Covid came from before this episode, and if you have the same opinion now, or if you changed your mind.
Brooke Borel: Do I even want to be on record about this? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. Like, I didn’t know enough before. I’d been loosely following this before we did this episode, but not — I knew sort of the contours of the argument, but I didn’t read any of the papers. I didn’t dig in. So I had this loose understanding, but I didn’t know enough to really form a strong opinion.
And now I don’t know. I mean, I think that it looks like based on the evidence that we’ve seen, problems aside, that things are pointing to a natural origin, but it isn’t complete enough for me to say, like, yes, absolutely. That’s it. Case closed.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I mean, I’m on exactly the same page as you. I think I probably stopped paying attention to this issue in a big way in, like, 2021.
And I think I was pretty dismissive of it, frankly. I think I was pretty convinced that Covid came from a wet market. And I just sort of tuned out a lot of the controversy after that. I will say I think I might be a little bit more open-minded about this issue now, even though I, like you, I still think that based on the evidence we have, it still looks like it came from a wet market.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. And in science, there’s always uncertainty, right? There’s always uncertainty. But with this, I feel like there’s more uncertainty. I think that we just can’t be so case closed about this.
Anna Rotschild: Yeah. We’re on exactly the same page.
Brooke Borel: Dare I even ask what our listeners thought about this one?
Anna Rothschild: No.
Brooke Borel: Send us your love letters and hate letters.
Anna Rothschild: No, Brooke, don’t do this to us. Don’t send us any mail.
Brooke Borel: Okay, fine.
Anna Rothschild: Seriously, no one send us any mail.
Brooke Borel: Okay, fine. Maybe you guys can take a break for the week.
Anna Rothschild: Just for this week. Just for this week.
Brooke Borel: Just for this week. Okay, I think that’s a good spot to end things.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, that sounds great.
Brooke Borel: Okay. That’s it for this episode of Entanglements, brought to you by Undark magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. The show is fact checked by Undark deputy editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell, and Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor in chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. See you next time.