The Times Magazine 47“After that piece was published, I got a ton
of messages from Chinese-speaking people
calling me a race traitor, telling me to die.
I don’t really want to talk about that because
it freaks out my family,” she says.
A Canadian passport holder, Chan was
born in Vancouver and her heritage is part
Chinese. Her parents returned to their native
Singapore when she was a small child, but
she went back to Canada after high school,
completing a PhD in medical genetics at the
University of British Columbia. By the age of
25 she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.
In 2020, the political atmosphere in the US
made it difficult to discuss the virus’s origins.
As Boston magazine put it, “An unhealthy
absolutism set in... Either you insisted that
any questions about lab involvement were
absurd, or you were a tool of the Trump
administration and its desperation to blame
China.” That idea chimed with Chan enough
for her to retweet it. At the same time, though,
if Sars had emerged in a city in a western
country, it would have been far easier to
investigate the lab origin idea.
Chinese scientists are clearly not free to
explain and reveal everything they’ve been
doing with bat viruses, she says. “If it had
been in the US, I think a lot of American
journalists would have swarmed into that
city to investigate. People would just do their
own thing because they’re not afraid of being
thrown in prison and being tortured.
“It should not be the case that we can only
investigate lab escapes in western countries
and not Asian countries just because we’re
afraid of being perceived as racist. I think
that’s unscientific, and kind of hilarious.”
But she argues that if the lab-leak theory
does eventually turn out to be true, the west
won’t be free of blame. “I think this whole
thing has been cast as ‘China doing reckless
research’. But I don’t think it’s a China-only
problem. It’s a very international problem.
These scientists [at the Wuhan Institute] were
not working in a vacuum. They were working
with partners from Africa, from America, from
Europe. So it was a global collaboration.”
The most obvious figure here is Daszak,
the EcoHealth Alliance chief. His life’s work,
as well as the millions in grant money his
organisation has been awarded, including from
the US government, has pivoted on the idea
that collecting animal viruses from the wild
and then studying – and modifying – them
in the lab can help prepare humanity for
pandemics. It’s not hard to see why he might
want to discount the idea that such work had
actually brought forth a plague.
“I don’t really want to name people,
because when I’ve done that in the past
it really brings a lot of harassment to
them,” Chan says. “I think that a credible
investigation should be set up so that aworking with coronaviruses in Wuhan before
Covid was first identified. He has dismissed
as “premature” the conclusion of the initial
WHO investigation that a lab leak was
“extremely unlikely”.
In their book, Chan and Ridley document
numerous other twists that, at the very least,
look odd. In February 2020, for instance,
when the Wuhan Institute released a first
description of the virus it failed to mention
an unusual feature known as a furin cleavage
site – a small sequence of genetic code that
is potentially suspicious because it makes the
virus far more transmissible among humans
and has not been seen in any other
coronavirus closely related to Sars-CoV-2.
It’s impossible to know whether it was put
there by a scientist; it could have appeared
naturally. But Chan sees the failure of the
Wuhan bat-virus experts to highlight this
critical and highly unusual feature as
damning, comparing it to “describing
a unicorn and not mentioning the horn”.
There are other pieces of circumstantial
evidence: the earliest Chinese medics to spot
the virus were silenced; the bat virus in the
Wuhan Institute’s collection that was most
closely related to Sars-CoV-2 was weirdly
renamed; a key database vanished; journalists
have been forbidden from going near the
Yunnan copper mine; a senior Wuhan
Institute researcher has said that when Sars-
CoV-2 was initially identified her first thought
was, “Could it have come from my lab?”
Chan’s campaign to drag these matters into
the light hasn’t gone unnoticed in China. An
article in the Global Times, part of the Chinese
state media, accused her of “filthy behaviour
and a lack of basic academic ethics”.To those who haven’t followed the
labyrinthine debate over the origins of Covid,
this will need to be translated. “Drastic” is a
group of amateur sleuths who have coordinated
their efforts online and have tried to stand up
the lab-leak theory. “The Seeker” is one of its
members. His real name is Prasenjit “Jeet”
Ray and he lives in Bhubaneswar in India.
He has been accused of working for the CIA
or Indian intelligence. Actually, according to
Chan and Ridley, who tracked him down, he’s
just a “very clever young man” with excellent
internet research skills.
Not all of its conclusions pass the sniff
test, but Drastic has unearthed material any
investigative reporter would be delighted
with. Using the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s
own records, including an obscure master’s
thesis squirrelled away on a Chinese website,
they revealed how the institute had amassed
a collection of coronaviruses – taken from
bats – that belong to the same sub-family
as Sars-CoV-2.
The Covid pandemic had been raging for
a year before the Wuhan Institute researchers
admitted that Drastic’s findings were correct.
One reading of the evidence is that the
institute sought to obscure where its scientists
had collected these viruses, which was in
a copper mine in Yunnan province, nearly
1,000 miles from Wuhan. Ominously, six
workers who had been dispatched to collect bat
guano from the same mine in 2012 were later
admitted to a hospital in the provincial capital
of Kunming with coughs, fevers, head and
chest pains and breathing difficulties. Three
eventually died of a mysterious lung disease.
Accidents happen; Sars 1 has escaped from
labs at least six times. So could this be how the
present pandemic began: with a sample that
was transported for 1,000 miles from a remote
bat cave to the bustling city of Wuhan?
Chan doesn’t know. Nobody does. “There
is presently little evidence to definitively
support any particular scenario,” she wrote
in her original paper in May last year. That
hasn’t changed. Last month, an investigation
by US intelligence agencies concluded that
the origins of Sars-CoV-2 may never be
determined. Animal-to-human transmission
and a lab leak were both plausible hypotheses,
it concluded. The World Health Organisation
is of much the same mind. An original WHO
investigation, which travelled to China in
January, was widely criticised after it failed to
gain access to the Wuhan laboratories as well
as for including Peter Daszak, a controversial
British scientist who leads a group called
EcoHealth Alliance and who has close
working ties with the Wuhan Institute. Dr
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director
general of the WHO, now says that the
“laboratory hypotheses must be examined
carefully”, with a focus on facilities that wereAN ARTICLE IN A CHINESE
PAPER ACCUSED HER OF
‘FILTHY BEHAVIOUR AND
A LACK OF BASIC ETHICS’
A school in Wuhan is disinfected prior to reopening, 2021REUTERS