72 Scientific American, March 2022W
henever scientific findings
threaten people’s sense of control
over their lives, conspiracy theo-
ries are never far behind. The
emergence of novel viruses is no
exception. New pathogens have
always been accompanied by con-
spiracy theories about their origin. These claims are
often exploited and amplified—and sometimes even
created—by political actors. In the 1980s the Soviet
KGB mounted a massive disinformation campaignConspiracy Theories
Made It Harder
for Scientists to
Seek the Truth
Virus-origin stories have always been prone to disinformation,
and the “lab-leak hypothesis” threatens research—and lives
By Stephan Lewandowsky, Peter Jacobs and Stuart Neil
missed. But some theories came
with a patina of plausibility. Specu-
lation that the SARS-CoV-2 virus
was engineered in the Wuhan Insti-
tute of Virology (WIV) in China was
facilitated by the physical location
of the institute: it is right across the
Yangtze River from the Huanan
market where many of the earliest
cases of COVID were detected. The
Chinese government’s denial that
markets sold live wild animals also
roused suspicion, even though such
wares were always suspected and
have since been confirmed.
The so-called lab-leak hypothe-
sis gained sufficient rhetorical and
political force that President Joe
Biden instructed the U.S. intelli-
gence services to investigate it. Al-
though the interagency intelligence
report update, declassified in Octo-
ber 2021, dismissed several popular
laboratory-origin claims—including
that the virus was a bioweapon and
that the Chinese government knew
about the virus before the pandem-
ic—it was unable to unequivocally
resolve the origin question.
Does this mean that proponents
of the lab-leak hypothesis uncov-
ered a genuine conspiracy that will
be revealed by persistent examina-
tion? Or is the lab-leak rhetoric
rooted in conspiracy theories fue-
led by anxiety over China’s increas-
ing prominence on the world stage
or in preexisting hostility to bio-
technology and fear over biosecuri-
ty? And what is it about the condi-
tions of the past two years that
made it so difficult to know?ZOONOTIC ORIGINS
the ostensible lab-leak hypothesis
is not a single identifiable theory
but a loose constellation of diverse
possibilities held together by the
common theme that Chinese sci-
ence institutions—be it the WIV or
some other arm of the Chinese gov-
ernment—are to blame for the pan-
demic. At one end is the straightfor-
ward possibility of WIV lab person-
nel being infected during fieldwork
or while culturing viruses in the lab.
Scientifically, this possibility is chal-
lenging to disentangle from a zoo-
notic origin that followed otherabout AIDS, claimitng that the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency had
created HIV as part of a biological
weapons research program. This
campaign benefited from a “scien-
tific” article written by two East
German scientists that ostensibly
ruled out a natural, African origin
of the virus, an explanation favored
by Western scientists that has since
been unambiguously established.
In African countries, where many
scientists and politicians consid-
ered the hypothesis of an African
origin of AIDS to be racist, the dis-
information campaign fell on fer-
tile ground. Ultimately the conspir-
acy theory was picked up by West-
ern media and became firmly
entrenched in the U.S. Similarly,when the Zika virus was spreading
in 2016 and 2017, social media was
awash in claims that it had been
designed as a bioweapon.
From the beginning, the genom-
ic evidence led most virologists
who were investigating SARS-
CoV-2 to favor a zoonotic origin in-
volving a jump of the virus from
bats to humans, possibly with the
help of an intermediate host ani-
mal. But considering the anxie-
ty-provoking upheavals of the pan-
demic, it came as no surprise that
the virus inspired conspiratorial
thinking. Some of these theories—
such as the idea that 5G broadband
rather than a virus causes COVID
or that the pandemic is a hoax—are
so absurd that they are easily dis-