AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the truth has often felt elusive. As conspiracy theories, misinformation and political rhetoric took hold early on, many people found themselves unsure of what to believe. Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei from NPR's history podcast Throughline brings us the story of a scientist who tried to avoid the politics and landed at the center of a political storm.
RUND ABDELFATAH, BYLINE: The conspiracy theories started early.
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DIANE MACEDO: Misinformation is spreading fast.
ABDELFATAH: There was the one about whether the virus was related to biological weapons research.
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PALKI SHARMA: Was it built in a lab by scientists and unleashed on the masses?
ABDELFATAH: Another said that the CDC and Bill Gates were in on it.
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BILL GATES: Do people really believe that stuff?
ABDELFATAH: As the unknowns started stacking up, many people were looking to scientists to lead us through the pandemic. But scientists weren't immune to politics.
ALINA CHAN: My stance was, I'm not going to let what politicians say determine what I write.
RAMTIN ARABLOUEI, BYLINE: This is Alina Chan. Alina is a scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who specializes in gene therapy and cell engineering.
CHAN: So I started just reading as much as I could about the other closely related coronaviruses, like SARS and MERS.
ARABLOUEI: And she noticed that COVID-19 was behaving differently. It wasn't mutating very quickly, almost like it was already adapted to humans.
CHAN: I started to worry that this might have come from a lab.
ABDELFATAH: And there was another reason she thought this. Wuhan, China, where the first case of COVID was detected, is home to China's premier coronavirus research laboratory.
CHAN: Scientists in Wuhan actually pointed out that it could have come from the markets, but, hey, also, look at these labs in our city, and they have been collecting these - exactly these type of viruses from these bats, bringing them back to the lab.
ABDELFATAH: But right away, the Chinese government rejected the idea of a lab leak. And while all this confusion was happening, the political rhetoric in the U.S. was also heating up.
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TOM COTTON: So many of America's elites are so committed to propping up the Chinese Communist Party they have...
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DONALD TRUMP: Kung flu. Yeah.
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ABDELFATAH: Meanwhile, U.S. investigators were focused on the theory that the virus had jumped to humans from an animal market.
ARABLOUEI: Top virologists had also stepped into the game.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (Reading) We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
ARABLOUEI: This is a letter co-signed in the medical journal The Lancet by more than two dozen scientists. Given how politicized COVID was becoming, they felt the need to weigh in with clear information, and they lumped the lab leak theory in with all the other conspiracy theories floating around. The letter got a ton of coverage.
ABDELFATAH: But in private messages around this time, some scientists wondered if a lab leak actually was possible. We only know about these messages because they were leaked in 2023.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (Reading) The main issue is that accidental escape is, in fact, highly likely. It's not some fringe theory.
ABDELFATAH: Here, we should mention that the U.S. funded and supported projects coming from the Wuhan lab. If the lab was at fault for leaking the virus, the U.S. would also likely have to answer.
ARABLOUEI: But Alina says she wasn't focused on the politics. She was convinced that a lab leak in Wuhan was plausible. In a paper, which she also tweeted about, she questioned why the virus seemed to be mutating slowly.
CHAN: (Reading) Even the possibility that a nongenetically engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely.
ARABLOUEI: Suddenly, she was getting hate mail from some people who thought she was spreading a conspiracy theory - and from others who didn't think she was taking her theory far enough - and from scientists who thought she was damaging the integrity of science.
CHAN: I'm not ashamed of my scientific analysis. I'm not ashamed of what I wrote because it's true.
ABDELFATAH: Over time, the U.S. government and science community have come around to the plausibility of a lab leak. In 2021, President Biden asked the U.S. intelligence community to investigate the two leading theories again. Today, institutions, including the World Health Organization, intelligence agencies and some media outlets, characterize the lab leak as plausible.
CHANG: That's Throughline hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei. You can hear the whole episode on NPR's Throughline podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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