The Volokh Conspiracy

Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent

About The Volokh Conspiracy

"Journalists Should Be Skeptical of All Sources—Including Scientists"

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From Nate Silver:

Here's the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID's origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, "The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2", has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.

We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There's also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level).

The messages show that the authors were highly uncertain about COVID's origins — and if anything, they leaned more toward a lab leak than a spillover from an animal source. But none of that was expressed in the "Proximal Origin" paper, which instead said that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible". Granted, there is a little bit of ass-covering — "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another," they also wrote in the paper. But the message — natural origin good, lab leak bad — was received clearly enough by mainstream news outlets. "No, the new coronavirus wasn't created in a lab, scientists say", reported the CBC in covering the paper. "COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic has a natural origin" was the headline at Science Daily….

What were the authors' motivations to mislead the public? … [Y]ou can find prominent virologists quoted on record as to why the lab leak theory was so problematic — even if it wasn't necessarily wrong. The problems fall into three buckets:

  1. Evidence of a lab leak could cause a political backlash — understandably, given that COVID has killed almost 7 million people — resulting in a reduction in funding for gain-of-function research and other virological research. That's potentially important to the authors or the authors' bosses — and the authors were very aware of the career implications for how the story would play out;
  2. Evidence of a lab leak could upset China and undermine research collaborations;
  3. Evidence of a lab leak could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who touted the theory — remember, all of this was taking place during an election year, and medical, epidemiological and public health experts had few reservations about weighing in on political matters.

To be clear, I'm not sure how COVID originated either. I'd "buy" the lab leak at a 50 percent likelihood (I think this is pretty convincing) and sell it at 80 percent, which still leaves a lot of wiggle room for me to be persuaded one way or the other.

But I think this is a big scandal either way…. The COVID origins story has also been a journalistic fiasco, with the lab leak having been dismissed as a "conspiracy theory" and as misinformation even though many prominent scientists believed it to be plausible all along….

For more, read here.