They cheated us badly about the event that changed our lives: twin cities

Since scientists began playing with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how it counts. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was surely caused by an accident accident. Some western scientists suspect rapidly The strange virus had resided in a laboratory freezer for a couple of decades, but remained mostly silent for Fear of dump feathers.

However, in 2020, when people began to speculate that a laboratory accident could have been the spark that began the COVID-19 pandemic, they were treated as kooks and connecting rods. Many public health officials and prominent scientists ruled out the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a non -profit organization called Ecohealth Alliance lost a subsidy because it was planning to conduct risky investigations on bat viruses with the Wuhan Virology Institute, research that, if carried out with Laxos Security standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen to the world, not less than 77 laureate Nobel and 31 scientific societies aligned until defending the organization.

Then, Wuhan’s investigation was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission, it certainly seemed a consensus.

Since then, we have learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or discrete crucial facts, tricked at least one journalistOrchestradas allegedly independent voices campaigns and even compared notes on how to hide their communications to prevent the public from listening to the whole story. And as for that investigation of the Wuhan laboratory, the details that have arisen since then show that security precautions could have been terribly lax.

Five years after the start of Covid Pandemia, it is tempting to think about all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about the security of the laboratory, and about the need to be straight with the public, and now we can move to new crises, such as measles and eased flu, right?

Mistaken. If someone needs to convince the next pandemic is just an accident of distance, visit A recent article in the cellA prestigious scientific journal. The researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe the samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experience to see if they could infect human cells and raise a pandemic risk.

It sounds like the type of research that must be carried out, if it does, with the highest security protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in A recent guest essay. But if you move until page 19 of the article and the magazine article, you find out that scientists did all this under the “BSL-2 Plus” conditions, a designation that is not standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say that it is “insufficient to work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If only a laboratory worker involuntarily inhaled the virus and infected, it is not known what the impact could be in Wuhan, a city of millions or in the world.

One would think that now we would have learned that it is not a good idea to try possible gas leaks illuminating a coincidence. And you would expect that the prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such a risky investigation.

Why have we not learned our lesson? Perhaps because it is difficult to admit that this research is risky now and taking the necessary measures to keep us safe without admitting that it was always risky. And that perhaps we were deceived on purpose.

Take the case of Ecohealth, that non -profit organization that many of the scientists jumped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a new coronavirus related to those found in bats and researchers soon noticed that the pathogen had the same rare genetic characteristic as the Ecohealth alliance and Wuhan researchers had proposed to insert in the coronavirus of bats, you would think that Ecohealth would sound the alarm everywhere. He did not. If it were not because of requests from public records, leaks and citations, the world could never have learned about the worrying similarities between what could have been easily happening within the laboratory and what was extending through the city.

Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that are quite early in the pandemic project the laboratory escape theory as without foundation.

The first was a March 2020 article in Nature Medicine magazine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But later we learned through the citations of the Congress of their loose conversations that, although the scientists publicly said that the scenario was unlikely, in private, many of its authors considered that the scenario was not only plausible but probable. One of the authors of that document, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in Slack’s messages: “The laboratory escape version of this is so likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and molecular data are completely consistent with that scenario.”

Spooked, the authors arrived to obtain advice from Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist of the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals that he acquired a burner phone and organized meetings for them with high -ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then director of National Health Institutes, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through requests for public records for the non -profit right of the US. To know that scientists finally decided to move forward with a document on the subject.

Operating behind the scene, Farrar reviewed his draft and suggested to the authors to rule out the laboratory leak even more directly. They fulfilled. Later, Andersen declared before Congress that he had simply convinced himself that a laboratory leak, although theoretically possible, was not plausible. The subsequent chat records obtained by Congress show the main authors of the newspaper that discuss how to deceive Donald G. McNeil Jr., who reported on the origin of the pandemic for the New York Times, so that they do it outside the track about the plausibility of a laboratory leak.

The second influential publication to rule out the possibility of a laboratory leak was a letter published in early 2020 in the Lancet. The letter, which described the idea as a conspiracy theory, seemed to be the work of a group of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to the requests for public documents for the right to know, the public then learned that behind the scene, Peter Daszak, president of Ecohealth, had written and distributed the letter while planning how to hide their clues and tell the signatories that “it will not be identifiable as coming from any organization or person.” Later, Lancet published an appendix that reveals Daszak’s conflict of interests as a collaborator of the Wuhan laboratory, but the magazine did not retract the letter.

And they had help. Thanks to more requests from public records and citations from Congress, the public learned that David Morens, a fauci senior scientific advisor in the National Health Institutes, wrote to Daszak that he had learned how to make “the emails disappeared”, especially emails about ORIGINS Pandemic. “We are all intelligent enough to know never to have weapons to smoke, and if we did, we would not put them in emails and if we find them we would eliminate them,” he wrote.

It is not difficult to imagine how the attempt to silence the legitimate debate could have begun. Some of the strongest defenders of laboratory leak theory were not only making consultations; They were acting as a terrible Faith, using the debate on the origins of pandemic to attack legitimate and beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, surrounding the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to disagree could have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

That is why he could be tempting for those officials or the organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely at the mistakes they made, because of the ways in which, trying to do such hard job, they could have retained relevant information and even deceive the public. Such Autoscrutinio is especially uncomfortable now, since an unburgated child has dead measles and the federal government is pumping non -anti -cracon meaning. But a clumsy and wrong effort like this not only failed; It is counterproductive. These half truths and strategic deceptions facilitated that people with the worst reasons seem reliable while discrediting important institutions where many work sincere in the public interest.

After some stubborn journalists, a small non -profit organization that pursues requests for freedom of information and an independent group of researchers brought to light these problems, followed by an investigation of the congress, the Biden administration finally prohibited Ecohealth from receiving federal subsidies for five years.

That is a beginning. The CIA recently updated its evaluation of how Covid pandemic began, judging a laboratory leak to be the probable origin, although with little confidence. The energy department, which executes sophisticated laboratories, and the FBI came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions so that governments and researchers from all over the world respond. Why did it take until now in the German audience to learn in 2020, its Federal Intelligence Service supported a laboratory escape origin with a probability of 80% to 95%? What more is keeping us on the pandemic that all our lives changed half decade?

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence to discard a laboratory leak or demonstrating that the virus emerged from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few documents cited for the origin of the market were written by a small group of overlapping authors, including those who did not tell the public how serious their doubts had been.

Only an honest conversation will take us forward. Like any field with the potential to inflict damage to global scale, research with dangerous and potentially super -missable pathogens cannot be left to self -regulation or lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The goal must be an international treaty that guides biosafety, but we don’t have to freeze in place until one appears. Leading magazines could refuse to publish an investigation that does not fit security standards, the way in which they reject research that does not fit ethical standards. Finankers, whether universities or private corporations or public agencies, can favor studies that use research methods such as harmless pseudovirus and computer simulations. These steps alone would help discourage such dangerous investigation, here or in China. If any risky research is really irreplaceable, it must be maintained at the highest safety conditions and perform far from the cities.

We may not know exactly how Covid pandemic began, but if the research activities were involved, that would mean two of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third.

Zeynep Tumekci writes a column for the New York Times.