Thread by @techreview

They called it a conspiracy theory. But this postdoctoral research tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab. Here’s a thread about how she did it—and why it matters to the search for the origin of covid-19. technologyreview.com/2021/06/25/102…

.@Ayjchan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that people were saying it had come out of a food market. If that was so, why hadn’t anyone found any infected animals?

She wondered why no one was admitting another possibility, which seemed very obvious to her: the outbreak might have been due to a lab accident.

Chan is a postdoc in a gene therapy lab at the @broadinstitute. She had worked in a few labs and knew they were not perfect places.

The discussion on Facebook started when one of her friends posted a letter published by five senior virologists in the journal @NatureMedicine, titled “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” which analyzed likely sources of the new virus.

The authors of the letter had looked carefully at the genome of the covid-19 virus and said they couldn’t find any sign it had been purposely engineered.

(1/2) When Chan read the letter, she could already see a problem. In debunking the possibility that the virus was the product of extensive genetic engineering, they’d ruled out other, simpler scenarios.

(2/2) For instance, a normal virus collected from bats in the wild, if brought to Wuhan, could have somehow slipped out.

“I was like, ‘They are very mistaken,’” says Chan. “They haven’t thought of all these other plausible ways for a lab leak to occur.”

Her view is now widely held. That’s due partly to her Twitter account.

Throughout 2020, Chan relentlessly stoked scientific argument and doubts, sometimes adding a unicorn GIF to highlight research she found implausible.

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327675884511239?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1394327675884511239%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.technologyreview.com%2F2021%2F06%2F25%2F1027140%2Flab-leak-alina-chan%2F

Many scientists quietly believed that a lab leak was possible—if only because the world center of research on bat viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, happens to be eight miles from where the outbreak’s early cases were seen.

But there wasn’t any real evidence, and it didn’t pay to “take on the big guys,” as one accomplished virologist told me.

Chan wasn’t afraid to pit her brain against the best virologists in the world and her persistence helped change some researchers’ minds.

The reversal in thinking has been so sharp that media organizations are updating old articles having branded the lab-leak idea a conspiracy theory.

In May, President Biden ordered his intelligence agencies to carry out a new investigation into the origin of the virus. It’s due before the end of the summer. apnews.com/article/donald…

Like other journalists interested in the lab-leak idea, @antonioregalado has followed Chan since last May.

The obvious problem with the lab-leak theory, though, is that there is no concrete evidence for it.

Chan has no particular view about how exactly an accident might have happened—whether a student got sick in a bat cave, say, or secret research to infect mice with a novel virus went awry.

After reading Chan’s posts, @antonioregalado noticed that many of her claims don’t even relate to direct evidence at all; more often, they revolve around its absence.

(1/2) Chan tends to point out things that Chinese researchers didn’t do or say, important facts they did not quickly reveal, the infected market animal they never found, or a database that’s no longer online.

(2/2) She’s plainly suggesting there is a cover-up—and, therefore, a plot to conceal the truth. technologyreview.com/2021/06/25/102…

READ @antonioregalado’s absolutely compelling profile of @Ayjchan and how she advanced the lab-leak theory. Regalado's reporting and writing was repurposed for Twitter by @Benji_Rosen. technologyreview.com/2021/06/25/102…

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Learn about the activities of other online sleuths and their search for the origin of the virus. Here’s a profile of DRASTIC by @rowanjacobsen that we really enjoyed reading: newsweek.com/exclusive-how-…