We are on the brink of some real investigations, says researcher Alina Chan

Eighteen months ago, Alina Chan co-wrote an explosive paper that sought investigation of the possibility that Covid-19 was caused by a virus from a laboratory in China. Chan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. On Twitter she ignited a debate on the pandemic’s origin and received "death threats." Last November, with biologist Matt Ridley, she wrote a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. Now, all she hopes to do is "walk into obscurity and lead a normal life." Excerpts from an interview: 

 We still have no headway as to the origins of Covid-19.

We are on the brink of having some real investigations. So far, we have only had the China-WHO joint study, which cannot be called an investigation. It was more like a collaborative effort; they (the WHO) were completely dependent on the Chinese side. It didn't have full access to patient data nor to the original data about the seafood market (in Wuhan). But today, we are starting to see some investigations being launched; of course, it's quite slow. It might take several months, possibly even a whole year, to launch these, but at least something is happening. So I'd say that there's hope. Once a real and unbiased investigation begins, we will be able to see early papers, emails, documents being shared in the early days of pandemic, or even in the years leading up to pandemic.

Are scientists across the world supporting you?

We need to do an anonymous survey to know what is the scientific consensus around the origin of Covid-19. Right now, it's quite dangerous for scientists to stick their necks out and go against some very powerful scientists who have made it clear that they prefer a natural origin. Imagine the people reviewing your grants, reviewing your papers; there's no way one would go against them publicly. One important thing to remember, though, is that we've seen a lot of private emails being released through the Freedom of Information Act. They show that these top scientists, who publicly say that there's no evidence for the lab origin theory, behind the scenes they're actually very panicked.

Do you think it was genetically engineered or only leaked from the lab?

I think it's worth investigating. Right now, there's just no definitive evidence. What was particularly disturbing was that last September, there was a research grant proposal released through the Freedom of Information Act which showed that the scientists in Wuhan were part of a larger international collaboration and the leader of that grant proposal was based in New York City in the US. In this proposal, which was submitted in early 2018, they had proposed inserting a very unique genetic modification (furin cleavage site or FCS) into SARS-like viruses that they had discovered in the wild. And it just so happens that SARS-CoV-2 has an FCS and is the only SARS-like virus ever discovered with this type of genetic modification. this FCS confers a pandemic potential on SARS-CoV-2. When we remove this FCS the virus becomes completely weak and can never cause a pandemic. 

You said you would change your name after the book is published and would go into obscurity. Do you fear for your life? 

I think both Matt (co-author) and I are aware that this book would offend a lot of powerful people. The Chinese government surely does not like this book; nor do other top scientists who do a lot of virus collection and gain-of-function research experiments that could potentially enhance viruses in the lab and cause them to become pandemic pathogens. They have consistently pushed back against the lab leak hypothesis since day one in January 2020 and called it a conspiracy theory. They bully and harass the scientists who don’t toe their line. There's been a lot of abuse. I don't have a desire to put myself at risk of more retaliation than has already occurred. I don't know when I should change my name. But it's on the table. I have both my career and my safety to look after. The book was my way of closing the page on this chapter of my life. I want to take a step back and go back to my job because I've taken some personal risks and the fear is there. I think that fame is a very dangerous thing to have. There's a huge loss of privacy. I now just want to be a normal person, not having to be targeted for harassment. And not having to fear about career retaliation. 

Do you fear retaliation from China?

What if I travel to a place that has an extradition treaty with China? China is one of the most powerful countries on this planet; it has a very far reach into any country, frankly. There are lots of things to be afraid of. I have to confess, I don't have many good solutions to them. But I find that if you focus too much on your fears, you will end up not doing the right thing. Certainly there has been a hate piece against me by the Chinese state media to incite violence against me. It's targeted harassment. 

You've spoken about bat-cave tourism continuing with much more vigour, in the last two years.

In early 2020, China passed new laws saying that these wild species of animals, even if they're domesticated, should not be sold for consumption anymore. So they shouldn't be sold for food. But they didn't actually do anything about these species used for traditional Chinese medicine or luxury items. A lot of the animals that are suspected to be potential intermediate hosts of this virus are not primarily traded for food. For example, pangolins were primarily traded for traditional Chinese medicine for their scales, not for the meat. If there's no law, this wildlife trade could be leading to these novel outbreaks and pandemics. On the ground, the train is still roaring full blast. Bat-cave tourism, where people go inside caves having millions of bats, is still ongoing with thousands visiting, in China, in the same province of Wuhan even now. People in southeast Asia are still going into these caves to collect bat guano (faeces) from bats to sell as a fertiliser.

Virus hunting and manipulation today are like the gold rush, partly due to increased funding for pandemic prevention projects.  

There's an international programme, PREDICT, that gets scientists to predict the next pandemic. They need to collect as many viruses from nature as possible, and make the largest collection of them in the world. So they wanted to define thousands of viruses from every continent, and put together this ginormous database of viruses, and study them in a lab to try and predict what makes a virus capable of infecting humans, and how you can develop therapies against these viruses. This virus hunting work and the resulting lab work on these viruses pose a risk that has been under-reported. Whether the researcher gets infected in the caves when they're being exposed to millions of bats, or in the lab when they're working with the samples, and then they bring it into the city, next to the international airport… this whole pipeline of activity has risks that have not been properly evaluated.
I believe that the current process of reviewing whether work is too risky is not transparent and not sufficient. We know that tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of dollars continue to be poured into this type of work. And they continue to say that this work is essential for preventing and predicting the next pandemic. And they are leveraging even this pandemic to say that we need more money for this type of work. 

There's some talk of a lab origin of Omicron.

Omicron was only detected in late 2021. So there's this missing period between mid-2020 and late 2021. People don't really know what was happening with this virus, how it evolved from that parent into Omicron. I can understand why some people think this could be another lab product. But the evidence is quite stacked for natural origins of Omicron.

How do we know that people approving and conducting risky experiments have turned over a new leaf in the last two years?

Lab accidents are inevitable. they are happening on a very frequent basis even in the top labs around the world. It's happening and in a country like the US, it happens so much more than anywhere else. Yet, there's no global oversight. There's not even national oversight. Nothing has changed despite the savagery unleashed by the novel coronavirus. Recently, in late 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control released an announcement: 'if anyone is making chimaera of SARS-1 and SARS-2, please let us know soon and let us know by February if you want to continue doing this work.’ One US scientific organisation even wrote a letter to Congress saying don't regulate us, don't regulate our research, just because you think that this might have come from a lab. There are scientists who are really pushing back against more regulation, more transparency. 

Has the work on this virus by labs increased in the past two years?

Yes. Because of this pandemic so many labs started working with SARS-CoV-2 like viruses and there's so much more money for virus work. Because now everyone is freaked out by this pandemic, there's a very strong, justifiable reason to get funded. They are still shipping viruses from Asia, up to the US for study in the lab. What if they actually find a pandemic pathogen, and they've just shipped it to Boston? What if during the shipment, it explodes on the plane? Accidents happen all the time. Unfortunately, most of it is conducted in the dark. Only the people doing the work, and only the people funding the work, get to see what's happening. The public has no idea.