Chapter 12 - Science under Siege in the Information Age

Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information.

“Murderer! Murderer! Smug murderer!” The threatening calls from an unknown conspiracy theorist followed Peter Daszak down the seemingly endless hallway of the US Capitol building. Some of his detractors were trying to get him rattled—any reaction, really—holding their phones to his face so they could blast it out to their followers. Also there: Emily Kopp, working for the anti-biotechnology activist group USRTK. She was chastising Peter for causing trillions in damages to the US, following behind him with a professional camera team recording her monologue. This would potentially be good footage for her next attack piece or possibly a movie. After countless books, op-eds, podcasts, and YouTube videos, the lab leak conspiracy genre was lacking a big-screen cinematic experience; rumors about its production had been circulating for months now.

Peter knew it would get bad the moment US Republicans took control of the House in 2022. They had been campaigning as the party of accountability and oversight. A false promise. In reality, they wanted to direct the emotional energy of voters for political gain, whitewashing President Trump’s pandemic failings by using scientists as scapegoats. They also wanted to use the spectacle of public witch trials as campaign events—the offline version of the omnipresent pile-ons from social media. The agitated online mobs had called feverishly for a party that would exert revenge for the trauma of the pandemic, and Republicans were keen to ensure that it was the scientists and their democratic opponents at the other end of that particular pitchfork.

Many pseudo-events had led up to this moment for Peter, from the White Coat Waste Project, using Matt Gaetz and Marco Rubio to cascade awareness of his WIV grant towards an irascible Trump, resulting in its unlawful cancellation on live television. The USRTK playbook included decontextualizing Peter’s emails to give ammunition to conspiracy theorists, while the relentless media onslaught about gain-of-function research stoked a moral panic. Then, the “leak” of DRASTIC’s re-interpreted DEFUSE proposal, the supposed blueprint for creating the pandemic virus. Katherine Eban’s hit pieces cast him and Shi Zhengli as the main villains. All of these were an avalanche of events, in addition to his supposed arrangement with Anthony Fauci as the “kingmaker” of grant funding and the many virologists in cahoots circling the wagon.

Simultaneously, virus hunting had been demonized as well. Myths about the supposed dangers of discovering viruses were powered by biosafety activists, catastrophizing influencers, and sponsored in considerable part by the cryptocurrency fraudster and effective altruism fanatic Sam Bankman-Fried, who donated millions to various media outlets to write scary existential risk stories about virology. EcoHealth Alliance’s mission was recast as creating the conditions for biological warfare, treated by some commentators as the equivalent of nuclear testing. The utility of virus discovery for research and pandemic prevention was ridiculed. Even Republican senators missed no opportunity to blast Peter regularly in the Daily Mail and New York Post for uploading something as innocuous as a short video of a bat eating a banana. Each time he made the news, allegations against him would be recycled and refreshed in people’s memories. No matter what Peter Daszak did or did not do, no matter if he spoke up or withdrew, the drumbeat continued.

The media landscape about him was a bizarre mixture of directed fan fiction and choose-your-own-adventure stories, with multiple co-created narratives about Peter, his role, and his supposed fault mixing, converging, and spinning into ever-new reasons to hate him. His supposed villainy was entertainment at this point, and the third act of his story arc was already prewritten.

“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP) led by Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup tweeted in June 2023. They all had big plans for the lab origin myth. In early 2023, they were laying out a path for the public shaming of scientists, first and foremost Peter Daszak, his colleague David Morens at the NIAID, and including Dr. Anthony Fauci. The HSSCP and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA) were the main tools for those ambitions.

On November 14, 2023, behind closed doors, they pestered Peter with questions for over nine hours. “It is clear that they take it as a fact that we did reckless gain-of-function research,” Peter told me at the time, despite the NIH disagreeing. They also constantly hammered him about his role in the WHO mission and the supposed NIH-sponsored gain-of-function experiment The Intercept had homed in on. And, of course, the DEFUSE proposal, or more accurately, the distorted media version of it. His lawyers had advised him to not argue and contest the many false interpretations of technical details; he would come off as adversarial, and the politicians would blame their scientific ignorance and confusion on him. Rather, he should keep it simple and reiterate that this experiment was not gain-of-function based on the NIH definition and that the DEFUSE proposal was never funded, nor was the work ever conducted. He tried to stick to the advice, but he could not prevent himself from clarifying why certain technical allegations were just false and nonsensical. After the arduous interview, he left uncertain of what would happen next.

Then, radio silence.

Sometime in March 2024, Peter naively thought that he might not be called in for a public hearing. The vibe had seemingly moved on; the HSSCP was focusing their efforts on giving anti-vaxxers a platform, chastising school closures, lockdown measures, and issuing a subpoena to former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “to answer for these deadly policy failures.” The usual political clown shows in a heated election year. The rewriting efforts of Trump-era policy failures had apparently shifted towards blaming the Democrats. Perhaps the lab leak narrative was just not that interesting or useful anymore after four years? Some virologists expressed the same feeling; the story was an old and tired trope at this point.

They would be wrong.

Shortly after Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the primary campaign, thereby securing the presidential nomination of the Republican Party again, the winds shifted quickly. His enablers in Congress focused on getting him elected, mobilizing voters anew. With Trump’s chances of winning the White House against an aging Joe Biden looking increasingly promising, they needed to create momentum for the next Republican policy agenda—an agenda that became known as Project 2025.

Briefly, Project 2025 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks. The 922-page conservative policy magnum opus and “mandate for leadership” set out to radically transform the US. It aims to remove a lot of checks and balances necessary for a democratic society, bestowing the executive with unilateral power to implement their agenda and replacing tens of thousands of apolitical bureaucratic positions with pre-screened MAGA loyalists, including in the Department of Justice and scientific institutions such as the NIH, FDA, or CDC. Public health measures and climate action would be virtually impossible under the new regime. It would strip influence and independence from scientific bodies such as the CDC and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and bring them under tight political control. Similar plans have been laid out to remove FDA drug approvals for reproductive health care. Project 2025 is an all-out political assault on US science and institutions. Scientific American quoted Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, about the Project 2025 agenda:

“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document.”

Such a radical anti-science policy agenda needs many motivated rationalizations to convince ordinary conservative Americans (who remain overall supportive of science) of its appropriateness. The HSSCP and other congressional committees were ideally positioned to create the right pseudo-events for that purpose. Any epic drama starts with a great villain, and the lab leak myth had just the right story ingredients to give politicians what they needed.

The HSSCP announced Daszak’s public hearing on social media on April 4, 2024:

🚨BREAKING🚨

EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will testify at a public hearing on May 1, 2024.

Dr. Daszak must answer questions about COVID-19 origins, dangerous gain-of-function research, and his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

They claimed that “Dr. Daszak and his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research” and that “mounting evidence continues to show that COVID likely originated from a Wuhan lab.” They urged Peter to come to clarify his statements, insinuating he had “directly contradict[ed] previously uncovered evidence about his relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology & his oversight of gain-of-function research.” Throughout April, the HSCCP would ramp up their attacks along the same line. Familiarity. Repetition. What they were missing was novelty. So, what’s the twist this time?

The online absurdity reached a tragic peak when scientifically illiterate House representatives started to impose their ignorant interpretation of the DEFUSE proposal upon Peter’s supposed intention, alleging nothing less but a thought crime about a proposal that was never funded and work that was never conducted.

Lying to Congress is a crime.

@EcoHealthNYC President Dr. Peter Daszak told us he intended to conduct risky gain-of-function research in North Carolina. However, recent evidence suggests he actually planned to conduct the research in Wuhan.

On May 1 — we will seek the truth.

Open intimidation. The politicians threatened publicly that if Peter didn’t concede to their interpretation of unreality, he would be in criminal jeopardy. Now, that is new enough.

Like a marketing campaign before a big event, the HSCCP regularly used their Twitter posts as teasers about the spectacle they had prepared for viewers:

In less than one week, EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak will appear before @COVIDSelecT for a public hearing.

✔️ COVID-19 origins

✔️ Gain-of-function research

✔️ Wuhan Institute of Virology

✔️ Dr. Anthony Fauci

…and more are on the table.

May 1, 2024 | 10:00am ET

While conspiratorial communities online and Republican-aligned niche media had covered the upcoming public hearing of Peter Daszak throughout April, the overall traction in wider discourse was still limited to a few hundred thousand online people. Sizeable, but not news-cycle defining. That was to change exactly seven days before Peter Daszak’s hearing. Rep. Brad Wenstrup announced the bombshell in the best velocity hacker fashion: Dr. Anthony Fauci was up next. His hearing would happen in June, a few weeks after Peter’s. Now that announcement got the attention of mainstream outlets such as The Daily Caller, The Washington Post, and Fox News, putting Peter’s hearing on the map. Dutifully, Fox News framed Peter’s hearing as the preamble to the main blockbuster:

Wenstrup said that the panel will also hold a public hearing with EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak on May 1 that will serve as a crucial component into the origins of COVID-19 and provide essential background ahead of Fauci’s public hearing.

Free advertisement for the upcoming HSSCP-choreographed influence campaign. Finally, on May 1, 2024, the show was ready to start. And it did with a big bang.

Precisely 12 minutes before his scheduled public hearing, as Peter was still being chased down the hallway, the HSCCP Twitter account posted an official-looking document. It was the Republican majority interim report “recommending EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak be formally debarred and criminally investigated.”

Criminal investigation? Debarment? These are radical actions, especially as their sole evidentiary merit seems to lie in the fact that EcoHealth Alliance sent an NIH progress report in too late. However, with the lab leak narrative, the lack of supportive evidence was never a barrier to action. Peter was indeed referred to the Justice Department for allegedly lying to Congress and misleading funding agencies about conducting gain-of-function research. The NIH was not off the hook either. The report leveraged the same charge of facilitating dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan “contrary to previous public statements, including those by Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

In other words, heads were finally going to roll.

Even more cynically, the report openly tried to rewrite history, claiming that “the Trump Administration identified serious concerns with EcoHealth Alliance’s funding of the WIV and instructed the NIH to fix the problem” and that “this intervention likely prevented EcoHealth from continuing to conduct dangerous research.” The shutdown of EcoHealth’s grant in 2020, which had to be reversed because of illegality, was now whitewashed as a necessary and just action. The purpose of scapegoating Peter Daszak and NIH officials was pretty clear:

[According to] evidence collected by the Select Subcommittee, there are serious and systemic weaknesses in the federal government’s—particularly NIH’s—grant-making processes. The weaknesses identified by the Committees not only place United States taxpayer dollars at risk of waste, fraud, and abuse but also risk the national security of the United States. These weaknesses can only be remedied through both executive and legislative action.

Project 2025 officially kicked off.

All of this happened before Peter even read his introductory testimony. But if the verdict was already in, why go through with the public hearing after the fact? Virality, of course. To cement the rewriting of the past in the public’s mind and prepare them for the atrocities of tomorrow. If you make it trend, you make it true.

“Get your popcorn ready, folks,” the HSSCP had announced. After all, nothing flies in our gladiatorial arena of social media more than a public witch hunt. In the factional war of all versus all, consensus can only be found when we come together around shared enemies. Politicians know this best.

Peter’s hearing went predictably with posturing politicians trying to look good on camera while reading their prepared monologues. Peter, aware that the verdict was already out, was sitting in as a campaign prop, facing his accusers, getting cut off any time he tried to clarify or correct the record. An exercise in cruelty. He was still fighting for his reputation when the string had already closed around his neck. The setup, imagery, and his futile attempts to satisfy the accusers just provided the gravitas to the choreographed event.

In their monologues, Republican representatives really did not offer to lay out any evidence or examine his charges; rather, they would try to find ways to insinuate and link Peter Daszak´s work to various grand conspiracy myths of the day. First and foremost, he facilitated gain-of-function research in China, helped the Chinese which caused the pandemic. But there were also some tangents and other dog whistles. For example, Rep. James Comer from Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Accountability and Oversight, tried to paint him as a spy or CIA asset, or at least somehow in cahoots with the intelligence agency. “Does the intelligence community know what happened in the Wuhan lab? Did the intelligence community believe that China was manufacturing a bioweapon?” A nod to MAGA Republicans who believe that the “deep state,” including the intelligence community, was somehow involved in creating the pandemic, to institute vaccine mandates, totalitarian control, or whatever. Peter Daszak answered that it was a question for the intelligence agency, then referenced the 2023 ODNI report, where all intelligence agencies ruled out that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon.

Rep. Michael Cloud from Texas used his five minutes to ask if Dr. Daszak had been engaged with social media companies and whether he agreed with their moderation policies. Nothing to do with Peter, but a dog whistle for a different battle over misinformation and disinformation research, another field of science that Republicans are attacking along with public health, medicine, climate change, and a general evidence-based worldview. He also questioned Peter Daszak’s patriotism and allegiance, given that he works with a country that does “unrestricted warfare against the United States.” More red meat to the broad anti-China coalition in the US. Peter replied that to stop pandemics, we need scientists to go to the places where they emerge and that, ultimately, this is in the interest of US citizens.

Rep. Morgan Griffith from Virginia spent his five minutes in a virtual monologue, talking himself into a rage about Dr. Daszak being a supposed liar while not letting Dr. Daszak address any of his contentions. Overall, a lot of grandstanding was expected from this side of the political spectrum that had long made up its mind about the myths they wanted to buy into. Their verdict and recommendations were entirely expected.

The real surprise for Peter was the other side of the political aisle. Representatives from the Democratic Party had very different goals and talking points prepared, potentially to the surprise of many who did not pay close attention. Their overall goal was to paint Dr. Daszak as dishonest, self-serving, and even fraudulent.

Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz from California spent considerable time claiming Dr. Daszak was conflict-of-interest-ridden given his involvement in the Lancet letter. Why did he not acknowledge he was working with the lab that was the focus of conspiracy theories? The intelligence communities say the question is still open, but “the statement you authored attempted to summarily close the question,” Rep. Ruiz claimed. Peter Daszak explained that conspiracy theories at the time were about bioweapons, HIV inserts, and snake DNA—all prominent conspiracy theories. He did not imagine, back in February 2020, that this statement condemning these circulating conspiracy theories would be a conflict of interest. But Rep. Ruiz was not interested in his explanations, emphasizing that Peter Daszak did not explicitly state that he was working with WIV. Why was Rep. Ruiz so hell-bent on a conflict of interest statement for an opinion letter?

Rep. Debbie Dingell from Michigan took up a conspiratorial talking point about the 2018 DARPA proposal, which was never funded. The anti-science pressure group USRTK had claimed that earlier drafts of that proposal would expose an attempt to mislead the federal agency because of a side note stating that some assays might be performed in China. In reality, the submitted draft to DARPA had more specifications and did not support any assertions that misled the agency. Also, if the proposal had been funded, the agency had to submit and agree on a detailed work plan with exact allocations of where and what work would be performed. Either way, there is no substance to these assertions of a supposed thoughtcrime.

Yet Rep. Dingell was not interested in Dr. Daszak’s explanations of how these allegations made no sense given the grant-making process. She just said, “Well, there are appearance issues here… We won’t accuse you of creating COVID-19, but to the extent that you have considered misrepresenting facts, we consider this a very serious mistake,” she cut him off.

Rep. Deborah Ross from North Carolina went all in on another completely unrelated project that the NIH had awarded to Peter Daszak and Shi Zhengli to study coronaviruses in China. The multi-year grant had annual reporting requirements, and there was a problem with the year-five report, which Dr. Daszak had not uploaded on time in 2019. The reason was a supposed banality; a software or related error in the NIH system prevented EcoHealth from uploading the report. “The system locked us out; we contacted NIH; we received no response,” Dr. Daszak explained. He had emailed his grants manager to upload everything; the committee had the emails corroborating that EcoHealth intended to upload the report. However, once again, nobody seemed to care.

“The NIH has conducted an electronic forensic investigation into their report submission systems and found no evidence of a lockout,” she claimed. Rep. Ross went on to state that the rules need to be followed when taxpayer money is involved, and although EcoHealth Alliance had been “exemplary” for four years, that it did not happen in year-five invited questioning from her colleagues. But what exactly were the Democrats questioning? Again, none of this has anything to do with the origins of COVID-19 or the pandemic but about a reporting mishap (at most, a violation) on an unrelated grant.

On and on the Democrats would go about these trivialities, as if EcoHealth Alliance was not an organization with dozens of people, multiple projects, collaborators worldwide, and a million things going on that might sometimes have human mistakes in the mix. The 18-month-long audit of EcoHealth by the Department of Human Health and Services (DHHS) has found some errors but no significant violations, after all. So why were the Democrats so hell-bent on painting Dr. Daszak in a very negative light? Rep. Ruiz stated in his final summary:

I wanna be clear, nothing produced for the Select Subcommittee over the last 14 months, 425.000 documents, over 100 hours of close-door testimony substantiates claims that federal funding to EcoHealth Alliance and the Institute in Wuhan caused the pandemic.

But somehow that would not excuse Dr. Daszak’s alleged lack of transparency. “I do think, at the end of the day, Dr. Daszak, your responses here are unsatisfactory,” Rep. Ruiz would finish up. “You claim you submitted, and yet it was not submitted.” “Your administrative responsibilities and lack of reporting in a timely manner are concerning.” “You are explaining things to your convenience to avoid consequences, and that is concerning.”

Remember, the Subcommittee’s report was released before the public hearing; no matter what Dr. Daszak explained to them, their agreed-upon verdict with Republicans was already in. “It is important that you and your actions as grantees are held accountable,” Ruiz finished his monologue.

The Republican counterparts were happy, congratulating each other for their bipartisan agreement. Rep. Wenstrup had the final word and closed the hearing with skepticism toward scientists. “We cannot just blindly trust the scientists because they are scientists.… Especially when they are not forthcoming and honest,” pointing at Dr. Daszak. “Getting money for a federal grant? That is a problem,” he listed Peter’s supposed crimes. “Hiding behind different definitions of gain-of-function research,” he continued with performatively raised eyebrows.

Rep. Wenstrup clearly enjoyed his moment. “There are scientists in China,” he reminded everybody. “A country that is an adversary to the United States of America.” And Peter was supposedly masterminding a “misleading grant application to DARPA, downplaying the Chinese part,” he gleefully added. “You did not disclose your collaboration with the WIV in The Lancet,” he raised his eyebrows again. “This is a troubling pattern of behavior that we are seeing,” he paused briefly, “and conduct as well,” he added for impact. The hearing between Democrats and Republicans was then closed amicably.

I had watched the hearing live with increasing discomfort, and I wasn’t alone. Scientists from three continents were chatting with me about their unease. “Shitshow” and “The whole thing makes me sick. Political theater at scientists’ expense” would be some of the sentiments expressed. But I think something a bit more concerning was going on.

The Democrats attacked Dr. Daszak because he was considered a weak point in the coming Project 2025 assault on the CDC, NIH, NIAID, and other agencies. Especially with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing scheduled just weeks later, throwing Peter under the bus quickly might be the right defense strategy. Already in the interim report, the HSSCP Republicans stated that their goal is to “reign in the unelected bureaucracy, especially within government-funded public health.” Institutional expertise and independence out, political decision-making in.

The Republicans further recommended granting the NIH director or the HHS secretary, both political appointees, not career public servants, “the authority to immediately suspend a grant determined to be a threat to national security.” In other words, they want to make President Trump's action by canceling EcoHealth Alliance’s grant on TV in 2020, which NIH unlawfully enacted, legal for the next Trump administration. In that future, all scientific grants will henceforth be up to the whims of the executive. Good luck with getting funding to study any politically inconvenient topic.

The committee also wants to “incorporate the national security and intelligence community into the grant-making process,” specifically for countries they deem a concern—another vehicle to curtail the independence of science in the US and bring it under political control.

Given these larger political circumstances and the immediate threat to independent institutions, I believe the Democrats decided to try to direct heat away from the NIH and other federal agencies. These organizations awarded EcoHealth Alliance with grant funding for research and are responsible for oversight. They approved the work done in China. They also made themselves liable by canceling Peter’s grant unlawfully at Trump’s orders.

By painting Peter Daszak as this dishonest, conflict of interest-hiding, deceitful actor, the Democrats laid out their defense strategy for institutions. Even if these agencies were found to have financed risky research, or even gain-of-function research, as they all deeply believed to be true, it was without NIH approval. It was not a failure of oversight but deliberate fraud by Peter Daszak. And the unlawful cancellation of the grant in 2020 was just and reasonable given these circumstances.

A convenient political framing. They upheld their oversight but were misled by the uncooperative Chinese and their conduit, the “shady” Dr. Daszak (whose character they just smeared). They then acted decisively to shut them down. In my opinion, they were throwing EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak to the wolves in hopes they would get their fill and relent from pressing Democrats in an ailing presidential campaign. Sounded pretty good if the Republicans let them have this one. Which, surprisingly, they did, at least for now.

Again, this is my interpretation of their actions, as I am not privy to any concrete backroom deal, they may have made with their Republican counterparts. Maybe the Democrats independently decided on that strategy simply because nothing makes for better bipartisanship agreements than a shared villain. The Democrats probably felt that it was a smart move in order to protect the institutions from false allegations of willingly financing gain-of-function research in China.

Nobody at the HSSCP cared that SARS-CoV-2 had nothing to do with gain-of-function research and that no lab could have produced a virus like SARS-CoV-2. The tragic reality was that politicians did not care about any facts or scientific reality, only about their voters’ desires.

Today, 66% of Americans believe the virus came from a lab, many of them feverishly. In a general election year with razor-thin margins and everything at stake, the Democrats certainly did not want to open new avenues of attack against them. No party wants to be in a position of having to educate citizens about technical gain-of-function definitions or defend a complicated scientific reality their voters do not want to believe in anyway. No politician wants their party blamed for the trauma of the pandemic. For the Democrats, it was just too risky to be perceived as defending EcoHealth Alliance, or worse, as the party covering anything up, especially with China involved. The Biden administration has always taken a hard stance on China; the origins investigation was a good topic to show. All Democrats needed to do to create parity with Republicans was to get in on the spectacle. Be even more vicious than them. Who cares about the fate of a non-profit organization with no power to push back? Especially one led by a scientist who makes such a great villain? With democracy itself at stake in the upcoming election?

Politically, they likely saw it as the right move, given the circumstances. Yet by making that political maneuver—that it is better to play into popular sentiment rather than risk exposure by sticking up for facts—I worry that Democrats in the House have embraced the same pugilistic worldview of their opponents and information combatants online, where power and perception matter much more than an evidence-based worldview.

If you make it trend, you make it true. And scientists all over the US felt the political wind shifting.

Prof. Angela Rasmussen told the magazine Science that she “was disappointed that the Democrats joined the Republicans” in what she described as “essentially an attack on science.”

It’s a very dangerous situation because most scientists who are approaching any problem — whether it’s the origins of the pandemic, whether it’s anything else — are going to think twice: should I actually get involved in research that is high impact but potentially politically controversial?

While all these House committee hearings have the makeup of an interrogation and imbue a courtroom feeling, they are anything but. Peter came to testify, but his verdict had been posted on Twitter before he had even read his opening statement. There was no defense lawyer or jury present. Politicians constantly interrupted him to deliver their prepared five-minute soundbite monologues. It was a televised witch trial, not a legal ruling. However, most media treated it as a definitive case anyway.

EcoHealth Alliance and its scientists felt the impact immediately. A five-million-dollar research grant for analyzing the risk of bat viruses interacting with wildlife farms in Vietnam, all but finally approved, suddenly was pulled from the process without comment or justification. This type of work is exactly what scientists believe could elucidate the emergence of COVID-19 through the wildlife industry. Now the human cost and fall-out was real. “It’s crazy to see the death knell of my scientific career mentioned so casually,” Dr. Cadhla Firth, a talented evolutionary biologist who studies zoonoses and works at EcoHealth Alliance, wrote on Twitter in response. Laughs and derision ensued, with commentators happy to point out how she had it coming for causing the pandemic. She replied:

I didn’t start working for EHA until 2021, so I’m not sure what I have to do with any pandemic-related b******t? You clearly aren’t aware, but EHA isn’t just Peter, there are a lot of amazing scientists in the organization that have never even spoken to Peter.

Two weeks later, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) sent a letter to EcoHealth Alliance, informing them of their suspension from procurement programs and proposed debarment for years. With these actions, politicians hung a Damoclasian sword over the organization, stigmatizing it to the outside world.

“I want to remind everyone that we have not yet been given the chance to respond to allegations.” Peter would clarify on Twitter a few weeks later. He was now gearing up for a legal case because, in the end, the courts need to decide whether or not it is lawful for the DHHS to debar an organization from funding. A measure like that would need to show evidence of substantial wrongdoing, not mostly meritless allegations, and a late grant report submission. “We will contest every one of them, with substantial evidence, both to the HHS & publicly,” Peter showed some fighting spirit.

In an evidence-based world, his chances in court are pretty good, for as long as “innocent until proven guilty” remains a core American legal concept. In a law-based society, everybody deserves a fair hearing and a proper process. Only in the witch trials of old, as well as autocratic regimes, does the burden of proof get inverted. There, the accused have to somehow prove their innocence to the satisfaction of their accusers. Often an impossible task. I fear that, at least in our modern media ecosystems, we have once again reached that point.

“Covidselect has not received anything that proves your innocence, and NIH moved to debar you,” the HSSCP mocked in response to Peter’s above tweet. The cynicism was staggering. After their publicity stunt and blatant abuse of political power, the politicians were the ones who get to define reality now, continuing: “EcoHealth Alliance, under your direction, facilitated dangerous gain-of-function research in China and repeatedly violated the terms of its NIH grant.”

Their implication was clear: he helped create the pandemic and could not prove otherwise. He was guilty until proven innocent. Bystanders reacted accordingly. The comment sections under the exchange were full of calls to put Daszak in jail without trial or sometimes directly to the guillotine. Often replies were accompanied by the hashtag “Nuremberg 2.0,” in reference to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi criminals. Many celebrated that the HSSCP, and by extension, “their team,” finally got the first one of those responsible for the trauma of the pandemic.

It was disgusting to watch, and not over by far. Pouring gasoline on that fire was Alina Chan, with the help of The New York Times. On the day of the Fauci hearing, June 3rd 2024, they published an elaborately crafted and highly manipulative op-ed with full graphic support from the NYT’s editorial team. The article must have been months in the making, timed perfectly to create buzz for the witch hunt and to legitimize the Republican attack on gain-of-function research and Dr. Fauci, who the op-ed advised to “cooperate with the investigation.” Scientists were shocked to have the paper of record invite a well-known activist to do political propaganda. Multiple outlets featured scathing commentary from scientists about Alina Chan’s piece and NYT’s enabling role in the weeks after. The NYT’s responsible editor did not answer my request for comments about the peculiar timing either. Either way, it was too little, too late to make a difference. The NYT’s op-ed, along with the buzz from Dr. Fauci’s hearing, hit the infosphere like a meteor. A masterpiece of velocity hacking, from the misleading graphics to the headline to the timing of publication. The world reacted. Virologists told me that random bystanders from their social circle who had not thought about the pandemic origins since 2021 asked them whether it was now proven that it leaked from a lab because they had read the NYT article. If you make it trend, you make it true.

While virology, in general, faced the brunt of Alina Chan’s article, the aftermath was even more torturous to Peter. The New York Times’ unethical op-ed legitimized the HSSCP witch hunts in the eyes of the public and elites. Peter explained to me that, for EcoHealth Alliance, it was:

…pretty damaging, because everyone here reads it in New York. And the people who run foundations read it, and the donors read it, and they all think it’s true because The New York Times has done a glossy thing about it.

With the paper of record going all-in on the gain-of-function lab leak narrative, prospective donors and steadfast supporters of EcoHealth Alliance grew hesitant to further support the organization. They had to think of their own reputations. If there is so much smoke, how could there not be fire?

Then came the killing blow. “So, at first the agencies didn’t instantly terminate all the grants,” shared Peter. His organization was involved in many critical research projects around the world, outside of coronaviruses and bats. Studying the impact of deforestation in Brazil or conservation efforts in Liberia would be among those. They were also cooperating with many US universities on projects in South Africa and Borneo. The DHHS suspension and proposed debarment did not demand these multi-year projects immediately stop. EcoHealth Alliance scientists involved in these financed projects would still have some runway to finish up—at least usually.

But that lasted a few weeks, and then Senator Joni Ernst… She wrote to all the agencies, saying, ‘Explain to me whether you have suspended EcoHealth Grants or not.’ So, after that, they started terminating them.

One by one, upon pressure from the same US senator who was outraged by Peter’s “giving a bat a banana” video he shot in Thailand, agencies felt pressured to terminate successfully running and paid-for projects. Projects that were often awarded primarily to US universities with academic researchers in the lead and EcoHealth Alliance only as a subrecipient in a supportive role. Details did not matter. “EcoHealth should never get their hands on bats or taxpayer dollars again,” Senator Joni Ernst stated in her press release.

With these actions, they have been made the ultimate pariah, ending any further cooperation even with US universities. The politician’s signal to the academics and academic institutions was clear: cooperate with EcoHealth and face termination of your grants too.

Systematically, the actions and influence of news outlets, politicians, conspiracy theorists, influencers, and media activists worked together to dismantle any revenue stream to keep EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization for the public good, in existence. An NGO does not sit on a lot of cash; they do not turn a profit; all their grant money goes out to research materials, scientists, and collaborators. If EcoHealth Alliance runs out of money before the court trial about the legality of their debarment starts, even a successful legal defense becomes meaningless. The organization and its people will be long gone. That seems to be the plan—letting them bleed out rather than making their case in court.

By the time we chatted, the court hearing had already been pushed back a second time to a later date. EcoHealth Alliance had to let go half of the staff, often rapidly, because their grants were terminated out of the blue. Brilliant scientists working for the public good are suddenly out on the street. Others hang on by the thinnest of threads, but likely not for much longer either; that includes Peter himself.

“People are very unhappy,” Peter acknowledged, as if life had been sucked out of him. I quickly asked what happened to the international collaborators of EcoHealth Alliance, some of which I got to know. “It’s been a bit of a mixed bag. They all lost our money. Some of them are angry,” he said.

Scientists in Malaysia took it best. When they were cut off, they also had to let go of some staff as well, but “they are determined to raise some money elsewhere.” To not give up. Other collaborators retreated. According to Peter, Supaporn stopped responding. They had a paper:

…that was ready to go on this new virus that’s close to SARS-COV-2; it binds to human ACE2. A clear and present danger… We need to do some more analyses. That’s gonna take some time. We don’t have any money to do that, and that’s not gonna come out. She’s basically not going to publish that work.

Of course, virus hunting has become very controversial in Thailand as well. Supaporn faces a lot of hardship on her own. No Southeast Asian country wants bat scientists to create new data about the pandemic’s origin. Nobody wants to be blamed by a world that has not made its peace about natural risks that span borders, industries, and peoples.

Other EcoHealth collaborators, especially in Africa, were hardest hit. Critical projects and conservation efforts stopped. Rescued animals are again without protection and care. People lost their livelihood or purpose. Anger, depression, and despair had gripped some formerly funded collaborators. The grim reality is that many people, animals, and communities will suffer because of US representatives playing politics with science. Politics with pandemic prevention efforts. Some critically important science will not be done; some will not get published. Training of regional experts and educational interactions with communities will subside. Progress of the last decade will be reversed.

This fallout is a lot to put on a person’s shoulder. Peter Daszak was always proud of the meaningful work EcoHealth Alliance did. To see it all come crashing down is tormenting. “This is, you are going through a horrible psychological torture,” the haunted zoologist confessed to me. The events flashed past his inner eye. What could he have said differently? Done differently? Was he trapped from the start? He confessed before trailing off in thought:

The day after the hearing, I started dreaming about the politicians attacking me. For every day since… every time I’ve fallen asleep, I’ve dreamt about it. Every night I wake up having had nightmares about it. Every time I fall asleep during the day, anytime… It’s straight in there.

Despite the difficult years, the Peter Daszak I got to know a bit in late 2022 was still a hopeful guy, embattled but not bitter. He had a can-do attitude toward problems; it was part of his charisma. Now, our conversations were more stagnant, almost like an eerie distance had emerged, separating him from the ground he was standing on. His recurring nightmares haunted him because his brain struggled to find a solution to a problem that was not of his creation and remained elusive to his control. He can’t even wrestle control from his lost thoughts anymore. “So it’s right there, and then you wake up, and then it’s reality. And then you have to face your reality.”

§

The HSSCP was not the only Republican-led committee formed to do pandemic revisionism and political propaganda. Four other Republican-led committees also wanted to extract their pound of flesh from scientists, including EcoHealth Alliance and Peter Daszak. Virologists would not be their only target either. Ever since 2023, these revenge committees have called public health experts, institutional leaders, scientific journal editors, and even disinformation researchers in front of Congress.

Innocence was no protection from punishment. In 2023, the HSSCP called in Prof. Kristian Andersen and Prof. Robert Garry to testify about the “proximal origin” paper and Fauci’s alleged role in suppressing the lab leak hypothesis. While the virologists did absolutely nothing wrong and admirably held themselves to the public grilling, making the Republicans look stupid, one might think that they came away well. But that would be wrong. Because Republicans had abused their power and issued subpoenas for troves of private messages of scientists, they could immediately retaliate for their botched hearing. They “accidentally” leaked subpoenaed private messages of virologists to motivated propagandists, effectively tasking them to smear virologists through decontextualization. The USRTK playbook, if you want, but hypercharged by the might and resources of a political party in power. Client propagandists on Substack did much of their propaganda, crafting a malicious character assassination through decontextualizing private slack messages that went viral.

The smear campaign proved not only profitable for the propagandists, but also very effective. Not only did they discredit Prof. Kristian Andersen and his coauthors’ reputations in the eyes of the public until this day, but it was also creating doubt about all virologists and science in general. A year later, right after the Fauci hearing, a New York Times op-ed columnist was given the space to falsely allege that it was scientists like the “proximal origin” authors that destroyed public trust in science. The misleading of the public all started with those lying virologists and “Dr. Fauci’s teleconference” for them. Revisionist history from punditry is all too eager to show scientists their place. In reality, the virologists’ only real offense was to do good science that happened to interfere with political myth-making and popular sentiment.

Unfortunately, politicians wielding the power of the state against scientists will find many influencers and commentators in big newspapers and elsewhere all too willing to legitimize their abuse. Especially when their interests are aligned to shut up and marginalize those pesky fact-checkers and myth-busters that sabotage the popular narratives that made them powerful.

“The point of the exercise was punishment, not oversight,” Renée DiResta would write about these congressional hearings. Disinformation researchers like herself were facing the same treatment by Republican-led revenge committees. She and others had come under fire by Republicans because they tracked disinformation around election interference and influence operations. Their research findings tended to somehow always interfere with what right-wing influencers and politicians tried to sell the public, such as the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump or that social media had censored conservatives. So, of course, these researchers had to pay for their audacity to speak the truth, too.

The wild theories spun in the online fever swamps can serve as a pretext for something even more sinister: Politicians, who wield real power, citing propaganda as justification for sham investigations and other forms of retaliation.

“They retaliate, however, because real power is at stake, and discrediting the people exposing them is the best way to cast doubt,” Renée DiResta would further explain. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where her research group was based, was bombarded with subpoenas and lawsuits, racking up legal costs into the millions for the university. Ultimately, Stanford got the message and did not extend Renée’s employment, effectively shutting down the research group. As a reward for her stellar research, Renée also found herself the villain of a networked smear campaign, alleging that she was a CIA spy masterminding the deep state’s censorship-industrial complex. She, of course, knew what would come her way once the ridiculous narrative was picked up by the influential:

It was glaringly obvious to those of us who study propaganda and disinformation what was going to happen: documents and excerpts of interviews would be leaked to ideologically aligned propaganda outlets, and those mentioned in the resulting coverage would be targeted by online mobs.

Retreating from public life offers no remedy against these networked attacks.

Playing ostrich does not stop the rumors or end the story; it simply lets somebody else control the narrative. If you are sufficiently interesting or useful as a villain in a conspiracy theory, the propaganda machine and rumor mill can keep recycling claims and allegations endlessly.

Renée wrote about her experiences in her book. Having a front-row seat to a modern-day witch hunt is certainly not how she expected her research on propaganda to go. As attacks on scientists across the board mounted, we kept in touch. She was not happy but remains steadfast for the moment, hoping that reality will eventually exonerate her work and reputation. “The people who stood up to McCarthyism are the ones history remembers,” she said, referencing another era where the allegiance of scientists was questioned by an authoritarian political movement. A movement empowered by the “red scare” moral panic and enjoying broad societal support.

Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist, sees parallels between the current anti-science aggression experienced by biomedical science and the persecution of scientists in the Soviet Union under Stalin. While history does not really repeat itself, it certainly likes to rhyme. I would offer that such anti-science aggression has become a necessity for old and new powers in the information age who want to entrench their particular worldview and consolidate their grip over public discourse and with it, wider society.

The lab leak narrative enjoys the buy-in of the wider public, as well as motivated conspiracy theorists, activists, influencers, dark-money-funded NGOs, tabloid newspapers, mainstream outlets, politicians, diplomats, even some intelligence agencies, and the leaders of nation-states. A diffuse coalition of convenience, profit, and power, aligned by a shared narrative. That makes the current lab leak alliance no less forceful or dangerous than past ideological movements or moral panics in my opinion.

This is not solely a US problem either. Science is under pressure globally. A broad anti-science coalition aligned with a grand geopolitical narrative is scary and dangerous for any scientist whose research tends to interfere with said narrative. All around the world, virologists and scientists I’ve gotten to know see their work threatened, find themselves targets of abuse, and face general suspicion about their motives from international institutions, governments, and citizens.

We already heard about how Prof. Alice Hughes has tried to pull her life back together. Shi Zhengli has not left China since and has recently felt renewed pressure on her because she dared speak to foreigners, including me. Many Chinese scientists faced repercussions for sharing data, albeit these are rarely as public as when Zhang Yongzhen, who published the first genome with Eddie Holmes, was found sleeping in protest outside his lab. He had lost it. One of my contacts told me about another Chinese scientist losing his position for greenlighting the upload of the Huanan market meta-transcriptomics data that Florence Débarre discovered. Others, who will not be named, are in a precarious situation because they have been talking to Western scientists informally or privately.

Linfa Wang from Singapore, who tried to keep a low profile and not speak up until recently, has somehow evaded being dragged into the worst abuses, although I learned his name is regularly flaunted by Republican Senate staffers. I wonder what happens when the documentary movie comes out to raise public awareness of him. Either way, his students like Wee Chee and other young virologists look into a future of hardship because, on top of all the professional challenges—the painstaking work, the long hours, the isolation—their research brings with it, they will have to contend with a hostile society. A society that does not want them trained and removes funding for the profession, sabotages their publications, and punishes them if they get too visible. Bat researchers everywhere face suspicion and riled-up regional communities that do not want them around anymore for fear of governmental repercussions. That Supaporn Wacharapluasedee in Thailand has broken off contacts is maybe less surprising. She’s had her fair share of hardships, losing her lab once already because of the origin myth, being investigated, and having her collected bat samples destroyed.

Even in healthy democracies, scientists are not necessarily safe. Eddie Holmes and Dominic Dwyer in Australia faced their hardships, with the former recounting a harrowing experience and security incident at his home during the height of the “proximal origin” witch hunt in the US Congress. The Murdoch media empire in Australia is influential, and Eddie makes a great domestic villain for Australian audiences. Even today, conspiratorial mobs insult him, write him messages, and sabotage his institutional email address. British scientists are very much in the same boat. Anti-science aggression has gone global everywhere, and it correlates with how outspoken scientists are.

Merely talking to me was also not without risk. Uploading our interview on YouTube got Brazilian parasitologist Carlos Morel in trouble with the WHO press office. As a member of SAGO, another advisory expert committee to investigate the origins of pandemics, he dared to say there was no evidence of a lab leak. Because he keeps speaking publicly, fighting the good fight for evidence over fiction, he has become a target of conspiracy theorists and their media outlets. Other researchers reach out in private to me, not keen on becoming the next target of online hate mobs or politicians. Junior researchers worry about their careers, but even established professors try to avoid attention in this climate.

Even if not directly attacked, virologists and public health scientists feel pressure mounting from every side. Already on a shoestring budget, frontline defenders against avian influenza and other emerging diseases like Erik Karlsson and Filip Claes in Cambodia need at least five times the manpower to uphold their responsibilities for pandemic anticipation and prevention. However, that support is unlikely to arrive. The WHO has been paralyzed and made ineffective by the geopolitical tap dance around US and Chinese interests. Governments, funders, and NGOs everywhere seem to have lost interest in public health and abdicated their responsibilities of acting to prevent the next pandemic. China even pulled out of international collaborations for wildlife and wet market surveillance and loosened its laws against this industry again. What future are we building for ourselves? How can we mend the bleeding scars of the growing chasm between societal beliefs and scientific research?

Virologists who have been hit hardest have been sounding the alarm not only about their research but also about the damage the false lab leak myth is doing to science.

Science is humanity’s best insurance against threats from nature, but it is a fragile enterprise that must be nourished and protected. The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. Yet, the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.

We must understand that scientists are a minority in every society they are embedded in. Science values evidence over tribal affiliation, which is why it has no friends among political camps or extremists that tend to spearhead attacks on them. Because scientists are just not part of any larger political tribe, and most of society is oblivious to what happens to them in today’s fragmented information ecosystem, nobody comes to their defense when anti-science aggressors come for them.

This has some very direct consequences. First, inconvenient scientists are picked off one by one. Second, anybody who speaks up in their defense might become the next target. Third, nobody is safe to pursue independent research that might interfere with popular beliefs or power.

Take Marion Koopmans, whose role in the WHO mission has been questioned in her home country’s parliament several times. “Right-wing politicians were immediately attacking me,” she recounted what had happened to her. Lawsuits followed. “We had several court cases,” not necessarily restricted to the lab leak myth but often related. For her, it cascaded from the “PCR gate” conspiracy theory to “plandemic” and various anti-vaxx movement-associated narratives. After the WHO mission, she explained, “There was a bombardment of harassment.” She was now part of the origins cover-up as well. When the WHO looked to recruit her again for SAGO, activists bullied them out of the idea. “There was a coordinated effort against me,” Marion said. Alleging conflicts of interest, corruption, cover-ups, and worse. She sent me an Excel file documenting over 200 different attack pieces against her in the media, from bloggers to contrarian outlets to mainstream sources.

Now “We are bringing Marion Koopmans to justice” posters were plastered. Her students are approached by political operatives and conspiracy theorists, trying to get them to go to court against her, supposed witnesses to her many crimes. “I have been told by security advisors that it will go on for some time,” the sharp-eyed virologist admitted her frustration. Yet she was not giving up. The experience has invigorated her sense of importance in explaining science to society. That is the reason she still speaks out, albeit it comes with so much hardship. She has avoided traveling to the US because of safety concerns in such a radicalized country. She’s had security for three years; guards checked every physical meeting she attended.

These worrying experiences abound, especially in the last few years. I have witnessed events that I thought were largely impossible in a democratic society, yet they happened. I have had conversations with scientists who do not feel safe anymore, who self-censor, and who stopped communicating to the public entirely. I have seen essential research projects scrapped, defunded, and scientists giving up pursuit of certain areas of research to protect their careers, their lab members, and their families.

These are not trivialities about social media harassment, trolls, or random junk from the internet. These are existential problems facilitated by an aggressive anti-science movement that saw an opportunity in the lab leak myth. Scientists, abandoned by society, have no chance against their onslaught. Ask yourself: When did you have to change your home address and scrub the internet of private information because you and your family receive daily death threats from hate groups?

When people are continually calling your place of work, protesting outside it, filing lawsuits, and your employer loses funding, do you have the capacity to continue your work?

When your private messages can be subpoenaed by political activists and then leaked to their client propagandists to instigate a national smear campaign, would you feel comfortable talking about a controversial topic even in private?

When New York Times columnists work closely with conspiracy theorists to build their hit pieces against you, are you thinking twice before speaking up for scientists even as a bystander?

When you get dragged in front of Congress in a witch hunt, where they lie about you to your face and afterward refer you to criminal prosecution, do you want to roll the dice that the justice department has not been tainted by the institutional rot impacting every other area of government?

“Where is the public outcry?” Marion asked me. When innocent scientists get harassed, threatened, buried in lawsuits, dragged in front of politicians to denounce their beliefs, or face criminal prosecution? Why does nobody lift a finger? Or worse, why are so many seemingly cheering on the spectacle? “That is worrisome.”

§

“There is no true insight into the nature of reality without liberating ourselves from the noise,” the documentary filmmaker Christian Frei explained to me how his thinking has evolved on the topic. How can we make sense of the present moment?

I believe informational conflicts between our various bespoke worldviews and objective reality are inevitable. It is a battle that has plagued humanity ever since we formed tribal societies with different creation myths, religions, and politics. For most of our histories, these conflicts between worldviews often led to repression of others by various forms of power, subjugation, or bloodshed. Might decided who was right.

With the scientific revolution in the late Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, humanity started on a different project. While still often shaped by power and privilege, the scientific method gradually transformed our knowledge of the observable universe into a more coherent picture. No matter our idiosyncratic, magical, or personal worldviews and politics, science works whether or not we believe in it. Scientific evidence—not might—suddenly could decide what ideas about reality were right (or at least who was the least wrong). Raw power still often won, but over time, the superiority of this new “weight-of-evidence”-based approach became impossible to deny.

Today, the scientific method has been awarded the inherent authority to create, assert, dispute, challenge, and correct information about objective reality. It is the ultimate arbiter of solving informational conflicts or contradictions that constantly arise within our colorful, bespoke worldviews. Science has become the pin that holds us attached to shared reality and, I would argue, each other. It may offer one of the greatest services an enlightened society could wish for: the formulation of a consensus reality based on shared facts. A common ground that allows us to work together and solve problems larger than ourselves. If we want to, that is.

Since its inception, the scientific method has always faced pushback from certain segments of society. Science is a constant danger to religious ideology, shady businesses, and pseudoscience peddlers that rely on myth, manipulation, and magical thinking. Attempts to discard science and discredit scientists by these motivated actors are not new.

In a world of increasingly bespoke realities, what if science has become an existential threat to all our most cherished co-created beliefs and worldviews? To our recently developed online politics, identity, and community?

I believe that today, an entirely new front of informational conflicts has opened between shared reality and our digital world. We all have found ourselves participating in and co-creating bespoke online communities. When the pandemic pushed scientists and scientific topics to the center of society and into the middle of the attention economy, many underlying tensions just escalated, drawing near the breaking point. All that was needed was a good emotional hammer to shatter the glass around the moral panic button about science. Both fringe and well-funded anti-science movements seized on the opportunity. The pandemic, and the lab leak narrative specifically, was their once-in-a-generation chance to topple the supremacy of science and tear society away from supporting and trusting it. An opportunity brought about by technological disruption, vulnerable information ecosystems, and a traumatic global crisis.

The unleashed information war over reality now constantly pits science and scientists (as well as investigative journalists, educators, and other defenders of an evidence-based worldview) against crowds and information combatants arising from all layers of society. Even worse, researchers now regularly find themselves in the crosshairs of those with real power and influence. Science as a global public institution for humanity poses a considerable threat to grifters and snake oil salesmen, populist influencers and narratives, ideological billionaires, unethical businesses, tech platforms, and, of course, state actors and autocrats. They all currently dominate in the world of fragmented and bespoke realities. They all cling to their newfound power tooth and nail, seeking to shape public perception in their favor and to entrench themselves and their separate little epistemic fiefdoms permanently. But how to go about it? In the information age, leading attacks against scientists, gaining ground against the scientific method, and winning decisive battles against an evidence-based worldview have become their avenues of choice to project and defend their influence over society.

With so much at stake and so much to gain, participating in the current anti-science (or anti-reality) movement rewards many networked agents of influence handsomely. Almost anybody can gain popularity, profit, persuasion, or power by undermining the authority, function, and perception of science sufficiently well in the information age.

The marketplace of motivated rationalizations is constantly looking for new, valuable products. That’s why all these networked agents, activists, and agendas seek to portray science and scientists as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. Rather than a public good for the benefit of all, they work hard to cast scientific insights as the opinion of a weird, secretive niche interest group, tribe, or cabal. They paint inconvenient scientific research as ideologically subversive and existentially threatening. Independent science is a thorn in their eyes, something that needs to be beaten in the fight for societal supremacy, public perception, and political power. Their acts of anti-science aggression are what we see playing out in real time today.

But what happens when their viral narratives and emotional falsehoods remain unchecked? When any semblance of a science- and evidence-based worldview is relegated to a thing of the past?

Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky has studied how conspiracy theories and misinformation impact democracies. He and others view the rise of anti-science activism and sentiment as a hallmark of democratic backsliding. “Everything that is a counterweight to power is being undermined,” he explained to me. “I think the goal is to abolish accountability as a stepping stone. That means you got to discredit science.” He and his coauthors argue that science is a critical guardrail for the “epistemic integrity of democracy.” We need a shared set of facts to function in a democracy; without them, any collaboration on shared issues becomes impossible.

“Once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore,” the Kyiv-born journalist and propaganda researcher Peter Pomerantsev said in his Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America. The congressional witch hunt against Renée DiResta had caught his eye.

Democratic decline has become the topic du jour in intellectual circles. Many scholars, intellectuals, researchers, and historians point towards misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, authoritarian politics, social media, and polarization as root causes. I believe everybody looks at a valid subset of the larger phenomena, which I would offer is that our modern information environments have changed how information flows through society and thereby restructured our societies into conflicting and mutually incompatible bespoke realities. Unfortunately, the current information ecosystem asymmetrically favors emotional myths and viral narratives over scientifically accurate content, all while incentivizing us to form our identities and communities in opposition to science.

Yet without science as a pin that keeps us attached to shared reality, I worry about losing everything that we have taken for somewhat granted, including living in a democracy.

Or, as the Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist, puts it even more bluntly:

Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.

I’d say that if scientists can indeed be seen as canaries in the coalmine of democracy, carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber. Many scientists went silent and retreated from the public after years of reckless onslaught. Who is going to speak up in the future when the next viral falsehood comes along? We need to act now before it is too late.

As I write this, the false lab leak myth is gaining steam once again, readily invoked by right-wing politicians and MAGA Republicans in the US. It is used not only to target their domestic enemies or activate voters by giving them scapegoats but also in service of a more sinister authoritarian agenda. Leading the efforts again is the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks and the key organizer behind Project 2025, the current playbook for enabling the authoritarian takeover of the US. One of their main goals, called “Schedule F,” is to replace tens of thousands of politically independent public servants and career scientists with loyal party apparatchiks, bringing all institutions under the unilateral control of the presidency. Consolidating power in the executive branch might be a terrible idea for both the independence of science and the future of the republic.

On July 8, 2024, the Heritage Foundation laid out its grand plan for the false origin myth. They assembled “what we believe will be the most important commission in decades” COVID-19 origins group, consisting of former Trump officials involved in the false bioweapon myth like former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Deputy HHS secretary Robert Kadlec, and former CDC director Robert Redfield. The group also included lab leak activist Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton National Security staffer and anti-China hawk looking for influence again. The HSSCP chair, Brad Wenstrup, was there as well for the launch of “a report with actionable recommendations for the president and legislative branch of government to implement right now.”

These people, all very familiar with weaponizing the government, would decide what to do about the lab leak myth in the future when the Republicans gain power again. Here is their fundamental position: make China the enemy. Jamie Metzl, from Heritage’s origin commission, asserted:

There can be little doubt… that the Chinese government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.

Various segments in the US, predominantly but not exclusively on the right, have long cast China as an existential villain, not just a geopolitical adversary anymore. In the factional warfare between bespoke realities, we only come together around a shared enemy. Seasoned politicians understand that principle deeply. You do not work on solving shared problems with your mortal enemy.

Subsequently, the commission outright rejected, even mocked, the idea of ever collaborating with China on shared environmental, climate, and public health challenges. According to a snide comment from one of their speakers, working with China in the past was always a misguided idea that had failed spectacularly. The pandemic supposedly proved this. Jamie Metzl further summarized their points of action, asserting that the pandemic resulted in “18 trillion in losses to the United States,” arguing the only path forward, and “as a means of establishing accountability and discouraging similar behavior in the future, …Chinese companies and the Chinese State must be held accountable and liable for these losses.” Doing anything else would just further incentivize the CCP to engage in “dangerous, aggressive, and secretive behavior,” they claimed. In other words, they will make China pay 18 trillion dollars in reparation to the US, and this will somehow stop the next pandemic, which many of them believe was a bioweapon anyway. An absurd demand and non-sequitur from anti-China hawks designed to escalate tensions further. “We also want other countries to use what we have done as a blueprint to hold China accountable,” John Radcliffe added. He is proposing nothing less than basically a return to a Cold War era with China.

Yet, should the Republicans win political power and even the White House, these fringe positions of the Heritage Foundations will likely become official positions once again. The weaponized lab leak narrative is a trigger they can pull again and again for enemies, domestically and abroad. Other efforts are already planned. Next to ongoing activities by the HSSCP that burned Peter Daszak at the stake of public opinion, there is the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability led by McCarthy-era wannabe and lab leak truther Rep. Comer and the powerful Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The latter will likely see long-term gain-of-function fearmonger Rand Paul take over chairmanship with the election and Senator Josh Hawley in the driver's seat of the new inquisition.

The first sham hearings were held on June 18, 2024, to smear the virologist and “proximal origin” coauthor Prof. Robert Garry as a propagandist while giving Rand Paul’s close collaborator Richard Ebright the stage to spew politically desired falsehoods about bioweapon agents and research. In September, Josh Hawley accused Dr. Carrie Wolinetz, former chief of staff at the NIH, of “actively misleading the American people.” His fulminating monologue was clipped by Forbes Breaking News and received over 1.8 million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. Thousands of approving comments made it clear that people wanted more of this. Self-serving theatrics aside, much worse is expected to come from these revenge committees weaponizing the conspiracy myth.

After years of viral propaganda, the lab leak community has grown to include ordinary citizens, online mobs, client propagandists, commentators, as well as mainstream journalists, and has captured media outlets all the way to both chambers of Congress. With such a powerful amplification network in place, it’s easy to imagine how the emotionally captivating myth could be quickly re-deployed by another Trump administration. Utilizing the right-wing outrage machine, agitated crowds, willing influencers, and mainstream media enablers, political leaders might want to recycle the lab leak myth to stir popular demand for further escalation against China, even to justify military aggression. When the other is cast as an existential threat, all manipulators need to do is fabricate a few novel twists to justify the larger narrative. Instigate some fresh pseudo-events that seem to support what most Americans already believe in and ensure that many dedicated amplifiers are willing to push it repetitively.

If you make it trend, you make it true. How about a new story arc about the evil CCP supposedly working on bioweapons to be deployed against Taiwan? Now, that would catch eyeballs if it could be made to look real.

Novelty, familiarity, and repetition are not only key ingredients to virality but effective manipulation tactics to persuade the masses and shape their bespoke realities. While absolutely far-fetched from today’s point of view, some type of military escalation would not be an unprecedented US response either. After the traumatic events surrounding the 9/11 terror attacks, popular fears and misconceptions about terrorism and old tropes about Muslim fundamentalism were merged and weaponized by politicians. The so-ignited emotional energy could later be directed skillfully with the right set of fabricated pseudo-events. Pseudo-events like the supposed existence of compelling “reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq’s military,” as NPR reported. These misrepresentations were subsequently brought forward by ostensibly credible voices like US Secretary Colin Powell to support the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) narrative. Emotionally activated citizens, their critical faculties blinded by trauma, rage, and grief, ate it up. The mainstream press not only failed to calm the situation but fanned the flames. Instead of critically questioning the evidence and narrative, The New York Times did the most to legitimize the WMD narrative. Ultimately, elite belief in its veracity and the constant media drumbeat created wide public support for the military invasion of Iraq. A remarkable outcome considering that political tensions with the country have been going back decades. Escalations have come and gone. War was certainly not inevitable. Few doubt today that the evidence-free invasion the Bush administration was obsessed with would have been possible without 9/11 as a traumatic catalyst.

Do we really believe the trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic that killed far over a million Americans is any less potent a catalyst if hardline warmongers and anti-China Republicans get their way? Especially if we talk about the authoritarian MAGA movement winning power again? Russia’s Putin already used the fabricated “US Biolabs in Ukraine” narrative (another variation from the lab leak genre) as one of his supposed justifications for invading Ukraine. A sizable proportion of Russians (and sadly, also Americans) readily bought into these fabrications. Every dictator and strongman stirs the emotions of his nation’s people by creating an enemy abroad or starting a war. The purpose of war for autocratic leaders is to legitimize their iron rule at home to call for unity while using it as a pretense to crack down on domestic dissenters. What might an authoritarian second Trump administration, keen to enshrine power and supported by the Project 2025 apparatus handpicked for loyalty by the Heritage Foundation, be willing to do if given the chance?

I honestly do not know what could happen; the example is provocative on purpose. A scenario to highlight that our failure of imagination often makes us blind to how badly things can escalate if we let them. We need to find our way back to epistemic clarity about the world we live in. As Russian dissidents will tell you, when nothing is ever really true, any justification for political actions, no matter how absurd, stupid, evil, or unimaginable, becomes possible. Or take the words of Hannah Arendt, a scholar of totalitarianism:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And people who no longer believe anything cannot make up their minds. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such people, you can then do what you please.

That is why I want to fight our epistemic paralysis of the moment.

Conspiracy myths specifically have always been tools for mobilization against certain individuals, groups, races, or even nations. They are part and parcel of the fascist and totalitarian playbook that we have no excuse not to wise up about. How effective conspiracy myths can rouse our feelings and mobilize voters will be shown most prominently in the next US presidential election. I strongly believe the all-consuming political myth-making and the ensuing grand narratives of perpetual conflict against a foreign enemy should be relegated to the past, where they belong.

Irrespective of the outcome of world events, we have to understand that an evidence-based worldview is and will remain under attack globally by networked anti-science aggression and viral meta phenomena within our information spheres. That is the new tragic normal, enshrined in the circumstances and systems we inhabit today.

This means that all types of blatant exploitation of our emotions and crafty manipulations of the public have become much easier with the many vulnerabilities that emerged with our new information ecosystems, no matter who is in power and who happens to catch our eyeballs. We all have to do our part to build resilience and protect our democratic and scientific institutions, ourselves, and our agency from the power grabs of cynical politicians, self-serving influencers, media manipulators, motivated crowds, exploitative algorithms, and the viral narratives that rose out of our collective interactions online and that prey on us from within. That is a tall task for us today, and possibly the only task that matters if we want things to turn around for the better. I also believe that we have the power and will to create the future we want to live in.

One of the most important direct actions that defenders of an evidence-based worldview can take immediately is to not be bullied out of the conversation by (what is in my experience) just networked losers, loudmouths, and lunatics. We all have some influence online. Do not let media manipulators and activists preemptively rob your voice and your impact on others with empty posturing and mob tactics.

We also have to create social friction to slow the spread of harmful viral narratives. Let’s ask for evidence and time to assess before participating. We need to resist the seduction of story tropes when they seem to neatly support our team or worldview, especially when they villainize and dehumanize others. The world is much richer than the usual make-believe villains and heroes conjured up by gifted storytellers. We need to build new online systems that allows rationality and plurality to florish online. Most importantly, we need to hold the line against falsehoods and their amplifiers instead of giving in to bluster, pressure, or nihilism. Let’s defend the scientific method as the best tool we have to approximate ever-more accurate views about our shared reality. It will not always be convenient to do so. Speaking up for something incurs some risk of pushback.

I have no doubt that I will get attacked, smeared, and discredited by the usual agitated lab leak believers just for writing this book. I also expect the book will likely be downrated by organized campaigns on rating websites and ranking systems, as happened to Renée DiResta’s work. Lab leak influencers will likely cherry-pick passages to fabricate outrage or to dismiss my words, and the book will quite probably be overshadowed by the next shiny manufactured pseudo-event anyway. C’est la vie. If that is the outcome, I am okay with it. What is important is that for all their asymmetry of passion, they could not stop me from writing, nor can they stop you from reading the inside story of the COVID-19 origin controversy.

If my book, against the odds, threatens to gain any traction in mass media, it will possibly lead to fiercer pushback. The same tried and tested containment strategies and character assassinations that motivated lab leak believers previously used will be deployed again to try to shut down and discredit the findings of scientists whose remarkable trajectory we followed over twelve chapters. But will their detractors succeed again? Containment is difficult, for good or bad. I would wish for the book to give the scientists another round of attention and a fair hearing to tell their story.

But no matter what happens in the media, I would urge to not let activism and anti-science aggression rob you of your right to hear the scientific evidence from the very scientists who painstakingly produced it. The facts are in; the pandemic was not created in a lab. It is essential to democracy that we do not let those in power rewrite history to their convenience.

On the origins of SARS-CoV-2, scientists did their job admirably, sometimes in the direst of circumstances and at high personal cost. Now, I believe it is on us, society at large. We all can do our part to aid those scientists, help them get the evidence and their stories out, and help each other show up for reality—every defender of evidence-based worldview matters. If we learned one thing from how events unfolded, it is that we need to be networked when it comes to sticking to evidence, too. We all have a circle of influence; how we choose to use or not use it cascades outward. Even a little bit of compassion for science and scientists, and ultimately ourselves and the society we are embedded in, can make a lasting difference.

Science often seems untouchable and locked away in ivory towers, but the reality is quite different. Science is a powerful yet fragile enterprise, done primarily by curious and good-willed humans like you and me. They need the support of society just as much as society needs its scientists. While often not delivering answers as fast, intuitive, or satisfying as we would like, the scientific method as a humanity-spanning collective endeavor still deserves our trust. We would not be who we are without it. Science certainly serves as a critical guardrail against the excesses and abuse of society by politicians, governments, media manipulators, and gladiatorial influencers who crave power, cater to our intuitions, and utilize misleading information as their weapon of choice.

Lastly, we need to become clear-eyed about what is at stake because the sobering reality of our present conundrums does not change when inconvenient science is shut up.

We are integrated into vulnerable information ecosystems we don’t fully understand. We live in an interconnected world that seems currently ill-equipped to face viral threats, both online and offline. Our democratic societies have taken a turn for the worse. We have to deal with perilous political movements while being divided into increasingly bespoke realities. We are currently marching toward a new dark age of myth, manipulation, and magical thinking that all of us hoped to have left behind. The outlook is dire.

But we also have the tools to work against these trends. In Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World, the compassionate communicator offers us science as a candle in the dark. It can illuminate our way forward and keep the many demons of our human nature, as well as of our own making, at bay. We just need to remember that science does not exist in a vacuum; it is deeply embedded in society and done by ordinary humans like you and me. That makes it both beautiful and fragile, and certainly vulnerable to all-out societal assault.

I believe that we all need to reclaim our role as the perpetual guardians of that precious light of the Enlightenment. We have to recognize that we have been sleeping at the wheel as the forces of anti-science aggression, of manipulation and myth-making, of autocracy and nihilism, have been building up their digital war and propaganda machinery. They learned that by using the most compelling emotional conduits who channel our frustrations, fears, and trauma into activism, we could be lured to participate in the gladiatorial spectacle of viral anti-science narratives. They learned to target our tribal human nature and desire to belong to funnel us toward bespoke communities in opposition to science. They learned to root our online identity in their manipulative falsehoods. As a consequence, scientific illumination is once again quickly fading from society.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

It falls on all of us citizens to learn that we have to hold the line and stand up for an evidence-based, democratic worldview. To find community and build identity once more based on our largest shared humanity, not the lowest common denominator. All we currently have to get us out of our self-imposed epistemic crisis is ourselves. No cavalry is coming to magically rescue us from the encroaching darkness. We can't wait much longer on the sidelines either.

Welcome to shared reality.

Let’s get to work.

Fin

Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.

Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.

Related links: The anti-autocracy handbook for scholars.

Related links: How social media destroys democratic discourse

Related links: The playbook of anti-science actors - 3 part series

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