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:

Q/ We still have no headway as to the origin of Covid-19.

A/ We are on the brink of having some real investigations. The China-WHO joint study cannot be called an investigation. Once a real and unbiased investigation begins, we will be able to see early papers, emails, documents being shared in the early days of the pandemic, or even in the years leading up to the pandemic.

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

A/ 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 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. I just want to be a normal person, not having to be targeted for harassment. And not having to fear about career retaliation.

Q/ Do you fear retaliation from China?

A/ What if I travel to a place that has an extradition treaty with China? China has [a very long] reach into any country. There has been a hate piece against me by the Chinese state media to incite violence against me.

Q/ You've spoken about bat-cave tourism.

A/ In early 2020, China passed new laws saying that wild species of animals, even if they're domesticated, should not be sold for consumption anymore. But they didn't do anything about these species used for traditional 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 their scales for use in Chinese medicine. If there's no law, this wildlife trade could be leading to novel outbreaks and pandemics.

Bat-cave tourism, where people go inside caves having millions of bats, is still going on in Wuhan, with thousands visiting. People in southeast Asia are still going into these caves to collect bat guano (faeces) from bats to sell as a fertiliser.

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

A/ 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. They wanted to define thousands of viruses from every continent, 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.

I believe that the current process of reviewing whether work is too risky is not transparent and not sufficient. Tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions, of dollars continue to be poured into this type of work.

Q/ Have people approving and conducting risky experiments turned over a new leaf?

A/ Lab accidents are happening very frequently even in the top labs around the world. In the US, it happens 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. 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.'

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

A/ 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 it explodes on the plane? Accidents happen all the time. Only the people doing the work, and only the people funding the work, get to see what's happening. The public has no idea.