Alina Chan and Matt Ridley: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

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On February 17, 2020, The New York Times and the Washington Post suggested that the lab leak hypothesis was a “fringe theory” that had been “debunked.” In April of 2020, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace called the lab leak hypothesis “one of Trumpworld’s most favorite conspiracy theories.” A few days later, Joy Reid said it was “debunked bunkum.” Some journalists and scientists even claimed that the hypothesis was xenophobic and “racist.”

As the mainstream press largely failed to ask questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (with some notable exceptions), the crucial task of investigating the virus’ origins fell to independent researchers, many of whom worked tirelessly to examine the evidence. 

Two of those researchers are Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Matt Ridley, a British biologist and science writer. In their book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, they detail the history of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as the cover-up that followed the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. 

In our conversation with them, Chan and Ridley explained the professional risks they took to pursue this line of inquiry. “For Alina, this took huge courage,” Ridley said. “She's at the start of a brilliant scientific career at a brilliant institution, and she had to be really tough. It's a remarkable story of human courage.”

As the lab leak theory becomes more widely discussed and accepted, much of Chan and Ridley’s work has been vindicated. In February 2023, FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.” The Energy Department released a low-confidence report with a similar conclusion, and just last week, the head of China’s CDC said that a lab leak should not be ruled out. 

So how did the media and the scientific community get the COVID origins debate so wrong?