Earlier this week I caught up with a couple of public health scholars regarding something that has been all over the news lately, the Wuhan lab-leak scenario, to get a sense of their thinking now that this once-derided theory is the stuff of widespread scientific, political, and journalistic inquiry. “I’ve always thought it was a viable hypothesis,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “There are legitimate questions that need to be answered.”
“The difficulty,” Harvard epidemiology professor William Hanage told me, “is that the lab-leak idea tends to be conflated by the public with a bunch of other things, like deliberate manipulation of the virus to be more dangerous, or even deliberate release. As for whether my view has changed—not really. Do I think that the Chinese authorities are capable of launching a sustained effort to distract from any issues, real or not, that might attract blame for the pandemic? Absolutely. But that is not a scientific question. Just as the reality of the blame, and the desire of many to have someone to blame, are not scientific.”
The lab-leak theory is one of several endlessly enthralling narratives that have catapulted from the fringes to the mainstream. Pressure is now mounting for a deeper probe of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which might or might not have accidentally unleashed COVID-19. Meanwhile, lawmakers are awaiting a government report about unexplained aerial phenomena observed by Navy pilots. And intelligence officials are ramping up their inquiries into a mysterious neurological condition, known as Havana Syndrome, that has reportedly befallen dozens of diplomats and spooks. All three of these stranger-than-fiction story lines have captured the public imagination in recent weeks, and the plots are only thickening.
It all feels rather novel after four straight years of the Trump Show, during which the 45th president took up residence in our brains like an inextricable parasite. For journalists and news consumers alike, one of the more refreshing consequences of Donald Trump being booted from political office, and sent back to his natural habitat on the golf courses of Bedminster and Mar-a-Lago, has been the opportunity to start reading and writing about other things. About anything, really, as long as it has nothing to do with Kellyanne Conway, or Jared Kushner, or Michael Cohen, or the 2020 election and all of its attendant baggage. To hell with the so-called Trump slump. Give me a holy-shit story about alien spacecraft, or a bizarro espionage thriller, or an esoteric mystery involving bats and petri dishes and virologists in pressurized space suits.
There was no telling what would replace the relentless and highly lucrative Trump news cycle. But we all pretty much knew what wouldn’t. Case in point: A couple of weeks after the inauguration, I saw an internal list of the top-performing political articles at a major national newspaper. The name “Joe Biden” was nowhere to be found. Of course Biden’s actions are newsworthy, as are consequential matters ranging from the Republican assault on voting rights to infrastructure to pandemic recovery. It’s just that compared to the headline-making train wreck that preceded him, coverage of Biden’s presidency may feel boring by comparison. You know what’s not boring? UFOs. The Wuhan lab. Foreign agents allegedly targeting U.S. officials with microwave-pulse weapons. In the absence of an endless stream of jaw-dropping West Wing leaks, this is the juicy stuff that has been ricocheting around the media ecosystem, from breaking-news alerts to cable news segments to the pages of lofty magazines. The New Yorker alone published a feature on each one of these topics during the month of May. (The New Yorker and Vanity Fair are both owned by Condé Nast.)
“Not in a million years did I ever think I would have thought about, much less published, a long piece about UFOs and taken them seriously,” said David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor. “I see the world a little differently now. Or at least, I see the people who see the world differently a little differently.”
UFOs arguably got their first taste of true mainstream respectability in December of 2017, when The New York Times published a page-one investigation into a secretive, $22 million Pentagon program tracking strange sightings in the skies. The exposé had everything from a chilling video of a Navy jet’s encounter with an unknown object to descriptions of “metal alloys and other materials” that had “been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena.” As executive editor Dean Baquet told me at the time, “It was a story about government, and fights over funding and priorities. And it was damn interesting. That feels to me like the makings of a story worth putting on the front page.”
The UFO news cycle came back in a big way last month, largely thanks to a 60 Minutes feature focusing on the government’s “grudging acknowledgment,” as correspondent Bill Whitaker put it, that “there’s something out there.” The following night Barack Obama gave the story an extra push when he went on The Late Late Show With James Corden and said, “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are—there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are, we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern.”
In another front-page article, the Times reported last week that “American intelligence officials have found no evidence that aerial phenomena witnessed by Navy pilots in recent years are alien spacecraft, but they still cannot explain the unusual movements that have mystified scientists and the military.” (The government’s report is due to be released to Congress by June 25.) Appearing on Fox News, former director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe said, “Frankly, there are a lot more sightings than have been made public.” A friend texted me a link to a British tabloid article about the U.S. government having “exotic material” from “mysterious vehicles” in its possession. “Are you following this whole UFO story?” he wanted to know. “I’m obsessed!”
Havana Syndrome is another one that’s been kicking around for the past few years. It was late 2017 when reports first emerged about employees at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba suffering from some sort of high-frequency sound attacks. The New Yorker published a big piece the following fall, and GQ’s feature from October 2020 was another must-read in the Havana Syndrome genre. (Vanity Fair published a more skeptical assessment in 2019, poking holes in the sonic-weapon theory and suggesting the culprit might be mass hysteria.) But it wasn’t until last month that, for many, interest surged.
On May 12, the Times reported that the “mysterious episodes” causing “brain injuries in spies, diplomats, soldiers, and other U.S. personnel…now number more than 130 people, far more than previously known.” Almost two weeks later The New Yorker ran a follow-up to its earlier Havana Syndrome feature, complete with a harrowing account of two White House staffers whose lives were upended after their brains apparently got zapped in a London hotel. “Top officials in both the Trump and the Biden administrations privately suspect that Russia is responsible for the Havana Syndrome,” staff writer Adam Entous wrote. “Their working hypothesis is that agents of the GRU, the Russian military’s intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials to collect intelligence from their computers and cell phones.”
On Monday the Senate unanimously passed a bill providing financial aid to government employees with brain injuries that were likely the result of “directed energy attacks.” And on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “We are in the midst, at the president’s direction, with the National Security Council in the lead, of coordinating a government-wide review, including the intelligence community, the State Department, the Defense Department, to try to get to the bottom of what caused them.”
The lab-leak theory is a newer enigma, but it’s also the one that has gotten the largest amount of attention. UFOs and microwave attacks feel distant to most people; COVID-19 is something that has affected us all, and the entire world wants to know how it started.
As I reported during the early days of the pandemic, the lab theory first entered the media’s bloodstream on January 23, 2020, with a Daily Mail story rehashing a 2017 article in the journal Nature about the opening of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its safety concerns. From there it was amplified by conservative news outlets and Republican government officials, some of whom suggested, without evidence, that bioterrorism might have been at play. The theory gained a certain level of U.S. media cred thanks to a pair of delicately sourced Washington Post columns by David Ignatius and Josh Rogin, both of whom established that the intelligence community was indeed taking the possibility of a lab leak seriously. Nonetheless, there was strong pushback within the public health establishment, and that went a long way in shaping the media narrative. The Washington Post, for one, would later have to issue a correction on a story that described the lab scenario as a “conspiracy theory” that was “debunked.”
Still, throughout the spring of 2020, national security reporters and foreign correspondents at major news outlets chased down tips that were coming in about the Wuhan lab, according to several such sources. They didn’t find any smoking guns. There was also an extra layer of caution in the air given the intelligence and reporting failures surrounding WMD in the early aughts, a shadow that looms over the mainstream media to this day. But at the same time, there was a willingness to pursue the story. “The idea that there’s an absence of reporting from the early days of this because we hated the Trump administration is just not true,” one source said.
In January, New York magazine published a cover story unpacking the plausibility of COVID-19 beginning with a tragic mishap at a lab in Wuhan that was conducting risky research on bat coronaviruses. Anticipating critical backlash, the magazine put out a long statement defending the piece, which turned out to be prescient. In another few months the real drip-drip began—a letter from a group of concerned scientists here, a stray remark by Robert Redfield or Sanjay Gupta there, and so on. On May 17, Donald McNeil Jr., the Times’ former top coronavirus reporter, published an essay on Medium titled, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Lab-Leak Theory.” McNeil wrote, “We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic. We may never know. But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.”
A few days later The Wall Street Journal came out with an eye-popping story: “Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on COVID-19 Origin.” The article reported that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology “became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report.” Sources at competing news outlets told me that this intelligence wasn’t by that point a secret—it had been publicly discussed during a March 12 panel at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. Nevertheless, it was the Journal article that broke open the floodgates. “I feel like, with the Journal story, suddenly it was okay to report about the lab leak again,” one of the sources said. “That story totally changed the public narrative over this.”
Building on the momentum, Vanity Fair published an 11,000-word feature last week by my colleague Katherine Eban, who managed to get deep inside the government debate over the lab theory. “Behind closed doors,” she wrote, “national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in high-stakes battles over what could and couldn’t be investigated and made public.… Conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step.”
The scientific community remains divided, and many acknowledge that there may never be a satisfying conclusion. “It is really hard to disprove—or prove,” said Hanage, the Harvard epidemiologist. “My concern is that I can literally think of no evidence that would convince strong partisans of either lab-leak or natural origins that they were wrong.” Perhaps the right and wrong of it all is beside the point. “It doesn’t matter whether an outbreak originates from a lab or nature—we want to stop both,” Hanage continued. “That means that we ensure labs working with potential pandemic pathogens are subject to oversight, both in China and elsewhere, and that our surveillance efforts are enhanced to detect naturally emerging threats earlier on. We want to get better at both. And a large part of that is that China should indeed be much more transparent, but the current focus is not likely to make that happen. This is not giving in to China—it is recognizing that we will never know the origins for certain, but that we don’t need to if we want to decrease the risk of future pandemics.”
The lab-leak theory has enormous political implications, as does Havana Syndrome, even though they are entirely different in nature. (The possibility of well-intended research gone horribly wrong versus the possibility of menacing spycraft harming American citizens.) As for UFOs, there’s still a certain novelty factor, but even that situation presents a serious national security conundrum. (And if it turned out that the UFOs were actually, say, some highly advanced aircraft operated by a hostile foreign power, there would be international ramifications as well.)
What these stories all share in common is an air of futuristic mystique, the allure of the unknowable, a feeling of perpetual suspense. And that, of course, is what makes them so captivating. As Hanage put it, “Many of these things cannot be resolved one way or the other.”
Another way of putting it is that there are secrets, and there are mysteries. Secrets can be learned, but mysteries may never be solved. “In all three of these cases,” one of my journalist sources said, “we do not know what is going on. No one knows. It’s not like there’s a government person you can get to who has the answer and is hiding it. We usually don’t deal with stories that don’t have answers.”
— The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins
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— From the Archive: “60 Minutes Is Going Down”
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