‘T’ve always thought Covid may have leaked from a lab, and it could happen again’

Five years on from the first UK lockdown, the origin of the virus is still hotly contested. Dr Alina Chan was labelled a conspiracist when she disputed the official view it started in a wet market. Today, many scientists agree with her, she writes

- Dr Alina Chan

Five years ago today, Britain woke up to a world few had ever experienced. People were ordered to stay at home, permitted to leave for essential purposes only, such as buying food or for medical reasons. Laws were passed that prevented them from travelling outside their local areas and all “non-essential” high street businesses were closed. By May 2020, people were permitted to leave home for outdoor recreation (beyond exercise) and a month later, they were permitted to meet outside in groups of up to six.

The world was in the grip of a global pandemic which would take the lives of nearly 2 million people by the end of that first year. And it was under these circumstances in early 2020 that I became notorious for raising the possibility of a laboratory origin of Covid-19. But five years on, the origin of the Sars-CoV-2 virus which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and went on to infect the populations of 229 countries and territories, taking over 7 million lives, is still fiercely disputed.

At the time, I was a little-known early-career scientist (a postdoc) at the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. The backlash I experienced for raising this was disproportionate and personally targeted. I was called everything from a “race traitor” to a conspiracy theorist. It was as if the slightest sign of deviation from the official scientific consensus that the virus had come from sick animals in a wet market had to be slammed down and made an example of.

Collaborators of the Wuhan scientists accused me of seeking attention by riding the waves of wild conspiracy theories. But it didn’t make sense for me to do that. No sane scientist would have sought the type of attention I received. I was simply stating the fact that a laboratory origin was plausible, no matter how likely or unlikely.