and other nations to investigate the lab-leak hypothesis will ever turn up unequivocal evidence one way or another, at least without the full cooperation of China, which is unlikely.īut if they do, this small, motley group of amateur sleuths will have broken what may be the biggest story of the 21st century. It's not clear that the best efforts of the U.S. But the evidence assembled by DRASTIC amounts to what prosecutors call probable cause-a strong, evidence-based case for a full investigation. None of this proves that the pandemic started in the Wuhan lab, of course: it's entirely possible that it did not.
Gradually, the quality of their research and the rigor of their thinking drew a larger following, including many professional scientists and journalists. The sleuths ran into a fair number of dead ends, got into the occasional spat with scientists who disagreed with their interpretations, and produced a firehose of reporting. They call themselves DRASTIC, for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19.įor a long time, DRASTIC's discoveries stayed confined to the strange world of Twitter, known only to a few nerdy followers. Throughout the pandemic, about two dozen or so correspondents, many anonymous, working independently from many different countries, have uncovered obscure documents, pieced together the information, and explained it all in long threads on Twitter-in a kind of open-source, collective brainstorming session that was part forensic science, part citizen journalism, and entirely new.
They are a group of amateur sleuths, with few resources except curiosity and a willingness to spend days combing the internet for clues. The people responsible for uncovering this evidence are not journalists or spies or scientists. Amateur sleuths pulled together the evidence of a lab leak as the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers are seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China's Hubei province, on February 23, 2017. The reason for the sudden shift in attitudes is clear: over the weeks and months of the pandemic, the pileup of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab kept growing-until it became too substantial to ignore. And the mainstream media, in an astonishing about-face, is treating the possibility with deadly seriousness. President Joe Biden has demanded an investigation by U.S. ( Newsweek was an exception, reporting in April 2020 that the WIV was involved in gain-of-function research and might have been the site of a lab leak Mother Jones, Business Insider, the NY Post and FOX News were also exceptions.) But in the last week or so, the story has burst into the public discourse. The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." CNN jumped in with "How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family." Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times ("fringe theory") to NPR ("Scientists debunk lab accident theory"), were equally dismissive. For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right.