They Tried to Silence Her COVID Origin Theory. Now Even the CIA Agrees with Alina Chan.

Five years ago this month, the SARS-CoV-2 virus shut down the world and changed it forever. While initial reports suggested that the virus had jumped from wild animals to humans at a market in Wuhan, China, others pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology—the only lab actively experimenting with closely related viruses. Since these viruses have never been found naturally within 1,000 miles of Wuhan, a local outbreak made little sense—yet questioning this brought swift political and institutional backlash from scientists worried about risking their careers and their work. But while working at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, scientist Alina Chan kept publicly questioning the official story, despite attempts from influential scientists and the media to cast the hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. After I profiled her for Boston in September 2020, helping introduce her to the world, she has emerged as a leading voice in the campaign for stricter biosafety worldwide. I recently checked in with her to see how things have changed.

So back in 2020 when I interviewed you for Boston, you were basically a postdoc with a Twitter account. Since then, you’ve published a book as well as influential opinion pieces in Science magazine and the New York Times, and have shifted to work on the challenges relating to research that can cause pandemics. How has your life changed?
My gosh, five years, that’s a lot to cover. I mean, almost everything has changed.

All this work that you do on biosafety, this is not your day job, right?
Yeah, this is not my day job.

Where do you find the time?
I’m a workaholic. That’s been the case for years. It’s just the kind of system they put you through in Asia. Even elementary school students work from morning until night. I think that has kind of stuck with me through adulthood as well. You wake up and work until you pass out. I have no hobbies.

Well, I guess I can cross that question off my list. How do you maintain a work-life balance?
I don’t. My daily routine is very unbalanced. I’m really driven, but also very exhausted.

So why do it?
I really had wanted to leave this origin stuff behind. But the fact that no real measures are being taken to mitigate this risk really draws me in. There’s this huge problem that needs to be fixed, and no one’s fixing it. For me, this has become more of a mission to get leaders in both the scientific community and the government to do something about accidental lab leaks. I feel that the work is highly meaningful.

Has your confidence that the pandemic resulted from a lab incident changed since 2020?
Back then, I was pretty agnostic. I was about 50/50. To the rest of society, that seemed insane because all of the top scientists were saying that this was a racist, anti-scientific conspiracy theory.

Yes, and now we know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, that they were colluding to suppress discussion of the lab-leak theory and were secretly trying to get you disciplined or fired. How did that make you feel?
Scientists are people. They have a lot of different pressures in their lives. Pressures to keep their labs running, to publish, to advance in their career. These virologists were not speaking scientifically. They were speaking from a very motivated standpoint, trying to shut down something that they thought would hurt their interests. Even in a situation where millions of people were dying. That shocked me.

Portrait by Ken Richardson

What finally convinced you that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the likely cause of the pandemic?
For me, the thing that really shifted the balance of evidence was the discovery of a 2018 research proposal called Defuse that was submitted by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their U.S. collaborators that specifically said, “We’re gonna look for novel SARS-like viruses in the wild, we’re gonna put in these novel furin cleavage sites and see what happens, and we’re gonna test these viruses in human cells to see how these features can impact their ability to replicate and cause disease.” And then, barely two years later, exactly such a virus causes an outbreak in their city, very far away from where these viruses are found naturally. To me, that extreme coincidence was too much to ignore.

This January, the CIA changed its official assessment of COVID. It now believes a research-related accident is the most likely origin. What does that say to you?
Among U.S. intelligence agencies, the FBI, Department of Energy, and CIA possess the greatest scientific expertise. All three now lean toward a lab origin of the pandemic. This means, at the very least, that the arguments and evidence for a natural origin of COVID-19 don’t stand up to expert scrutiny.

In your heart of hearts, do you think we’ll ever get a definitive answer?
I think there’s a good chance, and I’m not willing to let go of that chance. Until you investigate, how will you find out? So even if the chance is only 5 percent, you have to do it.

How much does it actually matter? If we know we need to improve biosafety no matter what, why do we really need to know what happened in Wuhan?
Because 20 million people are dead. I think if you show the whole world that we’re not going to investigate, that only incentivizes deception. People will be like, “Look, we managed to successfully stop the U.S. from investigating just by withholding information!” And the next time, they’ll just do it again.

Have we made progress in preventing the next pandemic?
No, I don’t think so. There was a recent review of all the publicly reported lab outbreaks and infections over the first two decades of the 21st century, and it found more than 300 instances of lab infections and more than a dozen lab escapes. Twenty years ago, we didn’t have all of these technologies where someone could just collect tens of thousands of samples from wildlife, sequence their DNA, and within weeks be able to generate viruses based on the sequences and put in novel genetic features. So this really is a growing concern. Many labs out there are working with dangerous viruses at low biosafety levels. They are coming up with these cutting-edge experiments for which the outcomes are completely unpredictable. These researchers are not bad actors, they’re just scientists going about their daily lives, and yet they are one bad day away from starting a pandemic. So the risk is on a level that we’ve never seen before, and if we don’t do anything about it, we’re just sitting and waiting for a tragedy to happen.

If you were made biosafety czar tomorrow, what is one policy you’d put in place?
Centralize the work. Do it in a single location where there are strict measures in place to protect the rest of humanity. If you look at the U.S., for example, there are hundreds of labs around the country with the capability to isolate, synthesize, clone, and genetically engineer coronaviruses and other viruses. It’s so decentralized, and yet it has the potential to lead to such widespread loss of life. Maybe there should be an island somewhere—a very nice island with a top-class facility and some very skilled technicians who stay on the island and go through a proper quarantine before leaving—and you do all the dangerous experiments there rather than in Boston or North Carolina.

Sounds like a Michael Crichton novel. Maybe this should be your day job.
In fact, I am making a career shift. I’ve decided to move on to a project in biosafety. The aim is to increase visibility. There’s no one tracking all of these experiments around the world that have pandemic risk. There’s no one mapping out all the researchers who do this work, all the pathogens that have been collected, all the abilities to synthetically clone these viruses without leaving a trace. The point is to make sure that you can see the risk globally. Where are these experiments being done? Who’s doing them? What are the pathogens? And was anyone surprised by the outcome? I think that’s really important to catalog. Without that kind of data, it’s really hard to formulate an oversight system that works.

What’s been the reception to that idea? A lot of scientists are resistant to more oversight.
Well, there have been some virologists putting out opinion pieces saying, “We’re doing fine taking care of ourselves,” but I don’t think that represents the majority of the scientific community. I’d like to think that talented young people want to work in a field where there’s oversight, where things are transparent, and scientists are accountable. You don’t want to go work in a place where there’s no mandatory system for tracking incidents and no way to investigate, because that just means it’s unsafe for everyone. For you, your family, and your wider community.

That lack of oversight does sound pretty nutty. How does it work in other high-risk fields?
For technologies that can lead to great harm, such as nuclear energy, when there’s an accident, there’s always a full investigation by an independent organization. Even for plane crashes, which kill a few hundred people, not millions, you go in and investigate. You don’t just tell Boeing, “Hey, look into it yourself and tell us what went wrong.”

Do you ever see yourself working within government?
I do think there’s an opportunity to really transform the way research that could cause pandemics is being conducted and funded. There have been too many people stuck in the past, too attached to how things were being done and afraid of making big changes. But now you have all of these really unexpected people filling the top leadership positions in the new administration at National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services. What the NIH is really doing with all of its funding money is setting a culture and changing how scientists think about doing this sort of research. So there’s an opportunity to go in and say these are catastrophic risks; the next accident could kill millions of people, so we really need to be mitigating them. I think I could be very helpful in crafting that cultural change.

What have been some high points for you on this journey?
I’ve met and been supported (and rescued) by other scientists, journalists, writers, advocates, and sleuths who were determined to not let the lab leak be miscast as a conspiracy theory. In some cases, these were scientists who knew that investigating a lab origin of COVID would ultimately preserve the integrity of science and public trust. The highest points for me were when I saw these allies triumph against those seeking to suppress inquiry.

And the troughs?
When people I cared about were being attacked or intimidated by others in the field. Seeing people just asking for a fair investigation of natural and lab hypotheses get taken down by their community—that made me feel the worst.

And how about you? Are you okay with being hated?
I think I take it in stride pretty well. My other life experiences have built a lot of resilience in me. I’m a pretty strong person. I don’t get destroyed just because of peer pressure. The main thing is just knowing that you did what was right and what was needed.

Okay, enough about saving the world. What’s your favorite restaurant in Boston?
Oak Bistro in Cambridge.

Favorite walk?
Down Charles Street in Beacon Hill and into the Boston Public Garden.

Favorite thing about Boston overall?
The high concentration of scientific innovators and technology developers. As a child in Singapore, if I’d been told that one day I’d be working at the Broad Institute in the Boston area, I’d have been blown away.

This article was first published in the print edition of the March 2025 issue with the headline: “Going Viral.”

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