Scientist who pushed for COVID lab leak theory investigation says high-risk research needs oversight

Five years after the COVID pandemic started, a scientist who warned against dismissing the controversial “lab leak” theory says more needs to be done to prevent high-risk research from potentially causing a global health crisis.

Alina Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. When WBZ-TV interviewed her in 2021, she said she got online hate and even death threats over her belief that COVID could have originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.

“The virus was highly adapted for human transmission,” Chan said. “In December 2019, the virus we saw was ready go, ready to cause a pandemic.”

She said the lab leak theory got an “allergic response” from the scientific community and public health leaders.

“They just could not accept the idea that a scientific research accident might have caused a pandemic,” Chan said.

But in January, the CIA under former President Biden’s administration said a lab leak was a more likely cause of the pandemic than a natural origin. Chan said the damage was done, however, as the debate about COVID’s origins had become a political issue.

“Now we’re seeing all these funding cuts, people are saying, you know, screw the scientists, we don’t want to give them any more money,” Chan said. “That’s not coming out of nowhere.” 

COVID lab leak not a conspiracy theory, scientist says

On the White House website, there’s a COVID-19 web page that has a picture of President Trump standing between the words “lab leak.” Chan said that while the page claims almost definitively that COVID came from the Wuhan lab, it doesn’t provide enough evidence or assessments by intelligence agencies supporting that conclusion.

“The good news today is that it’s no longer a conspiracy theory, the lab leak is a totally plausible path by which COVID-19 could have occurred and should be investigated,” Chan said. “But the bad news is that we’ve kind of lost five years. In the last five years there has not been a proper investigation, there has not been a commission to find out how this began and how we can prevent it from happening again.”

Preventing another pandemic

Chan wants a two-pronged approach moving forward. She says there needs to be a full investigation to find the true origin of COVID-19, and there should be an independent entity, like the National Transportation Safety Board for travel, to oversee high-risk laboratory research. 

“When a plane crashes, you send in an independent team to investigate,” Chan said. “But when a pandemic could have started in a lab, there’s no external independent investigation, even when millions of people are dead.”

She says by allowing researchers to self-regulate, “we are one scientist’s bad day away from a pandemic.”

“There are at least dozens or maybe even hundreds of scientists around the world that are handling pathogens with the potential to cause pandemics,” Chan said. “We are just one bad day away from that pathogen leaking from a lab.”