Just a month ago, the idea that Coronavirus came from an accidental lab leak in Wuhan was derided by much of the press as a fringe conspiracy theory and banned on Facebook as a form of misinformation. Now, a host of distinguished scientists including Anthony Fauci, the US White House’s chief medical adviser, credit the idea as plausible, if far from proven, and are calling for more openness from the lab at the centre of the theory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Journalists who have rehabilitated the lab leak theory in recent months point the finger at The Lancet for allowing Peter Daszak, president of research funder EcoHealth Alliance, to squash notions of a lab leak early on — without disclosing that he had a significant potential conflict of interest. In February 2020, just as the Western world was waking up to the pandemic’s spread, Dr. Daszak, a British zoologist who has become a controversial central figure in the origins debate, organised and signed a letter — along with the who’s who of pandemic experts — in The Lancet to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The letter has been mentioned in news stories more than 350 times so far. But nowhere did The Lancet disclose a critical fact — Daszak had funded and worked with WIV researchers for years to collect bat coronaviruses from the wild — in order to get ahead of them before they spread to humans — and led National Institutes of Health-funded work on, among other things, “virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanised mice” to assess how they might spread. “If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to The Lancet’s readers,” says an investigation into the theory published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in early May. A spokeswoman for The Lancet says that Dr. Daszak “is one of the world’s leading experts on zoonotic diseases, including Coronaviruses, with experience of working in China” and that his task force would assess “all leading hypotheses” including “laboratory release”. Daszak did not respond to a request for comment. Rossana Segreto, a former researcher at the University of Innsbruck, says that in January The Lancet rejected a letter by her and colleagues calling for an “open scientific debate” about the origins of the virus. A spokeswoman for the journal says it does not comment on unpublished papers. Dr. Segreto also points a critical finger at Nature Medicine, which in March 2020 added an ‘editors’ note’ to a 2015 paper documenting the creation of a “chimeric virus” from a bat coronavirus in work done in collaboration with WIV. The note emphasises that there is “no evidence” Coronavirus was engineered. But this 2015 paper, critics argue, is exactly the kind of research that could lead to a risky new virus, and the paper itself has…
