Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information. “Disgusting,” he said, ripping me out of my thoughts. He showed me a meme where Zhengli’s head had been photoshopped onto a bat, her face distorted with an open mouth to reveal vampire's teeth, and the whole frame colored in blood red. I shuddered involuntarily. The dehumanization was not subtle. “I really hate what they did with her ears here; it makes her look evil,” Peter Daszak continued with another meme. The haunted British-born zoologist and I sat on a couch in a remote house near Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, towards the end of 2022. He had pulled up his laptop to show me some of the circulating memes about the “Batwoman” and himself. Indeed, in that cartoonish pop-art picture, the warm Chinese researcher looked like a supervillain, with pointy ears covered by tape, holding bats and releasing a poison virus into the world. Both Peter and Zhengli have found themselves in the middle of a global media firestorm for over two years now; their decades-long work on coronaviruses has become a vital focus of global attention. Speculations and conspiracy myths about their lives and personas had become a cultural phenomenon, and online memes about them were widespread. These visual statements were sometimes artful, sometimes funny, often tasteless, and always closer to propaganda than reality. Peter had saved hundreds of them on his laptop. He pulled up one of the earlier ones, showing him sitting in a chair with Chinese President Xi Jinping in his lap, who was dressed like a stripper and wearing a tinfoil hat. “You can´t help but laugh at some of these, even when you were the one being made a fool of.” Amongst the countless unflattering, libelous, and grotesque depictions, what seemed to bother him the most were the ones fat-shaming him. “That is just tasteless.” He got annoyed. His face had gotten some color back, at least; he had been pale the previous two days. I was still getting to know the zoologist on that trip to Thailand, trying to understand who he was. Until the middle of 2022, Peter Daszak was just a random name for me that I would not have been able to put a face to. I came into the origin discourse in the summer of 2021 after Nicholas Wade’s article rubbed me the wrong way. My science-communication colleague Sam Gregson, a former CERN particle physicist from the UK, wanted to do a podcast about the lab leak hypothesis that we both believed credible and underexplored at the time, as our media ecosystem had told us. We invited DRASTIC member and conspiratorial blogger Yuri Deigin, who already had some internet fame on the topic, to have a friendly chat about the scientific evidence for a lab leak. In parallel, I was writing an article for my blog, trying to make sense of the arguments brought forward in the Nicholas Wade piece, and ending up learning much more about the topic. My writing process includes a lot of reading, and after getting some overview articles on the topic, I usually look into the scientific literature to see what the underlying data for these claims are. I guess this is where my concerns began. I could not find any evidence in the scientific literature that would substantiate any aspect of the various arguments I had read on the supposed “engineered” nature of SARS-CoV-2. On the contrary, many of the oddities that Nicholas Wade or Yuri raised were, in fact, perfectly explainable by available knowledge and scientific papers on the topic. On top of that, I had been working in experimental labs for over 10 years. From CRISPR to Gateway cloning to Gibson assembly, I had hands-on experience with all of these different genetic engineering techniques, partly to construct viral vectors that we used as a delivery method for genetic cargo. So, while not a virologist, I certainly understood the genetic engineering arguments brought forward by lab leak proponents were just plainly naive to outright false. As a science communicator, I thought, “Why not clear up some of these popular misconceptions?” After a few weeks of researching and writing, my blog article was titled “Explained: The hard evidence why SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered,” specifically addressing the RBD and the furin cleavage site, that unusual llama in the supposed flock of viral sheep. That article came out a day before our scheduled podcast with Yuri Deigin, which put me in a position to push back against some of the naive assertions our guest brought forward. Maybe it was this combination of events, or some vocal messages on Twitter being more assertive about SARS-CoV-2 not being engineered, that somehow put me in the crosshairs of the often-faceless lab leak community on Twitter. By this point, I had written dozens of science communication blogs for over five years, but not once had I gotten a hateful comment for it. Now my timeline was overflowing with insults, from the idea that I was a gullible loser, a “sheeple for the official narrative,” all the way to being a shill for EcoHealth Alliance, big pharma, or even China. Certainly not a pleasant experience. I guess instinctively, people deal in different ways when having their honesty and character questioned in public. Some might ignore or disengage; others might feel the desire to correct the public record. I learned about myself that I tended to fall into the latter camp, getting more vocal about what I believed to be the reality of the situation. So, I argued more, wrote more, and investigated the topic more. Sam and I soon interviewed King’s College professor Stuart Neil, a virologist and actual expert who seemed to have some healthy and nuanced takes on the origin controversy—what was known and what was uncertain. Thinking Sam and I might clarify the misunderstandings with more evidence, other in-depth expert conversations would follow. Angela Rasmussen, Kristian Andersen, Michael Worobey, Alice Hughes, Eddie Holmes, and others. With every new piece of content we put out, the scientific picture became clearer, yet the animosity against us only increased. Soon, I noticed—with a mixture of fascination, curiosity, and horror—how we were not alone. There was a pattern. Anytime a new voice would speak up publicly in favor of a natural origin explanation or just for evidence-based assessment of the science, a dedicated group of lab leak influencers and activists would get involved, trying to shut them down or convert them to their cause. If they failed to do so, the lab leak community leaders would start to maliciously quote-tweet—a Twitter-specific way of highlighting someone else’s tweet—with a misleading, discrediting, or ridiculing comment. These quote-tweets, often marked with specific hashtags such as #lableak or #originsofcovid, served as a beacon for their followers to join in the “conversation” with the new voice. They would reinforce the disparaging comment by adding their own insult, thus amplifying it again, over and over. Often, these behaviors would result in so-called “dogpiles” or ”pile-ons”, an argument or attack by a large group of people against one person. Being on the receiving end of such a pile-on can be a disorienting experience because, all of a sudden, a bunch of random people want to fight you like an enemy based solely on an out-of-context tweet or a flippant comment, as well as the less-than-charitable interpretation from the lab leak influencer who highlighted it. Most friends and ordinary people of the target would miss these pile-ons because these did not play out in the feed of the scientists they might follow but in the feed and community of the quote-tweeter, i.e., the lab leak influencer. Only the scientists targeted saw the full spectrum of abuse, while most of the public, not sharing this particular niche ecosystem, would be none the wiser to what had occurred. Scientists and journalists, especially those with only a few hundred followers, would be mostly helpless against the malicious narratives created about them in the lab leak community. They had nobody to speak up or defend their character because nobody even saw what was happening to them. They had no course of action because speaking up for themselves just created more activity, more harassment, and more abuse in the opposing community. Many contemporary scientists went through this “treatment” a few times before deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle, leaving the social media platform entirely. Eddie Holmes and Kristian Andersen deleted their accounts. Others became very selective and self-censored, not speaking out publicly about this toxic topic anymore. The exodus of reasonable voices on the topic, in turn, ceded even more discourse space to the activists. On top of that, the shrinking rational voices remaining in the conversation just became bigger targets for activist communities that seemed to relish in the act of verbally abusing their “enemies” together on a daily basis. A little community ritual, often unprompted by any specific action or offense. Every single day, they just looked for somebody to fight and hate for hours on end. Because of these asymmetric bullying dynamics, even a relatively small science blogger—too stubborn or maybe even too truculent to be silenced by these mob tactics—would suddenly gain a much larger role in the minds of conspiracy theorists. I’ve lost count of the number of pile-ons my words have caused over the years. Peter Daszak pulled up the next meme, this time showing both him and me together, arranged in a weird, convoluted homage to “The Godfather” movie. It portrayed Dr. Anthony Fauci as the “godfather of gain-of-function research,” Shi Zhengli as the “cook,” and some prominent scientists like Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen, Ange
