The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Dr Alina Chan
Those who haven’t already heard of the whistleblowing scientist Dr Alina Chan almost certainly will in 2023. The genetherapy and cell-engineering specialist at The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was one of the first experts to ask whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, and has doggedly pursued an investigation into the origins of the pandemic. Next year, it is possible that evidence will finally emerge proving that experiments to soup up coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) led to Covid’s accidental release.
‘Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward,’ Chan told MPS at a session of the Science and Technology Select Committee in 2021. ‘But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out.’
Chan was born in Canada but grew up in Singapore, returning to Canada to attend the University of British Columbia for both her undergraduate degree and her doctorate. She first suspected a leak in March 2020 after realising nobody had found any infected animals at the Wuhan market where China claims the pandemic began. At that time it was impossible to get most scientists to even consider a non-natural origin, with many suggesting it was racist to ask the question. Chan wrote an analysis arguing it was strange the virus was ‘pre-adapted’ to humans, and suggested it could have evolved in experiments on humanised mice infected with bat viruses. In 2021 she co-authored Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 with science writer Matt Ridley, a book The Wall Street Journal called ‘perhaps the most comprehensive case for the lableak theory currently available’.
But since she first spoke out, Chan has been met with harsh critical reaction – not just from other scientists, but Chinese state media too. Her stance has not made her popular and she has been branded a ‘race traitor’ because of her part-chinese heritage, with a Chinese outlet calling her behaviour ‘filthy’. She even considered changing her name because the abuse got so bad. Though she fully accepts an animal spillover is possible, she points out that despite years of looking, no culprit has been found. WIV also removed a database of viruses shortly before the pandemic.
Since then, hackers have dug up evidence showing that researchers at WIV were indeed collecting bats and carrying out gain-of-function experiments that could have created Covid-19 – and doing so at alarming biosecurity levels.
‘You find these scientists who said in early 2018, “I’m going to put horns on horses,” and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city,’ Chan told MPS.
‘It’s important to give the benefit of the doubt,’ she recently wrote on Twitter. ‘However if a suspect wipes their phone record and online search history, deep cleans their apartments, discards their gun collection and won’t tell you where they were at the time of the crime, I think it’s reasonable to ask questions.’
If evidence that supports the lab-leak theory does emerge next year, Chan could go down in history as one of the scientists who uncovered the deadliest scandal of recent times.