Debunking Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories
Published:
I refer the reader to the primary source2 for this discussion, a US House Oversight Committee hearing on the Coronavirus response featuring testimony from the former director of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Robert Redfield.
House Oversight Committee testimony excerpt from Dr. Redfield, formerly CDC.
A link to the PDF file of NYT’s Nicholas Wade’s testimony against the practices of Drs. Fauci and Collins concerning the origins of SARS-CoV-19 and the natural transmission narrative is also provided, link copied from the House Oversight Committee hearing page.
Dr. Redfield testified2 that during the COVID-19 pandemic response, a inaccurate paper was published (unclear in the House website who published what, and who backed the disconcerning narrative) concerning the nature of the origin of the COVID-19 SARS-CoV-19 coronavirus that was possibly contaminated by a political narrative.
Subcommittee Chairman Wenstrup (R-Ohio): “In your expert opinion was the Wuhan Institute conducting gain-of-function research on a batch of coronaviruses?”
Dr. Redfield: “Absolutely.”
From COVID origins hearing wrap-up, 3/8/2023:
Rep. Malliotakis: “Why do you think you were excluded from those calls?”
Dr. Redfield: “It was told to me that they wanted a single narrative and that I obviously had a different point of view.”
Dr. Redfield added: “If you really want to be truthful, it’s antithetical to science. Science has debate, and they squashed any debate.”
“Scientists, including Dr. Fauci, then drafted a paper arguing COVID-19’s proximal origins to animals at a wet market.”
Rep. Malliotakis: “Do you think that this paper does hide the truth?”
Dr. Redfield: “I think it’s an inaccurate paper that basically was part of a narrative that they were creating.”
The House oversight committee also received testimony2 from Dr. Redfield that “gain-of-function” research (i.e. modifying the virus for gain-or-loss of function, which could result in a number of unclear outcomes from the onerous end, such as novel host targeting, to the innoccuous, such as loss of specificity or virulence) may have been conducted in
From COVID origins hearing wrap-up, 3/8/2023:
“Rep. Malliotakis also warned that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may have been funding gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV.
Rep. Malliotakis: “Is it likely that American tax dollars funded the gain-of-function research that created this virus?”
Dr. Redfield: “I think it did, not only from NIH, but from the State Department, USAID and DOD.”
Further:
“Jamie Metzl testified how China’s government destroyed samples, hid records, imprisoned Chinese journalists, prevented Chinese scientists from saying or writing anything on pandemic origins without prior government approval, actively spread misinformation, and prevented an evidence-based investigation.”
More concerning, there may have been an incident in the WIV lab in September 2019, and the gain-of-function research seems to have had funding by USAID and DOD, and would have been research with questionable legality had it been done in other countries, such as the U.S. The nature of funding this research overseas seems considerably disturbing.
Rep. Lesko (R-Colorado): “Do you believe we can have certainty that the virus did not come from the Wuhan lab and that U.S. funding was not used for coronavirus research?”
Dr. Redfield: “Absolutely we cannot do that. It’s now declassified now, but in September 2019, three things happened in that lab. One, they deleted the sequences. That is highly irregular—researchers don’t usually like to do that. Second, they commanded the command and control of the lab from civilian control to military control. Highly unusual. And the third thing they did, which I think is really telling, is they let a contractor re-do the ventilation system in that laboratory. There is strong evidence there was a significant event in that laboratory in September 2019.”
Retracted article from the journal Nature Communications
A collaborative article from experts in the SARS-CoV-19 field published a since retracted article on the origin and transmission patterns of the viruses amongst their host species in the bat family. The retraction here is only marginally important, not because something suggests that the SARS-CoV-19 was entirely manmade, but that the analysis should be refuted on the basis of certain samples, 41 taken from a region that may not be applicable for the study of the ancestor of the commonly described SARS-CoV-19 sequence. Readers should take the retraction with a grain of salt because while it still seems likely that the virus originated from viruses studied in the bat population around the Wuhan region, though the inclusion of certain sequences in the analysis may have contaminated the study’s conclusions.
Retraction note:
Following publication, errors in the sequence data included in the analyses in the article were identified. Out of 1246 sequences analysed, 41 coronavirus (CoV) sequences (12 alpha-CoVs and 29 beta-CoVs) obtained from bats sampled in the border region of northern Lao PDR (Luang Namtha province) were erroneously included in the analyses. These sequences will remain available on GenBank under the following accession codes: MN312304-MN312315, MN312608-MN312631, and MN312666-MN312670. Additionally, 27 duplicated sequences were erroneously included in the analyses.
A revised article reports the analyses with the Laotian and duplicate sequences removed. It has undergone peer review independently from the original article’s review process and has been published1.
All Authors agree with this retraction.
On fact-checking referenes
Fact checking is a process in which a statement or claim can be understood as true, false, or somewhere in the middle (likely/unlikely) by the virtues of the sources used to support a claim. “Virtues” in this context is indeed a subjective term, but for journalists, researchers, and academics, the term often has notable flavors/connotations involved in establishing the virtue of a reference’s support towards that claim.
First, let’s consider the virtue of a primary reference. A primary reference is almost necessarily produced from an established and credentialed authority figure on the topic. Joe’s “covid lab leak theory” blog does not suffice as a primary reference, because it is likely that Joe’s blog a) did not perform laboratory and informatic analysis of the SARS-CoV-19 virus to produce a method that can be reproduced and verified as a either “accurate” or “inaccurate”/flawed method for determining whether or not the COVID-19 virus was produced in a lab as a biological weapon, or whether the COVID-19 virus originated from samples in a lab in Wuhan China, typically known to be either the Wuhan Institute of Virology1 or the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Wuhan, China.
Note that in the latter part of the last sentence, there are two alternative hypotheses which are very different in their implications. The former ‘claim’ states that COVID-19 may have been a bioweapon. The latter claim states that the virus originated from a viral containment and research facility that is designed to study diseases, their transmission and host specificities, and make recommendations for the prevention of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics.
There are thousands, if not millions of “tertiary” sources (social media and ‘independent’ media ‘authors’) that can or have made claims of both of the former extreme theories that COVID-19 was either born from a medical research facility in China or was weaponized and disseminated from a food market at the verified origin of the epidemic at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China.
These sources do not hold up as factual because they are often without verification, government references, or credibility of subject area expertise from social media, blog, or indie news outlets. To clarify, a ‘tertiary’ source is a source which makes a claim, citing potentially secondary sources only with some degree of interpretation, poor phrasing, or political and conspiratorial bias that may conflict with accounts from authorities on the matter. For example, the Wikipedia page cited below is a ‘secondary’ source, because it cites primary research sources such as Government statements, studies, and reports concerning the outbreak.
In contrast, a primary source is something that produces support for a claim by virtue of evidence, data collected in the field, and interpretations run on that data. Primary sources do not necessarily need to be from government or other authorities, like NGOs or universities. Anyone can become the author of a primary source. Credible primary sources are often subject to ‘peer-review’, a process by which senior experts in the field, often affiliated with a journal on the topic, perform a process of questioning and review to address open questions about the methodology, the sample collection process, the instrumentation or data collection technology, and the statistical or mathematical methods used to produce multiple components of evidence that supports or refutes a hypothesis statement or statements made at the core of the article’s thesis. However, a non-traditional ‘primary’ reference may be deemed credible by experts in the field when the technique behind the conclusions is both reproducible and deemed as sound.
References
Wikipedia contributors. “COVID-19 lab leak theory.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Feb. 2025. Web. 18 Feb. 2025.
United States House of Representatives. (2023, October 2). Covid origins hearing wrap up: Facts, science, evidence point to a wuhan lab leak. United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-hearing-wrap-up-facts-science-evidence-point-to-a-wuhan-lab-leak
Latinne A, Hu B, Olival KJ, et al. Origin and cross‐species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China. Nat Commun. 2020;11(1):4235.