Show Notes
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. “Without a harmonious and stable environment, how can there be a home where people can live and work happily?” Xi Jinping's words on New Year’s Eve in 2019 were intended to reign in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. For months, the city has been in a renewed battle for its soul against the oppressive and subversive influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, were expected to march again on January 1, 2020. The goal was to maintain political pressure after a landslide victory of pro-democracy candidates in district court elections weeks prior. Six thousand police officers were deployed to deal with potential unrest—the wrong signal to send, given previous escalations and excessive police brutality. “Safety concerns” led to the cancellation of the midnight fireworks despite months of planning. The next day, a peaceful protest with families, kids, and the elderly, often dressed up in costumes, quickly escalated into violence, tear gas, and mass arrests. The police blamed some radical student agitators who had hijacked the march. Maybe it was inevitable; tensions had been high for months. Universities and their students were front and center of the recent civil rights movement, and the police claimed these institutions had become “weapon factories.” As a result, sieges and raids on universities have become part of campus life over the last few months. The last thing the exasperated Jasnah Kholin (pseudonym) needed at the time was “one more f*****g thing to worry” about. The unfiltered coronavirus researcher (who swore like a sailor) now uses a pseudonym to hide her real identity for safety reasons (I promised her that I would omit any details that she felt would compromise her safety). She, like many others, had been at these protests for civil rights and experienced firsthand how they were squashed by the police, often with force. Once, the young academic had a pepper ball barely miss her face that would certainly have knocked her out. Another time, the police came to pick her up, and she was in prison for weeks before they let her go. Wrongfully suspected or not, she was among the lucky few who got out uncharged because there was no evidence to place her at the scene. It’s not surprising she had an innate distrust of the Chinese authorities, who were more and more entrenched in Hong Kong, her only home. When she heard about the pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan around New Year's on ProMED-mail, an internet service supported by volunteers that tracks unusual health events, she immediately started screenshotting and saving every bit of information that was coming out of Wuhan: every pdf, every Weibo message, every picture, all kinds of vital info. Because of Chinese censorship, information can sometimes be lost within minutes of appearing online. What foresight! “Oh, I am very familiar with how information works in China,” she would later explain to me. In any crisis, Chinese authorities shut down the information flow to try to control the narrative. This is not unusual; it happens for things big and small, important or insignificant. This approach might even help to contain false and harmful rumors during a crisis. However, it also creates a layer of obfuscation and political spin that can make it challenging to assert pertinent facts with any confidence. For example, consider how dangerous the virus was and how it spread. In the very beginning, the Chinese authorities claimed that the virus was barely, or not at all, transmissible human-to-human in an attempt to not cause panic, a claim that was still being repeated by the World Health Organization (WHO) on January 14th. Jasnah Kholin and her academic colleagues in Hong Kong did not believe any of it. They had been
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