The truth on Covid at last?

Dear Reader,

Five years to the week after Germany decided to bring in its first Covid lockdowns, a piece of investigative journalism has been published that could shed some light on the source of the virus that caused millions of deaths and restricted our lives for years.

Published by the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday, the investigation found that Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), concluded very early on in the pandemic that the virus leaked from a research facility in Wuhan.

However, for reasons that aren’t totally clear, successive German governments refused for years to let the BND share its findings with the outside world.

At the beginning of 2020, just weeks after the world had learned that a new virus was spreading through the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the BND started to look into where the pathogen had come from. The agency’s spies soon managed to get their hands on a raft of unpublished data and research from within the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The research showed that the Wuhan scientists “knew an unusual amount about the supposedly novel virus at an unusually early stage,” the Süddeutsche states.

As a reminder, the Wuhan research lab was headed by Dr. Zheng-Li Shi, a scientist the press dubbed “bat woman” due to the fact that she captured bats in remote caves in western China and then isolated viruses that she found in their blood. Backed by Western funding, Shi conducted “gain-of-function” research on these virus strains, enabling them to mutate and infect human cell cultures.

The BND ran its stolen data through a computer model and concluded with a certainty of “between 80 and 95 percent” that the virus leaked from a lab and was not the result of a “natural spill over” from animals into humans.

When the BND took its findings to the chancellery, then under the charge of Angela Merkel, they were ordered to keep their dossier to themselves. At the time, the US and China were engaged in an angry war of words over what caused the pandemic and the chancellery was worried that the dossier was explosive enough to cause a serious international incident.

The political considerations may be understandable. In effect though, Berlin's decision to keep its finding secret meant that it was ignoring appeals by the World Health Organisation to pass on any information that could help determine the cause of the pandemic. As the WHO said, finding out what caused Covid could be critical to stopping the next pandemic.

After Olaf Scholz became chancellor in late 2021, one of the first things that the BND did was to inform the new leadership about their findings. But Scholz’ team were also scared that the BND might be wrong. Apparently, they could not quite believe that their much-maligned spy service was good enough to have obtained such incredibly sensitive evidence. They too told the intelligence agency to keep their dossier secret.

Late last year, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear, the chancellery softened its stance. It allowed the BND to share its findings with the CIA, which then changed its evaluation from having no stance on a lab leak to considering it “somewhat plausible.”

One paragraph in particular in the Süddeutsche investigation caught my eye: When the BND told Scholz’ staff about their findings, the chancellor’s team asked them to discuss their findings with star virologist Christian Drosten.

But the BND proved reluctant to do so.

I quote:

“Scholz's people ask the BND to first discuss the laboratory thesis with Drosten in complete secrecy. But, due to a mixture of secrecy on the part of the spy service, personal reservations and a distrust that is difficult to explain, that never happened.”

That is quite shocking. Apparently, the BND didn’t trust Dr. Drosten, Germany’s most respected virologist and a leading government advisor, to keep the dossier’s contents secret.

What reason could the BND possibly have to doubt Drosten, the man whose Covid podcast was heard by millions and who was the esteemed head of virology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin?

One possible explanation is that the BND saw Drosten as biased and were suspicious of his links to Chinese researchers at the very Wuhan lab at the centre of their case.

As I wrote back in 2021, Drosten knew about Covid even before the WHO did, thanks to his personal contacts with scientists in China. At the time, Drosten didn’t want to say who had passed him the virus’s genome shortly after Christmas 2019. He never responded to several press enquiries I placed with the Charité at the time.

But an interview he gave this year provides some clues as to who he was talking to in China in the early days of the pandemic.

Speaking to Taz newspaper last month, Drosten said that “I knew the lead scientist from the (coronavirus) research department at Wuhan… I contacted her right at the beginning and had the impression that she didn't know exactly what was happening, but as expected, she was dealing with it directly.”

There is a good reason for why Drosten knew the bat woman: he had been intimately involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research in the decade before 2020. He had even edited a paper Dr. Shi published on viruses that were adapted to human cell cultures back in 2015.

Did this effect his judgement on the origins of the virus once it had spread around the world? Conspicuous is how Drosten had made several public interventions in the initial months of the pandemic, in which he portrayed a lab leak as a conspiracy theory and claimed that there was already strong evidence to suggest that the virus came from nature.

Most notoriously, he joined leading scientists behind “gain-of-function” research in signing an open letter that labelled a lab leak as a “conspiracy theory”. Some of the scientists who signed the letter had direct connections to the Wuhan Institute; others, like Drosten, had less formal ties, yet none declared a conflict of interest.

On other occasions early in the pandemic, Drosten described a lab leak as “extremely implausible... you don't just accidentally get infected with this kind of virus in a lab.” Elsewhere, he said the lab leak theory had been “dealt with” by subsequent publications from China.

Behind the scenes too, Drosten lobbied robustly against the lab leak hypothesis. After a conference call among leading virologists from the US and Europe in early 2020, Francis Collins, head of the US’s National Institute for Health, noted later that Drosten presented his case “with more forcefulness than was necessary.”

Recently, however, Drosten appears to have changed his tune… and suffered a bout of amnesia. In his Taz interview, he said that a lab leak was plausible after all.

“You vehemently argued from the outset that a natural origin was more likely than a laboratory accident,” the Taz journalist told him him, something that Drosten immediately denied.

“I may have been accused of being vehement,” he replied, “but it was never actually like that. I simply stated what we knew in my field of science. And I should also point out that the evidence has evolved since 2020 and so has my assessment.”

Obviously, Drosten was in the mood to talk about why he had changed his mind.

Why hadn’t Chinese authorities provided data that could help scientists find the mammal from which the virus passed to humans, he mused. “I have to say, the more time passes, the more sceptical I become. Does some vital interest of the (Chinese) state prohibit work on this? Perhaps. But the other explanation would be that this was no natural virus at all.”

He also seems to have had a change of heart on the safety of gain-of-function research.

Drosten had since seen a research application that the Wuhan institute had been planning back in 2018 that would have added a furin cleavage to a virus isolated from bats. This type of research is “by no means harmless” and “quite worrying,” he told Taz.

Now, there is another explanation for why Drosten is unexpectedly singing from a new hymn book. In December 2024, the BND didn’t just share its findings with the CIA, they also showed them to a group of German scientists which included Drosten. It would be hard, given that peers were present as he saw the BND dossier, for him to keep insisting that a lab leak was a conspiracy theory.

Now that the Süddeutsche has published its revelations, the Chancellery has agreed to inform the Bundestag and the WHO about what it knows, something that could lead to a long-overdue debate on lab safety and the wisdom of conducting research on viruses that makes them more contagious.

We should all keep our ears pricked about who we listen to if such an inquiry takes place. You can take scientists’ (shifting) opinions at face value. Or, as the BND seems to have done, you can conclude that they aren’t always the most objective witnesses, even when it comes to their own field of expertise.