She’s also received “death threats” — all because the molecular biologist thinks that the COVID-19 virus likely came out of a lab at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The threats are significant,” Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, told The Post. “But I don’t like being painted as a damsel in distress. I am not a victim. I don’t want to encourage people. I don’t want them to think, ‘The threats are not working on her. We should step it up.’ The more I talk about threats, the more they happen.”
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That said, she knows there are hazards to saying things about what she believes.
“This is so controversial that masks and vaccines result in threats coming at scientists,” she said at a Science and Technology Select Committee Q&A in London last week. “It’s unavoidable. I’m not in a rare situation … There are potential career effects.”
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Chan’s book, “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19” — written with Matt Ridley and issued last month — has already sparked debate and controversy. Upon its publication, the LA Times criticized the title with a review headlined: “These authors wanted to push the COVID-19 lab-leak theory. Instead, they exposed its weaknesses.”
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Before the book, Chan wrote a paper with a pair of colleagues describing three options for the virus, including that it was from a lab. Chan posted a “tweetorial” — a digest version of her article. It got picked up around the world, and the firestorm began.
But she continues to tweet multiple times a day, pleading with people to keep their minds open. On Monday, as the Omicron variant swept across the globe, Chan tweeted: “A pandemic is worse than a plane crash because the casualties increase exponentially. Preventing a future pandemic in its early days is arguably as important as tamping down on a current pandemic.”
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“There is uncertainty about whether there were any live animals capable of transmitting the virus to humans in the market during November and December 2019. But data shows that no bats or pangolins were sold there at that time and those are the only animals in which close relatives to the SARS-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, have been found,” Chan told The Post. “It was clearly a human super-spreader event” — which, she believes began in the 50,000-square-foot market, where the first patient to publicly show symptoms is thought to be a shrimp vendor.
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