Amid new indications that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in a laboratory, the origins discussion has taken a particularly unpleasant turn with 12 scientists who favour the zoonosis hypothesis accusing two faculty members at Rutgers University in the United States of conduct that “requires immediate and serious review by the university administration”.

In a letter of complaint to Rutgers, the 12 scientists accuse Richard Ebright and Bryce Nickels of “continuously and repeatedly” engaging in public behaviour “that not only disrespects the values of the scientific enterprise, but also poses a direct threat to the well-being and safety of us and our colleagues in the scientific community”.

Ebright and Nickels are both members of the leadership team at the NGO Biosafety Now. They deny the allegations.

Nickels is a professor of genetics at Rutgers and Ebright is a professor of chemistry and chemical biology.

The allegations have met with support from scientists and journalists who favour the zoonosis hypothesis (the theory that SARS-CoV-2 made a zoonotic jump from an animal to humans), but have sparked outrage among others who point out that several of the signatories of the complaint are themselves guilty of harassing and abusing scientists with whom they disagree.

Two of the signatories are Angela Rasmussen and Stuart Neil, who are both known for online aggression. Both use extremely abusive language themselves. Neil’s tweets are often particularly vulgar.

Rasmussen has accused scientist Alina Chan, who is co-author of the book ‘VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19′ not just of being mediocre, but of being a “manipulative conspiracist” and “intellectually dishonest”.

She has been quoted as saying of Chan: “Her supposed scientific contribution, including this book, is a scam disguised as an honest quest for the truth.”

Another signatory of the complaint is Kristian Andersen, who is a co-author of the controversial paper ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’, which was published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020”.

Andersen et al. said in the paper (a letter to the editor) that it was improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.

On February 27 Nickels and others delivered a petition calling for the retraction of the proximal origin paper to the Nature Medicine offices.

The petition, which was signed by 5,300 members of the public, states that email and direct messages written by the authors of the proximal origin paper show, incontrovertibly, that the authors did not believe the conclusions of the paper at the time it was written, at the time it was submitted for publication, and at the time it was published.

“They thus show that the paper was, and is, the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct,” the petition states.

In an article published in Science on March 15 Jocelyn Kaiser goes in hard against Nickels and Ebright. Kaiser makes claims in the article that are untrue and appear to be defamatory.

Kaiser quotes Andersen and another signatory of the complaint, Michael Worobey, who is a leading proponent of the zoonosis hypothesis.

Worobey, who heads the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in the US, continues to assert that the Covid pandemic began in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. He bases his argument on research conclusions that have been challenged by other scientists in several countries.

Kaiser quotes the part of Ebright’s emailed response to her article in which he calls the complaint against Nickels and himself “a crude effort to silence their opponents and, thereby, to prop up their collapsing narrative”.

Following a complaint by Nickels, Science issued the following correction: “An earlier version of this story said that, in response to the letter, Nickels compared his opponents to murderers. That sentence was incorrect and has been removed.”

After being contacted by Nickels, Kaiser included his thread on X (Twitter) in which he says there are 11 “deliberates lies” about him in the complaint letter.

“Anyone with a moral compass would immediately apologize and withdraw the letter,” Nickels tweeted.

Kaiser immediately follows up, however, with the statement that, in the past, Nickels and Ebright had “frequently criticised reporters and editors at Science in social media posts”.

Alina Chan tweeted on March 17: “I believe that reporting on online harassment should be fair. The latest piece by @jocelynkaiser does not point out the harassment that these dozen scientists filing a complaint have themselves engaged in towards other scientists like myself in the past 4 years.”

Ebright pulls no punches on social media and has been taken to task by colleagues for using extreme language in tweets about those he considers to be guilty of causing the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nickels says it is defamation for the 12 signatories of the complaint to Rutgers to attribute to him comments by other people, e.g., by the former vice-president of the EcoHealth Alliance, Andrew Huff, who does make extremely incendiary statements.

The EcoHealth Alliance is the organisation in the US whose DEFUSE grant proposal has been said to be a blueprint for SARS-CoV-2.

The proposal includes discussion about the planned introduction of human-specific cleavage sites into bat coronaviruses.

Ebright tweeted on January 19, 2024: “The 2018 EcoHealth proposal provided step-by-step plans for construction of a virus having the sequence and properties of the virus that emerged a year later in Wuhan: SARS-CoV-2.”

On March 16, Ebright tweeted the full text of his reply to Jocelyn Kaiser’s request for comment about the complaint to Rutgers, stating the following:

“Four signers of the letter – Andersen, [Robert] Garry, and [Edward] Holmes, and [Andrew] Rambaut – have been shown, by the content of email and Slack communications made public through a 2023 Congressional inquiry, to have committed scientific fraud in a 2020 paper on the origin of Covid-19 and to have conspired to defraud the public, the press, and policy makers about the origin of Covid-19.

“Two signers of the letter – Andersen and Garry – also have been shown, by the content of those same communications, to have provided untruthful testimony in a 2023 Congressional hearing.”

Ebright noted that each other signatory of the letter was a co-author with Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and Rambaut “on at least one disputed and discredited 2021–2023 paper on the origin of Covid-19”.

He said the narrative they promoted about the origin of Covid-19 was now collapsing, and they were now facing consequences for their actions.

“Their letter to the employer of persons who helped dispute their narrative and expose their actions should be understood as a crude effort to silence their opponents and, thereby, to prop up their collapsing narrative and avoid consequences for their actions,” Ebright wrote.

On March 16, Ebright tweeted that Worobey et al.’s  2022 paper in Science was “provably unsound and probably fraudulent garbage”. It should, he said, be retracted.

Biologist Stuart Newman, who is also a member of Biosafety Now, tweeted that the complainants had been “hammering away publicly” at Ebright, Nickels, Chan, and others “with allegations of conspiracy mongering and worse while their own pet theories unraveled, and their deceptions and private reservations have continued to come to light”.

Tony VanDongen, who is an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke University in the US, tweeted on March 18 that Stuart Neil had proposed in tweets to murder people he didn’t like with Ebola and HIV variants he would create in his lab specifically for this purpose.

VanDongen co-authored a preprint with mathematical biologist Alex Washburn and bioengineer and immunologist Valentin Bruttel, which was published in October 2022 (updated in April 2023), in which they state that the SARS-CoV-2 genome contains a pattern of restriction sites typically found in synthetic viruses, but not in related natural viruses.

Washburn tweeted on March 18: “Angela Rasmussen has harassed Alina Chan for years, and we’ve all witnessed it as people like Kristian Andersen and colleagues piled on, ganged up on her. These people do not have an ethical leg to stand on, and we must look past their efforts to play the victim here.”

He added: “They did it with me, @VBruttel and @tony_vandongen

“They did it with DRASTIC members

“They did it with @AGHuff, @dasher8090

“Zoonotic origin proponents engaged in unethical research conduct, they have been caught, and now they lash out at every pillar of independence in biology.”

He also tweeted: “The authors of this letter have: 1) Ghostwritten article calling lab origins “implausible” 2) Lied to reporters about the evidence of a lab origin 3) Cheery-picked raccoon dog samples 4) Published many now debunked & buggy studies while bullying their critics online and more.”

Scientist Justin Kinney, also a cofounder of Biosafety Now, recently said he would no longer participate in public discussion about the possible origin of SARS-CoV-2. He left Biosafety Now in January this year, citing professional risks.

Kinney tweeted the following on January 27:

I am leaving @BiosafetyNow. I always knew there was some professional risk to me speaking out, but my advocacy has now become a liability that I can no longer ignore. 1/5

— Justin B. Kinney (@jbkinney) January 27, 2024

He added: “Going forward I will also be unavailable for public comment on the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the ramifications for science, and the risks of future lab-generated pandemics.”

Nickels tweeted in February that, three weeks after Kinney was silenced, virologists, e.g., Stuart Neil, continued to threaten and ridicule him.

On March 18 Nickels tweeted: “The silencing of Justin Kinney in January, coupled with efforts to silence Richard & me this week, underscore that unless these individuals are held accountable … they will continue to try to ruin the lives of anyone who draws attention to their false narrative to protect their own reputations.”

New research points to the likelihood of an unnatural origin for SARS-CoV-2

Research results published in the journal Risk Analysis by Xin Chen, Fatema Kalyar, Abrar Ahmad Chughtai, and Chandini Raina MacIntyre on March 15 indicate a greater likelihood of an unnatural rather than a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2.

“Several studies have dismissed a lab accident as unlikely (Alwine et al., 2023; Andersen et al., 2020; Worobey et al., 2022), but our analysis indicates that both theories of origin are equally plausible,” the scientists from the University of New South Wales in Australia said.

“Most studies have focused on a zoonotic origin, but definitive evidence such as an intermediary animal host is lacking.”

Using published literature and publicly available sources of information, Xin Chen et al. used the modified Grunow–Finke assessment tool (mGFT) to study the origin of SARS-COV-2 and consider evidence for a natural or unnatural origin. They focused on laboratory accidents or leaks as the source of a potential unnatural origin.

The mGFT was originally designed to differentiate between natural epidemics and deliberate biological attacks.

It contains 11 criteria including biorisk, timing, unusual strains, geographic distribution, environmental concentration, epidemic intensity, transmission mode, and unusually rapid spread.

“The mGFT scored 41/60 points (68%), with high inter-rater reliability (100%), indicating a greater likelihood of an unnatural than natural origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the scientists concluded.

“This risk assessment cannot prove the origin of SARS-CoV-2 but shows that the possibility of a laboratory origin cannot be easily dismissed.”

Xin Chen et al. said that definitive proof of a laboratory leak or natural origin might never be obtained, but risk analysis tools such as the mGFT allowed a systematic approach to estimating the likelihood of either origin.

“The debate about the origins of SARS-COV-2 has been focused largely on medical evidence but not on other intelligence, which is key to identifying unnatural epidemics,” the scientists wrote.

“The large volume of private communications released under Freedom of Information requests also adds further insights (Kopp, 2023), such as the discrepancy between the public and private views of influential virologists.”

Xin Chen et al. said the epidemiological evidence needed to be broader than simply the Huanan seafood market and that all data, including outlier data, should be examined.

“This may include detailed epidemiological analysis of scientists who reported becoming sick at WIV as well as athletes who attended the World Military Games in October 2019, and testing of stored sera collected between October and December 2019 in these athletes,” Xin Chen et al. said.

“It may also include further analysis of data from countries that had evidence of the virus being present earlier than December 2019, such as Italy, France, and Spain (Carrat et al., 2021; Chavarria-Miró et al., 2021).

Xin Chen et al. noted that their study has several limitations that needed to be considered. The mGFT tool was previously applied to smaller outbreak scenarios, they said, and this was the first time it had been applied to a pandemic. Also, the tool was originally designed to detect biowarfare, not laboratory leaks or accidents.

When using the mGFT tool in a pandemic, higher scores were usually assigned to the criteria of “epidemic intensity” and “unusual rapid spread”, which could lead to an overall high score and a likely conclusion of unnatural origin, the scientists said. They added, however, that they were conservative in their scoring.

“The strengths of this study include a more comprehensive analysis of factors ranging from traditional virology, epidemiology, and medical factors to situational and other intelligence,” they said.

In an article published in Common Dreams on March 16, the chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote: “A US-funded laboratory origin of Covid-19 would certainly constitute the most significant case of governmental gross negligence in world history. Moreover, there is a high likelihood that the US Government continues to this day to fund dangerous GoF [gain-of-function] work as part of its biodefense program. The US owes the full truth, and perhaps ample financial compensation, to the rest of the world, depending on what the facts ultimately reveal.”

Sachs said the following urgent actions were needed:

• an independent scientific investigation in which all laboratories involved in the EcoHealth Alliance research programme in the US and China fully opened their books and records to independent investigators,
• a worldwide halt on gain-of-function research until an independent global scientific body set grounds rules for biosafety, and
• the establishment by the UN General Assembly of rigorous legal and financial accountability for governments that violated international safety norms through dangerous research activities that threatened the health and security of the rest of the world.

The Lancet commission report about the Covid-19 pandemic was published on September 14, 2022.

In the report, Sachs et al. said that both hypotheses for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 – “a zoonotic spillover from wildlife or a farm animal, possibly through a wet market, in a location that is still undetermined” or emergence from a research-related incident, during the field collection of viruses or through a laboratory-associated escape – required further scientific investigation.

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