On 19 February 2020, just three weeks after the World Health Organisation (WHO) had declared COVID-19 an international public-health emergency, a group of 27 prominent scientists published a letter in the Lancet headlined, Statement in Support of the Scientists, Public Health Professionals, and Medical Professionals of China Combating COVID-19.
“The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins,” the group warned. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin… Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”
The letter—cited formally as Calisher et al. 2020, in reference to microbiologist Charles Calisher, its lead author—was only four paragraphs long. But during the first year of the pandemic, it proved enormously influential among journalists and public-health officials, many of whom found it otherwise difficult to follow the complex evidence trails that virologists were then investigating in the search to understand the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Here were more than two dozen renowned scientists instructing readers of the Lancet—one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals—that the debate was effectively over: SARS-CoV-2 was caused by random genetic mutations and zoonotic spillover, not by a leak from a Chinese microbiology lab. To suggest otherwise was to traffic in Sinophobic “misinformation.” Case closed.
