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How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory*

Donald G. McNeil Jr.
[11]

Donald G. McNeil Jr.
[12]

1 hour ago·19 min read
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In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on
which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not a
Lab Leak,’ Scientists Say.”

It never ran.

For two reasons.

The chief one was that inside the Times, we were sharply divided. My
colleagues who cover national security were being assured by their
Trump administration sources — albeit anonymously and with no hard
evidence — that it was a lab leak and the Chinese were covering it up.
We science reporters were hearing from virologists and zoologists — on
the record and in great detail — that the odds were overwhelming that
it was not a lab leak but an animal spillover.

Frankly, the scientists had more credibility.

The other reason my story never ran was that it was 4,000 words long
and full of expressions like “polybasic cleavage site,” “RNA-dependent
RNA polymerase gene” and “O-linked glycan shields.” Editors would open
it, their eyeballs would bleed, and they would close it and find
something else to do.

(Back then, editors blanched even at “spike protein” and “receptor
binding domain,” but we’ve all had a crash course in virology this
year, haven’t we?)

Although it never ran, others like it did elsewhere. The experts all
agreed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not a deliberate weaponization of
a previously known virus and that it had no obvious signs of lab
manipulation (more details below). They noted that blood sampling
showed that brief “spillovers” of animal viruses into humans happen
often without causing large outbreaks.

Therefore, they argued, the odds were that this was another virus that
got lucky, like SARS and MERS and the 2009 pandemic flu: it had dwelled
long enough inside a civet or camel or pig or something to infect
human-like cells, and then had hit the big city.

For about a year, that was the general wisdom among science writers.
The “lab-leak theory” migrated back to the far right where it had
started — championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the
Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol
invasion. It was tarred by the fact that everyone backing it seemed to
hate not just Democrats and the Chinese Communist Party, but even the
Chinese themselves. It spawned racist rumors like “Chinese labs sell
their dead experimental animals in food markets.”

China retorting to Trump administration nonsense with nonsense of its
own — such as suggesting that [13]U.S. military officers planted the
virus during a visit to Wuhan in October 2019 — did not help.

And now to the present day.

Two weeks ago, my former New York Times science news colleague Nicholas
Wade wrote [14]an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (and
[15]on Medium) arguing that the lab-leak theory deserves a harder look.

It has since been sent to me a dozen times with notes asking “What do
you think?”

My first reaction was dismissive, even though I very much respect Nick
as a journalist. (Some of his work is controversial and he can be
cranky, but [16]who am I to criticize anyone on those grounds?) I
covered the pandemic from its earliest days and I disagreed with his
retelling of how the leak-vs.-spillover debate began.

Also, I was offended by some aspects, such as his attacks on Dr.
Anthony S. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and Peter Daszak
of the EcoHealth Alliance, both of whom I have known [17]for years; I
know both are dedicated to saving lives, and they have always [18]told
me the truth — or what they honestly believed to be the truth at the
time, because evidence sometimes changes. They are now both getting
death threats, and that is repulsive.

The N.I.H.-funded EcoHealth Alliance does not do dangerous lab
research; it doesn’t even have a lab. It [19]hunts for dangerous
viruses in the field; its zoologists teach people how to safely gather
samples from bats, birds, chimpanzees and other creatures fortified
with claws, teeth, beaks, muscles and pathogens.

That’s work I consider as essential as staffing the radar stations that
watch for missiles coming over the North Pole. The Trump administration
was insane [20]to cut off funding for it. You need to know what’s
coming at you. Actually cooking up novel threats is a different matter,
of which more below.

I was also bothered by Nick quoting Dr. Robert Redfield, the former
director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To my mind,
after being [21]warned about the virus by his Chinese counterpart in
the first week of January, Dr. Redfield failed to shout from the
rooftops and move mountains — and now 600,000 Americans are dead. He
also raised the specter of [22]a flu-Covid “twindemic” that turned out
to be [23]virological alarmism.

But…but…but…but…but…

The deeper I read into the papers and articles Nick cited, the clearer
it became how much new information had trickled out in the last year.
Not new to the most intense and well-educated followers of this topic,
but new to the greater public debate. I include articles like [24]this,
[25]this, [26]this, [27]this and [28]this by Yuri Deigin, Rossana
Segretto, Milton Leitenberg, Josh Rogin, Nicholson Baker and others.

And more and and more scientists feel misled.

I now agree with Nick’s central conclusion: We still do not know the
source of this awful pandemic. We may never know. But the argument that
it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister
lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago,
when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion.

And China’s lack of candor is disturbing. It denies access to the
institute’s lab logs and whatever messages were swapped during its own
investigations, took down 2018 statements critical of lab biosecurity
protocols, [29]retaliated against Australia for advocating an open
investigation and sharply restricted the W.H.O. investigators.

Calls for a better probe are mounting. Last week, 18 biologists,
including leading and outspoken experts on this pandemic like the
Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and Yale immunologist Akiko
Iwasaki, published [30]a letter in Science [31]calling for a new
investigation and demanding that Chinese labs and public health
agencies open their records to outside scrutiny.

To my mind, China could be forgiven for its standoffishness in early
2020. It was busy fighting its own pandemic. And if China had, say,
arrogantly offered to teach the American C.D.C. how to investigate
[32]America’s killer hamburgers — the equivalent of the way the Trump
administration spoke to China back then — we would have snubbed them
too.

But now, 17 months later, China is persistently acting like a nation
hiding something.

Also worrying: the hunt for the spillover theory’s smoking gun — a very
closely related natural virus in a human or an animal — has gone on for
over a year. Success would mean big prizes for the discoverer —
especially from the Chinese government, which could say “See??”

And yet — zip. That doesn’t mean it won’t be found. But by now we might
have expected at least some smoking shell casings.

I had been skeptical of the “lab leak” theory because animal spillover
is such an obvious answer. Genetics has proven that almost every
disease mankind has faced jumped from animals: bubonic plague from
rodents, measles probably from cows, whooping cough maybe from dogs,
and so on.

Also, the leak idea was just too conveniently conspiratorial.

I’ve covered several pandemics and studied others and one element is
consistent: they start in utter confusion that defies any sense that an
evil genius at work. Doctors know something’s wrong, but aren’t sure
what. That was true when American veterans started dying of pneumonia
after a 1976 convention ([33]Legionnaire’s disease); when the [34]Bronx
Zoo’s birds started dropping dead in 1999 (West Nile virus); when
[35]young nurses fell ill in Mexico City in 2009 (swine flu); when
camel butchers [36]died in Saudi Arabia (MERS); and when Brazilian
babies were born [37]with shrunken heads (Zika).

This pandemic’s opening days were also shrouded in fog, and yes, there
was a government coverup. But it was outed immediately and it didn’t
emanate from Beijing.

In [38]late December 2019, doctors at hospitals near the Huanan Seafood
Market began seeing a strange viral pneumonia they couldn’t identify.
On Dec. 30, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission [39]issued a warning.

It was quickly picked by disease-alert websites like FluTrackers and
[40]ProMED; the W.H.O. [41]put out an alert the next day. The New York
Times wrote [42]its first article on January 6, from Beijing; I started
[43]helping my China colleagues soon after.

By that time, one coverup had been underway for a week. Wuhan’s
politically ambitious mayor, [44]Zhou Xianwang, was eager to protect
the local party congress he had scheduled for January and the
[45]pot-luck dinner for 40,000 Wuhanese he hoped would get him into the
Guinness Book of Records.

On January 1, his police silenced the nervous doctors. The Hainan
Seafood Market was closed and hosed down.

That was the equivalent of trampling a crime scene. The market’s wild
game sellers — who might have had the infected animal, if there was one
— scattered. Any live animals or fresh meat probably went to other
markets or into the trash. Customers disappeared. The chance to use the
market as the hub of a good epidemiological investigation was lost.

At the same time, other events occurred that looked like coverups, but
maybe weren’t. As soon as it was clear that the threat was a dangerous
new coronavirus, the local health commission and then the national one
[46]ordered diagnostic and genetics labs to destroy their samples or
surrender them to high-level biosecurity labs. Most labs chose
incineration — another crime scene wrecked.

That smacked of coverup, and was treated as such by the Trump
administration, but it’s actually standard safety procedure to prevent
outbreaks. Our C.D.C. gave the same order in 2014 when it realized that
hospital labs had samples from Ebola patients being treated in
[47]Dallas and Omaha. “We told the labs in Texas and Nebraska to
destroy them or send them to Fort Detrick,” Dr. Pierre E. Rollin, who
[48]recently retired from the C.D.C after 26 years of fighting global
outbreaks, told me. “You can call that a cover-up, but it was a public
health decision.”

During those first days in Wuhan, a major misconception circulated —
that the virus did not spread easily between people. The W.H.O.
repeated it, so did we. But that was not necessarily deliberate
misinformation. With the market closed, the epicenter had scattered a
few dozen cases across a city of 11 million. Very few PCR tests
existed, and it was the height of flu season. At such times, it’s hard
to know who infected whom with what.

Also, I don’t believe the image of China as a Teflon pyramid with Xi
Jinping at the apex, the evil emperor who sees every sparrow that
falls. It’s like other big countries, even totalitarian ones: messy,
with competing scientists and petty bureaucrats. Its flaws often become
public despite Beijing’s rigid control of the internet.

Each day back then, the rumors got more bizarre. Some scientists
[49]claimed the virus had snake genes. Others said it [50]was part
H.I.V., triggering [51]claims that it was a bio-weapon.

Some of that fog of war lifted after [52]Beijing sent Dr. Zhong
Nanshan, the country’s renowned epidemiologist, to Wuhan to demand the
truth. On January 20th, Dr. Zhong warned on national TV that the virus
was spreading rapidly and that outsiders should stay away. On January
23, Wuhan was cut off from the world, [53]Mayor Xian apologized, and
China launched its brutal but amazingly successful effort to crush its
epidemic.

The [54]first article I know of blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology
ran on January 26 in the Washington Times, a conservative paper founded
by the Unification Church. It seemed based on two elements — the lab
was in the same city (albeit nine miles from the market), and a brief,
speculative quote from an Israeli biowarfare expert, [55]Dany Shoham.

“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in
terms of research and development in Chinese [biological weapons], at
least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW
alignment,” the paper quoted Dr. Shoham as saying. Any work on
biological weapons would be “definitely covert,” he added.

When I reached Dr. Shoham by telephone later, he spoke very cautiously.
He had not been misquoted, he said, but he emphasized that he had never
said that deadly virus came from that lab. He had said only that it
“was possible” that such a virus could have come from such a lab.

But the rumor was [56]off and running.

Then, on February 3 — a week later — scientists from that Institute
produced what smelled like a smoking gun.

They published [57]an article on Nature’s open-access website saying
one of the hundreds of coronaviruses gathered from bat caves that was
in their freezers was a 96.2 percent match to SARS-CoV-2.

They called it RaTG13 (indicating a Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat
captured in Tong Guan cave in Yunnan in 2013).

For conspiracy theorists, that was the clincher — if the lab had a 96
percent match, it must have leaked the killer.

But many of the world’s top virologists leapt to say “Not so fast.”

Coronaviruses mutate slowly, so a 4 percent mismatch in the 30,000 base
pairs of the two viruses meant RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 had diverged maybe
40 years ago, evolutionary geneticists said.

On February 16, as rumors swirled, five of the world’s top virologists
got together to publish [58]a letter on virological.org explaining why
animal origin was more likely.

The letter, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” was later[59]
republished in the journal Nature.

Its basic argument was that any lab trying to make a super-dangerous
virus would start with the backbone of one already known to be pretty
dangerous, like 2002 SARS. This new virus was so different from SARS,
especially in its receptor binding domain — the crucial bit where the
spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on the surface of a human cell
— that logically no one would have chosen it.

The binding domain was much closer to one that had been recently
[60]found in pangolin viruses, so it was likely the pandemic virus had
jumped from bats to an animal — perhaps pangolins but not necessarily.

Also, the new virus had a cleavage site unlike those in related
coronaviruses. (After binding to a cell, the spike has to “[61]cleave”
or split open, to meld with the surface and inject its RNA.) The new
virus’s cleavage site was an unusual set of amino acids in an unusual
spot on the genome. Such unexpected choices seemed more likely to
happen during the constant random evolution that goes on in nature
rather than the logic-driven “let’s try this next” methods of a lab.

Also the virus’s spikes had “glycans” which [62]act as shields to
protect them from antibodies. A virus sunbathing in a friendly lab cell
culture wouldn’t need to evolve shields, while a virus constantly
fighting off immune system attacks because it was evolving inside an
animal would, they argued.

Therefore, they concluded, “we do not believe that any type of
laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

The paper’s first author, [63]Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps
Research Translational Institute, is [64]still vigorously defending the
paper’s basic premise — that an animal origin is by far the most
likely.

But other eminent virologists, including at least one of his
co-authors, are wavering.

During the uproar that ensued after the institute revealed that the
RaTG13 strain was in its freezers, Dr. Daszak argued that merely having
a virus in a frozen fecal pellet meant little. Infections take place
only when viruses are warmed up and growing in cell cultures or
animals.

Dr. Daszak had worked for years with Dr. Shi Zheng-li, the “[65]Bat
Woman” who now runs the Wuhan institute. His zoologists and field
veterinarians had taught her bat-sampling — a dangerous practice even
in caves with tourists in bathing suits wandering around.

Freezers contain hundreds of viruses. It is too expensive to fully
sequence all of them and impossible to grow them all out in cell
culture, he explained. So labs create a set of “bookmarks.” They
sequence one short gene, called RdRP, that seldom mutates and keep a
list of their RdRPs. Sometimes they post their lists to a public
database like GISAID or Genbank.

Since the world had previously been looking only for relatives of the
dangerous 2002 SARS or MERS, he said, labs would care only if a virus’
RdRP gene closely matched those.

“If it doesn’t, it’s of no interest, so you pop it back in the
freezer,” he said.

Later, if a new dangerous virus turns up, labs can check their
bookmarks for a match, thaw that one out and sequence all of it. That
was why RaTG13 was found so quickly, he said. Ditto for pangolin virus
sequences [66]found in the freezers of the South China Agricultural
University.

Because there were no viruses with closer RdRP matches either in public
databanks or in a private Wuhan Institute list of 630 unposted RdRP
genes he had seen, he said, the Wuhan lab presumably held nothing
closer than a 40-year-distant relative of the killer virus.

“Believe me, if there had been, no one would have kept that a secret,”
he said to me more than a year ago. “It would be a huge discovery. We’d
be over the moon.”

Dr. Shi herself later [67]told Scientific American that, when news of
the new virus erupted, her first fear was that it had come from her
institute. She did not sleep for days, she said, until she had finished
checking her lab’s logs and assured herself that it had not.

Since then, though, more has come to light about the work done by Dr.
Shi’s teams.

The most startling bit of information was that, rather than “finding”
RaTG13 in her freezers in February, Dr. Shi had worked with it
[68]since at least 2016, but under a different name, RaBtCoV/4991.

RaBtCoV/4991 had not been gathered at random but from a mineshaft in
which miners digging bat guano got pneumonia, some fatally. Dr. Shi’s
lab sequenced enough of it to be able to say it was the most
“SARS-like” of the viruses from that investigation.

There were arguments over whether the miners died of fungal pneumonia,
viral pneumonia or both, but that link made it a likely suspect for any
lab wanting to explore dangerous viruses. Not mentioning her previous
work with it was troubling.

Also, Dr. Shi was [69]trained by Ralph S. Baric of the University of
North Carolina in building “chimera” viruses — taking, for example, the
spike protein from a new virus and splicing it to the backbone of a
known one like SARS. He invented “[70]no-see-um” techniques that left
no trace of the splice.

(Interestingly, Dr. Baric is one of the signers of [71]the letter to
Science demanding a more thorough investigation of all Wuhan labs.)

Then, to see if the new chimeras could infect people, they were tested
against human airway cells and “humanized” mice — mice bred to have
human ACE-2 receptors on their organs.

There is [72]debate over whether this is truly “gain of function”
research. Some argue that gain of function strictly involves taking a
virus already known to endanger humans and trying to make it more
lethal or more transmissible.

So Dr. Fauci was answering truthfully in [73]his bitter exchange with
Senator Rand Paul on May 11.

But many other scientists feel this is a distinction without a
difference. They feel that building any new virus from suspect parts
and then seeing if it infects humans is just as risky.

Like nuclear bomb testing, the need for “gain of function” research is
hotly contested.

Proponents argue that it is the only way to stay ahead of epidemics: in
a world full of emerging diseases, if you can figure out which
pathogens are only a few amino acids tweaks shy of disaster, you can
develop and stockpile vaccines and antibodies against them.

Opponents say that, noble as that goal may be, it is inherently too
dangerous to pursue by building Frankensteins and poking them to see
how strong they are.

Despite constantly rising biosafety levels, viruses we already know to
be lethal, from smallpox to SARS, have repeatedly broken loose by
accident.

Most leaks infect or kill just a few people before they are stopped by
isolation and/or vaccination. But not all: scientists now believe that
the H1N1 seasonal flu that killed thousands every year from 1977 to
2009 [74]was influenza research gone feral. The strain first appeared
in eastern Russia in 1977 and its genes were initially identical to a
1950 strain; that could have happened only if it had been in a freezer
for 27 years. It also initially behaved as if it had been deliberately
attenuated, or weakened. So scientists suspect it was a Russian effort
to make a vaccine against a possible return of the 1918 flu. And then,
they theorize, the vaccine virus, insufficiently weakened, began
spreading.

Also, Dr. Shi’s teams had done work on inserting cleavage sites into
viruses and seeing if that enhanced their ability to infect human
cells.

All this raises a disturbing possibility: What if some Wuhan scientist
— someone in Dr. Shi’s lab or perhaps at the Wuhan Center for Disease
Control right near the market, or possibly some military scientist she
trained but could not control — did something like take the likely
suspect virus RaBtCoV/4991 and use it as the “backbone” for a set of
chimeras with different receptor binding domains? What if that
scientist was trying in 2019 to attach binding domains from viruses
recently [75]found in dying pangolins seized from wildlife smugglers in
southern China? What if someone got tempted to add a cleavage site to
see if that supercharged it?

What if various such chimeras were passaged through cultures of human
cells or humanized mice? Wouldn’t that speed up mutations into forms
likely to infect humans even faster than nature can? Wouldn’t that mean
that something that looked like the current pandemic strain could
emerge, polybasic cleavage sites, O-linked glycans and all?

And what if someone doing that work in a less secure lab than should
have been permitted got infected before catching the subway home?

It’s a lot of ifs, and it’s pure speculation, which has been going on
since mid-last year.

Jon Cohen of Science magazine [76]put essentially these very questions
to Dr. Shi back in August, 2020.

She said no such work took place in her lab, and that the RaBtCoV/4991
virus had only been sequenced, not isolated or grown out as a virus
before the sample was used up. Everyone in her lab had tested negative
for antibodies to SARS-like coronaviruses so there was no evidence of
an outbreak inside, she said. And she had been assured through regular
conversations with other Wuhan labs that that they had no leaks either.

Doubts have been raised about that, including the question: since
Covid-19 was racing through Wuhan in early 2020, how likely would it be
that no one in her lab tested antibody-positive? Wouldn’t some have
gotten infected outside?

Ultimately, much of the debate comes down to this: Is Dr. Shi telling
the whole truth? And even if she is, are all her similarly skilled
colleagues in Wuhan? Are they being allowed to do so by their
government — which has a history of silencing scientists?

Chinese scientists were allowed to interact with W.H.O. investigators
only in a very tightly controlled way and very little of the report was
devoted to the lab leak theory, which it all but dismissed.

Opening up the 2019 logs of every lab in Wuhan and the 2019–2020 emails
between scientists and health officials would go a long way to
restoring trust.

And the failure to discover any wild viruses that look like
evolutionary intermediate steps on the way to SARS-Cov-2 is troubling.

So virologists are feeling more doubts.

Nick Wade quoted David Baltimore, who won the 1975 Nobel Prize for his
work with viruses, as saying the specific amino acid sequences in the
cleavage site made “a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural
origin.” (This has prompted [77]a complex debate among evolutionary
geneticists over which specific rungs on the RNA-DNA ladder are
statistically most likely to appear in a bat virus.)

I spoke about Nick’s article last week with Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, the
renowned Columbia University virus hunter who was one of the five
co-authors on the seminal “proximal origin” paper.

He favored a natural origin theory, he said, in part because he had
assumed that all the Wuhan Institute’s 2019 work with SARS-like viruses
had been done in its top-level BSL-4 lab, which [78]was cleared to
operate in 2017. (State Department cables from 2018 raised questions
about how well-run the lab was.)

But later he learned of studies with Dr. Shi’s name on them showing
that work [79]he considers dangerous had been done in level BSL-2 labs,
which he considers highly porous to leaks, not just [80]in 2016, but
[81]in 2020.

“That’s screwed up,” he said. “It shouldn’t have happened. People
should not be looking at bat viruses in BSL-2 labs. My view has
changed.”

That is still not, as he pointed out, direct evidence of a lab leak.
There is no proof of a leak.

But the Occam’s Razor argument — what’s the likeliest explanation,
animal or lab? — keeps shifting in the direction of the latter.

The hardest evidence that it was an animal is still what it was early
last year: On January 1, right after the market was closed down, and
then again on January 12, Huazhong Agricultural University and Dr.
Shi’s Institute gathered almost 600 samples from the block-long warren
of shuttered stalls.

Of those swabs, about six percent were positive for the virus,
[82]according to Xinhua, China’s state news agency. Most came from the
western end, where the wildlife was sold. And most, Dr. Shi said, were
from spots near or below floor level — the handles of roll down steel
shutters and the drains over the floor gutters.

Finding virus in six percent of surface samples was more than might be
expected even in a hospital during flu season, Trevor Bedford, an
evolutionary geneticist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle
who [83]does flu studies told me last year.

And the most logical explanation for finding that much virus on the
floor and in the drains, he speculated, was not coughing humans. It was
the blood of a butchered animal being sloshed around as the market was
hosed out.

Yes, there were cases in early December with no connection to that
market, but that’s not impossible. Livestock is shipped in batches,
Wuhan has other live markets. Also, viruses are known to create
“stuttering chains of transmission” as they become more transmissible.
We’ve seen the rise of increasingly transmissible variants this year
and we know this virus alternates between rare transmission and
superspreading.

And the wildlife trade is not some dinky smuggling operation. As the
W.H.O. report detailed, there are large farms in China raising civets,
badgers and other formerly wild animals for food. A bat virus could
have raced through them, adapting itself to more human-like animals,
the same way the human virus raced through Dutch mink farms.

Also, farmers all over Asia enter caves to dig bat guano for garden
fertilizer. A study Dr. Daszak’s alliance did on villagers living near
caves found that three percent had antibodies to bat viruses. That
translates to up 7 million inhabitants of rural southeast Asia
potentially catching such viruses each year. There may be many small
outbreaks that die out without spreading far. Ebola did that at least
19 times we know of between 1976 and 2014, the year the virus reached a
big city for the first time.

So there we are. All we have so far is speculation, and all the
explanations are unsatisfactory.

The whole thing may just be a cold case, and stay that way forever. But
there are more embers left to sift. The whole world, China included,
needs a hard answer, whoever is to blame — so we can prevent this from
happening again.

*The title is from the 1964 film “[84]Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned
to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb,” which is about human lies and
safety failures — and ends with clips of atomic weapons tests depicted
as the real thing. Not that I think the pandemic is funny. But neither
is nuclear war.
[85]

Donald G. McNeil Jr.

New York Times, 1976–2021. Global health beat 2002–2021. Last
assignment: lead reporter on the Covid-19 pandemic.
[86][email protected]
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* [87]Vírus
* [88]Covid 19
* [89]Lab Leak
* [90]Conspiracy Theories
* [91]Spillover

[92]More from Donald G. McNeil Jr.

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New York Times, 1976–2021. Global health beat 2002–2021. Last
assignment: lead reporter on the Covid-19 pandemic.
[email protected]

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[100]Donald G. McNeil Jr.
[1*hn4v1tCaJy7cWMyb0bpNpQ.png?q=20]
[1*hn4v1tCaJy7cWMyb0bpNpQ.png?q=20] [1*hn4v1tCaJy7cWMyb0bpNpQ.png]

[101]Ground the Planes

[102]Donald G. McNeil Jr.
[1*r7Q7YVFd92cCS-9cXfMOGA.png?q=20]
[1*r7Q7YVFd92cCS-9cXfMOGA.png?q=20] [1*r7Q7YVFd92cCS-9cXfMOGA.png]

[103]Why Can’t We Vaccinate Faster?

[104]Donald G. McNeil Jr.
[1*_L_N0oHEpjMZ3QUqundNag.jpeg?q=20]
[1*_L_N0oHEpjMZ3QUqundNag.jpeg?q=20] [1*_L_N0oHEpjMZ3QUqundNag.jpeg]

[105]This Man Saw Aliens in Area 51

[106]Hdogar in [107]Lessons from History
[1*obdh43Hc8TjSALTxJ7A-qQ.jpeg?q=20]
[1*obdh43Hc8TjSALTxJ7A-qQ.jpeg?q=20] [1*obdh43Hc8TjSALTxJ7A-qQ.jpeg]

[108]Viral Videos Get a Boost from Sharing Big

[109]Texas McCombs in [110]Big Ideas
[1*PqB1tWm7QqoKz20CsFADzQ.png?q=20]
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