Debunked COVID-19 conspiracy theory weaves a UNC medical researcher into the tale
The messages started coming a little more than a month ago, first on social media and eventually by email.
By March, Kari Debbink, a professor at Bowie State University who holds a doctorate from UNC-Chapel Hill, had received her first death threat.
The reason: She was being accused of helping create the novel coronavirus, which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic that has shut down much of the world, in a lab in North Carolina.
“To me it is just unbelievable that I would end up in a position to have someone think I could start a global pandemic,” she said in a phone interview with The News & Observer. “I reported it to the police … and they were just like, ‘What is going on?’”
As COVID-19 spread at the start of the year, so did rumors and speculation about its origin. Some said it was a biological weapon developed by the Chinese, or that it escaped from a laboratory accidentally or even that the disease was amplified by 5G technology.
One unfounded theory that many internet users have latched onto and that has been amplified by right wing news channels, like One America News, has placed its sights on North Carolina. It claims — falsely — that COVID-19 was created at UNC-Chapel Hill, specifically in the lab of Ralph Baric, where Debbink once worked.
Baric is one of the world’s preeminent researchers of coronaviruses — having studied the family of viruses known for their crown-like shape for 30 years. His lab on the UNC campus was one of the first places in the U.S. to receive a sample of the novel coronavirus earlier this year to begin conducting tests.
And while experts and researchers in the field who have examined the genomic structure of COVID-19 have overwhelmingly concluded that the virus originated in wildlife, the UNC rumor has continued to spread on social media and message boards.
Stated simply, scientists have reported that the makeup of the virus points to it being the result of natural evolution rather than bio-engineering.
UNC declined to comment for this story, and Baric was not available for an interview. Baric’s lab is putting a potential COVID-19 treatment through human trials.
Debbink worked in Baric’s lab while pursuing her doctorate at UNC, which is how she came to be a target online. She believes Baric has been tied up in conspiracy theories because of a lack of scientific knowledge among the general public.
“Not everybody is able to read a scientific paper and understand it,” she said. “It is very easy for someone to watch a video that makes [false information] seem like a totally legitimate idea.”
It’s unnerving, she added, to see people make threats over something they likely don’t understand.
Previous study of one coronavirus strain
Baric’s name appears to have been swept up into theories around the new coronavirus because of a 2015 paper he co-authored with more than a dozen other scientists, including one associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab located near the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak.
That paper showed coronaviruses in bats were capable of directly infecting humans rather than evolving in another animal first. Bats have been shown to be responsible for other coronaviruses in the past, like SARS and MERS, though the virus passed through a different animal host before infecting humans in those cases.
To prove this, the scientists created a a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus and used it to infect mice whose modified genomes mimicked human lung receptors. Creating an infectious virus for experiments — also known as “gain-of-function research” — had become a topic of debate around the time of the 2015 study.
Some fellow scientists, Nature reported, questioned whether the insights from gain-of-function research were worth the risks, however slim they might be. Baric told Nature that without the research that particular coronavirus strain — which is different from the one causing COVID-19 — would not be viewed as a threat that requires more attention.
In 2014, the U.S. government decided it would stop funding gain-of-function research, though Baric’s study was underway and was grandfathered in. The National Institutes of Health deemed the study not risky enough to fall under the moratorium on funding, Baric told Nature in 2015.
The lingering literature around the debate appears to have drawn attention to Baric’s work. An editor’s note attached to the top of Nature’s article about the debate now reads: “We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true.”
Debbink, who helped author Baric’s 2015 paper, said everyone involved with that research has been targeted online by harassers who are accusing them of creating a biological weapon.
Expert research shows the virus didn’t come from a lab
But since COVID-19, just one of several known coronavirus strains in the world, has had a chance to be studied, scientists have been resolute in saying there’s no proof of it being engineered by humans. On the contrary it appears to be quite natural in origin, likely coming from bats, they say.
A recent article in the journal of Emerging Microbes & Infections aimed squarely at false claims about Baric’s 2015 paper.
The authors of the study found no connection between Baric’s research and the new pandemic — because the hybrid Baric used and the virus that causes COVID-19 are completely different strains.
“This claim lacks any scientific basis and must be discounted...,” the authors wrote. “[T]here is no credible evidence to support [it].”
Susan Weiss, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and an author of the article, said she didn’t have time to talk to an N&O reporter about the false theories but added, “The conspiracy theory is ridiculous.”
In February, The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal, published a statement “strongly condemn[ing] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The group of scientists who published the statement cited nine different genomic analyses that all pointed overwhelmingly toward a natural origin of the virus.
“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” the scientists in The Lancet wrote.
Debbink said she doesn’t expect researchers to slow down their work because of the conspiracy theories, but she is worried about the long-term consequences of them.
“I think conspiracy theories are very harmful to the public discourse,” she said, “... less so because of people like me getting death threats ... but because they degrade the public trust in science and confuse people.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
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