Why is it so hard to get a straight answer about where COVID came from? Q&A with John Sudworth

John Sudworth was the Beijing correspondent for the BBC from 2012 to 2021. During that time, he reported on a variety of subjects, but was apparently singled out by the Chinese government for harassment because of his work on Xinjiang and COVID-19.

He has a new podcast, Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin, that includes reporting from his time in China as well as plenty of interviews and research completed after he left. I’ve listened to the first three episodes — there will be eight in total — and it is fascinating.

We spoke by video call last week just after I listened to episode three. This is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

—Jeremy Goldkorn

You’re in New York now, right?

I’m in New York, yeah. So, I left China early ’21, and had sort of eight months or so in Taiwan. And then we finally washed up on these shores at the beginning of last year, March ’22.

Because you want to cover a truly dysfunctional country?

Exactly, yeah. I had the lite version in China. I thought I’d come see the real thing.

Can you tell me a little bit about the circumstances of your leaving?

The pressure had been building on me for a number of years, mainly as a result of my Xinjiang reporting. It became very clear from 2018 onwards. It was a major kind of focus of the sort of Foreign Ministry kind of media management officials who were tasked with that job.

To harass you? The reporting you did inside one of the camps was memorable.

That’s right.

We started doing some long-form journalism around the mass incarceration in Xinjiang, with a couple of big pieces that had, not to blow my own trumpet, a fairly high impact. Strangely, we’d had a couple of those pieces, which had really brought the full ire of the Chinese state down upon us, only then to be invited into the camps.

In fact, we were on a trip to Xinjiang. We were roaming around Yili prefecture [in far western Xinjiang] and trying to gather some stuff up there under heavy pressure, tailed, monitored, having our interviewees…let me rephrase that: We didn’t have any interviewees. Everybody and anybody we approached was subject to the full double-barreled Chinese state authoritarian approach. And in the middle of all that, we got a phone call from Foreign Ministry saying, would we like to come into a camp? I was like, “Have you got the right number?”

Did you think: “Sir! We’re the BBC, not the Global Times”?

Yeah. But there you go.

My feeling at the time was perhaps they had begun sort of Potemkin tours of the camps. Reuters had been cycled through. I think maybe Bloomberg had been taken in. Only print media at that point. And then they took us in. Perhaps we were sort of an acid test. They felt, by then, they’d got the system perfected to a degree that even we wouldn’t be able to prise it apart.

We accepted that challenge with some trepidation, because, of course, it’s an embed with the Chinese state. You know that it’s heavily choreographed. It’s going to be heavily managed. But I think the pieces we delivered were able to hold the narrative to account and to expose those places for what they truly were. Even the show camps…were prisons

The pressure only increased from there. The upshot of it was that we were under very heavy pressure going into the pandemic year, the beginning of 2020. Things got tougher for foreign reporters through that year for a whole host of other reasons, not least, just because of the COVID restrictions.

I’d also done some stuff in Taiwan over the early 2020 election that had, again, earned a great deal of displeasure from my Foreign Ministry minders. These [things] all added up, but then the final straw, I think, was our reporting on COVID, the early management of the outbreak in Wuhan, and then this question about the origins.

At the beginning of 2021, we had not long been back from the World Health Organization Press Conference down in Wuhan, where they unveiled their preliminary findings. We were under a lot of heavy pressure through our reporting of that event.

We got back to Beijing. And within a few weeks, friends of ours, other journalists had been increasingly concerned, and warning us that we really ought to be thinking about going. The Foreign Ministry began to issue threats to me in private that I might face legal action. And then there was a big headline in the Global Times saying, Xinjiang residents to sue BBC. And that was really the final prompt for us that perhaps it was time to get on a plane.

Smart move.

So, the reason I reached out to you was your new podcast. I’ve listened to the first three episodes. In the first one, you’re in the mountains in Yunnan looking for batshit. The episode is actually titled “Batshit.”

What year was that happening?

That was 2020. What we’ve tried to do in episode one is paint a picture of the kind of science that was going on. Not, I hope, to sort of lead audiences in any particular direction, but to explain for anybody looking at the two main explanations for where COVID may have come from.

Obviously, the prime suspect is natural origin in the market, but there’s also this science accident explanation, the so-called lab leak theory.

There is actually an intimate connection between them. The reason the science in Wuhan was taking place was precisely because of the very real threat of what they call zoonotic spillover. There is plenty of precedent for this…diseases are coming out of nature, passing from animals to humans.

And there are the two sides of the same coin. Not to suggest one is more likely or less likely than the other. But there is, at the heart of this story, this connection that runs right through Wuhan.

So, one of the fascinating things about this issue and about your podcast, and the reason I binge-listened as soon as I found out about it, is how difficult it is to talk about this subject.

In China, that’s unsurprising because the government doesn’t want anything that makes China look bad, whether it’s a zoonotic cause or whether it came out of a lab leak. They don’t really want any discussion of anything bad going on in China. That’s a response we have come to expect from them.

But it’s not just in China. Why do you think people feel so strongly and there’s so much vitriol about this issue all over the world, from randos on Twitter to very respected scientists?

It’s a million-dollar question. Why has this become so politicized when, after all, it is so important, right?

There is nobody who will read this who will not, if they haven’t personally [affected], know somebody who has suffered dreadfully through COVID — be that through health impacts or because of what it’s done to our economies, the ability of people to travel, see loved ones…all those early years of the pandemic.

The answer really does matter. Perhaps therein lies the explanation. Perhaps the controversy and the vitriol is in proportion to the importance of this question, and the fact that it is still so muddied, the evidence, the answers.

But this is something I hope we can serve listeners with through our podcast. On the one hand, there’s a scientific debate. And we try to unpack that. We speak to some of the key scientists involved. We look at the scientific arguments. We try to weigh the evidence. We, hopefully, are able to stand back from that and guide people through the contours of that scientific debate over the past few years.

But you cannot examine this question without looking at the politics as well. And they’ve been there right from the very start. If you think back to the middle of 2020, six months into this pandemic, as it was really sort of taking off, the lab leak hypothesis was by then intimately connected to the Trump White House.

Perhaps for understandable reasons, people were already concerned about the then U.S. president’s seemingly anti-science approach, the perceived failures to deal with the situation stateside.

All of those elements played into this sense of despair and politicization over the issue. And along with the Trump White House pointing that finger of blame, there was the counterargument, which is that in the middle of a global health crisis, rather than blame, we should be reaching out and building bridges. There should be cooperation and understanding. We shouldn’t vilify Chinese scientists. Again, all very understandable, but these ideas came with their own set of political assumptions.

My feeling as a journalist, is that we should, of course, hold, and should have held the Trump White House to account. That’s our job, to subject the politics and policies of every U.S. administration to scrutiny.

But that shouldn’t necessarily mean we don’t do the same in China. And there were very good reasons to ask very serious questions about China’s handling of the outbreak from the very start. And about its approach to the question of origin and its clear lack of transparency, which has been writ large from the very beginning.

You did in fact have some access. I mean, you interviewed the “batwoman” at the Wuhan lab, Shí Zhènglì 石正丽. You did have some official access to information at the beginning, right?

We spoke to Shi Zhengli over email. This was later in 2020. We weren’t the only foreign media outlet she engaged with. She was happy to answer questions over email.

It’s often the way in China: As journalists, you get used to this wall of silence, the very heavy-handed management of reporters, particularly for big mainstream newspapers and national broadcasters. But then, occasionally, you get these little glimpses of openness.

So, yes, we were able to interview Shi Zhengli. On the other hand, as I think you’ll hear in the podcast, our attempt to gather pictures and record interviews down in Yunnan where this sort of giant field study had been going on for a decade or more, this kind of pandemic prevention work, as they term it, gathering samples from bats, taking them back to the laboratories to work on them and better understand the threat they pose. We ran into a really, very, very heavy-handed Chinese state response down there.

I think you mention in the first episode how you were traipsing around in the mountains and being followed.

Yeah. Obviously, you’re used to that as a journalist in China, all of our Xinjiang reporting, that would be par for the course. But I think we all felt… We expected it, of course. And by that point, as I say, I was under pressure anyway, but the kind of monitoring and obstruction we faced, it was clearly very off the scale.

I think it just speaks to the general lack of transparency, even despite the fact that we were able, at least to a limited extent, to put some questions to Shi Zhengli. Although I have to say that quickly came to a halt. I won’t spoil that bit, actually. That’s still yet to come in a later episode, but yeah.

I’m looking forward to that. The castigation of John Sudworth by Shi Zhengli?

Yeah. There came a moment when she was no longer happy to talk to us, put it that way.

How about your Western interlocutors, the scientists that you spoke to?

The other thing that I’ve found difficult to understand is how sensitive many of the Westerners involved seem to be about people asking questions.

Some of it clearly has to do with the fact that there was in fact some American and other Western involvement in the Wuhan lab. But how do you see the phenomenon that some of the scientists appear to have this attitude that is quite unusual to encounter outside of authoritarian countries like China when it comes to talking about this disease?

We’ve tried to unpack some of that in episode three which you’ll have just heard.

What struck me as a reporter in China through those early months was how quickly the idea of a lab leak was closed down. Now, I should say, Jeremy, I’m not a lab leaker. I’ve never thought this came from a lab. I have no evidence that it came from a lab. But at the same time, back in those early days of the pandemic, it was clear that some scientists felt it was a question worth asking. And that until there was strong evidence either way, it should remain on the table. That seemed to me entirely reasonable. And yet there was this very, very swift closing down of the debate. A large part of the media seemed to accept somehow that the question itself was conspiratorial, dangerous to be asking.

I think I felt at the time that perhaps the question at least had been closed down too quickly.

So, we speak to Professor Bob Garry from Tulane University in episode three. He was very generous with his time, very happy to talk, answered our questions about some of the science done at the time, and how that fed into this idea that asking the question was somehow wrong.

He is still very, very strongly of the opinion that COVID came from an animal in a market. He believes that since those early months,there is further evidence which drives him even closer to that point of view. But nonetheless, looking back at that early work they did, he admits to us that maybe they went a little far and a little too fast in those early months, which I think is fascinating.

It’s a long way around to answer your question. Of course, a global pandemic with the sort of impacts that COVID had is going to be polarizing. It was unsettling, it unhinged society, it caused all sorts of dreadful, unpredictable consequences for all of us. And yet, it also arrived in the middle of probably, arguably, one of the most politicized moments of modern times. We’ve all felt that.

And the scientific debate has found itself taking place within that context. It has become very bitter, very acrimonious. There are some scientists we would’ve liked to have spoken to, but who refused, partly because of who else was going to be involved.

One of the things that I’ve found quite frustrating about media coverage of COVID over the last year is that it seems to me there hasn’t been a great deal of follow-up on what China is doing to prevent the next pandemic, whether this was a zoonotic event or not.

We know that plenty of zoonotic events have happened in the past, and it seems to be broadly accepted, as you mention in the podcast, that SARS, the original SARS, was a zoonotic event. But it’s unclear to me how much China has done in terms of preventing that type of thing from happening in the future.

I’ve tried to get people in China to look at wild animal markets. It does seem that many of them have been shut down, but there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of attention paid to this by the global media, and certainly not by any Chinese information organization.

Does that sound about right? Have you looked at what measures the Chinese government is taking to stop future possible zoonotic events?

We have, and I think it’s a very good question.

To go back to something I mentioned earlier, in the beginning, there was this sense from some scientists and journalists that the question of the origin, the whole response to the pandemic ought to be filtered through this sense of cooperation and trust with China.

Even from those who are very firmly on the zoonotic side, their view, somewhat ironically, given that they were very sort of dismissive of the pointing of the finger of suspicion on the lab leak side at the beginning, is that China is likely to be covering up a market origin. Because there is yet no sign of an infected animal, the so-called intermediate host. Early case data, the idea that through tracing back, contact tracing patients right back through that undetected spread of COVID, we might get close to the origin, that went nowhere.

The WHO report, when they came out of China in 2021, had drawn almost a complete blank on anything that would look like solid evidence. So, to entertain the possibility of a lab leak, of course, you are entertaining the possibility of a coverup, right? I mean, if it came from a lab, China’s likely to know it. And the idea behind that would be that they’re not telling us. That now equally applies, I think, to the idea of a market origin. So you’ve got both sides now looking in from the outside with deep suspicion about how China has handled the question.

I think there are really very, very important questions to ask about the wildlife trade in China. It wasn’t closed down after SARS-1 as it was meant to have been. We knew then, of course, that there was a real and present danger from China’s industrial-scale wildlife trade. We know from what was happening in Wuhan, right up to the outbreak of the pandemic, that there were large amounts of animals on sale in that market. And there is a very good reason why the natural origin, for a lot of people from the start, was the prime suspect.

Since then, it does appear that China has taken some steps. There were laws outlawing the sale of wild animals. China took steps through early 2020, the kind of things people suggest should have been done much, much earlier. Wildlife farms closed down in large numbers, certainly around Hubei, the farms thought to likely to have been supplying the Wuhan seafood market. There’s been considerable activity to reduce that risk. And I think some scientists would suggest that that is perhaps indicative of the fact that China might know more than the evidence suggests it does.

In recent months even, there seems to have been even less information available. Do you have the sense that the control of the existing information has gotten even tighter than it was even a year ago?

Yes. There was a period right at the very early part of the pandemic where there was some information, some data released about early cases that looked as far as we can tell relatively unfiltered. That changed very quickly. There were laws passed, of course, gagging laws on Chinese scientists. They needed approval to publish papers related to the question of COVID’s origins, et cetera. And that has largely remained enforced to this day.

We’ve seen some data that has come out partly, I think, because of outside pressure. We finally got the sequence data from the tests that they carried out inside that market, way back. These tests were done way back in January 2020 after the market was closed down. It was only at the beginning of this year that we finally got the sequence data that some scientists were insisting was going to be crucial in terms of giving us potential clues about the pandemic. That speaks to the information control and the lack of transparency that have been there from the start.