Was it the bats all along?

In December 2022, as coronavirus restrictions around the world began to ease, the Swiss film-maker Christian Frei travelled to Thailand to film bats in their natural habitat. At the time, scientists studying bat viruses were being vilified by conspiracy theorists for their supposed role in the Covid-19 pandemic; public enemy No 1 was Peter Daszak, a British-born zoologist and bat hunter.

Online sleuths, and some intelligence agencies, had begun to suspect that Sars-CoV-2, as the virus causing Covid-19 is known, was the result of a laboratory experiment. The prime suspects? Daszak’s New York-based NGO EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a Chinese laboratory in the very city where the first cases of Covid-19 had been detected. As a self-styled Chinese whistleblower, Li-Meng Yan told the Trump-supporting Fox News host Tucker Carlson: “The virus is like Frankenstein. They can never get it from nature.”

Frei, who spent lockdown in Zurich studying Daszak’s research on emerging infectious diseases, knew that to be untrue. Every pandemic virus in history, from influenza to HIV/Aids, started life in an animal reservoir and there was no reason to believe that Sars-CoV-2 was any different.

Frei noted that, in 2005, Daszak and Shi Zhengli, the virologist who directs WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, had published a landmark paper in Science, together with Linfa Wang, a Singapore-based expert on diseases of animal origin. In the paper they described how, after the 2003 Sars epidemic, they had isolated a very similar virus from bats in a cave in Yunnan in southern China. Analysis showed that the virus was more genetically varied than Sars, making it an ancestor of the epidemic virus. Then, in 2013, Daszak and Shi reported that they had discovered two more Sars-like coronaviruses in a cave in southern China. These contained a crucial protein enabling the viruses to, which contained a protein that could infect and bind to mammalian cells, including those in the human respiratory tract.

“I thought: that’s interesting, there was a first Sars,” Frei says. “I found it fascinating how they were able to link the outbreak to a bat cave in China. These guys had been warning the world for years about the dangers of bat viruses and now they were being blamed for Covid-19. Why?”

Answering that question would take Frei five years and several trips to caves along the Thai-Myanmar border that house colonies of bats that carry similar Sars-like viruses. The result is Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, a remarkable two-hour documentary exploring the natural world of bat viruses and the conspiracy theories about the pandemic’s supposed “unnatural” origins.

Blame features exclusive interviews with Daszak, Shi and Wang, and transports viewers inside the fevered minds of conspiracy theorists and into the caves where bats, and their viruses, breed. In the process, Frei, whose previous films include the Oscar-nominated War Photographer, exposes the role of online sleuths and pseudo-scientific experts in spreading falsehoods about Covid-19 and unpicks the theory that the virus was deliberately or accidentally released from the Wuhan lab.

But most of all, Blame is an attempt to rehabilitate Daszak and Shi’s reputations and return bats to the centre of the story of Covid-19. As Frei puts it in his voiceover: “Bats have been part of our ecosystem for 50 million years. And yet … bats are the world’s most misunderstood mammals and so are [bat] scientists.”

However, Frei is at pains to point out that Blame is not about getting to “an absolute truth”. “I’m not starting out with hypotheses and interviewing one side, then the other,” he told me when I caught up with him en route to a screening of Blame at the It’s All True documentary film festival in São Paulo. “I am interested in the whole story.”

Nonetheless, in what many will see as a clear statement of where his sympathies lie, Frei opens Blame with a quote from the Lancet medical journal that “disinformation has become a deliberate instrument to attack and discredit scientists and health professionals for political gains”.

Pandemics, he reminds us, have long been fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and attacks on “out groups”. The Black Death of the 14th century was initially blamed on Jews poisoning the wells from where Christians drew their drinking water (the actual cause was a bacterium harboured by rats and fleas). During the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, which coincided with the last months of the first world war, the outbreak was blamed on German U-boats. Sixty years later, the Stasi and KGB concocted the lie that the HIV/Aids pandemic was the result of a secret US bioweapons programme.

As Wuhan and other Chinese cities went into lockdown in the winter of 2020, several theories circulated as to the origins of the coronavirus. For pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong, it was a plot by the Chinese Communist party to crack down on free speech; by contrast, China and Iran blamed the pandemic on the US, while Saudi Arabia blamed Israel. However, the theory that has proved most resistant to debunking is that the virus was engineered by Shi or a member of her team at the Wuhan lab, and that her experiments were enabled, in part, by a $3.7m grant to EcoHealth Alliance from the US National Institutes of Health.

Daszak, whose life has been turned upside down by the controversy, will never forget the moment in April 2020 when he learned that Donald Trump had endorsed the theory and was threatening to cancel EcoHealth’s grant. “I was in a state of shock,” he tells Frei in a sequence filmed at his house in upstate New York. “I couldn’t believe it. Why would the president of the United States single out our grant?”

A few days later, Trump followed through on his threat, effectively ending Daszak’s multi-year collaboration with Shi. In an instant, Daszak went from being a respected expert on emerging infectious diseases to a media hate figure. Shi, meanwhile, was labelled “bat lady”. As Republican politicians and rightwing conspiracy theorists called for Daszak to be prosecuted, he was dragged before Congress to testify about his role in supposedly facilitating “gain of function” experiments at Shi’s lab.

It was nonsense. As 41 leading virologists pointed out in an article in the Journal of Virology last August, “there is currently no verified scientific evidence to support the lab-leak hypothesis”. By contrast, an estimated 66,000 people in south-east Asia are infected with Sars coronaviruses each year because of human-bat contact. And although almost all result in asymptomatic infections with little or no further transmission, we know that in the past 25 years at least three different coronaviruses have spilled over from animal reservoirs and ignited epidemics or pandemics.

Nonetheless, according to polls, two-thirds of Americans believe the theory, and after Trump’s return to the White House in January the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cut all funding to EcoHealth Alliance and formally debarred Daszak from applying for research grants for five years. (Ecohealth Alliance has since been wound up and Daszak has set up a new organisation called Nature Health Global.) The decision did not surprise Frei – in one sequence he shows how Robert F Kennedy Jr, Trump’s health secretary, was an early adopter of the lab-leak theory and even published a book on the subject: The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.

“The lab-leak idea has many psychological, cultural and social advantages that make it a more powerful narrative than a zoonotic origin,” explains Frei in the film. “These narratives play into our cultural practice of blaming diseases on people outside our tribe, instead of our own failings and responsibilities.”

We tend to think of bats as among the most reviled animals on the planet – associated as they are with vampires and other creatures from the underworld. But as Frei shows, these are European cultural tropes. In China and other parts of south-east Asia, bats are considered lucky omens; it is also common for farmers to fertilise their fields with bat guano. Unlike scientists who venture into bat caves in search of viruses, farmers in Thailand and elsewhere in the region do not wear masks or biohazard suits during these guano-collecting missions. This makes them acutely vulnerable to infection – indeed, serology tests show that people living near bat caves carry antibodies to bat viruses, suggesting they are frequently exposed to them.

“Humans and bats have been coexisting for centuries,” says Frei. “But the more humans penetrate previously untouched ecosystems, the more spillover events are bound to happen.”

Blame opens with a shot of farmers planting seeds in fields in northern Thailand, before cutting to a shot of a drone entering a nearby cave. Everything is dark and all you can hear is the buzz of the drone’s blades and squeaks of the bats. Then the drone swivels round and we see the bats emerging from the cave and filling the night sky.

Bats often gather in great numbers. One cave, we learn, can contain as many as 2 million. Their swarms resemble the murmurations of starlings and are a big tourist draw. To capture these spectacular aerial displays, Frei recruited a local drone pilot and drone fitted with a “first-person eyeview” camera (similar drones, Frei tells me, are employed in Ukraine to target Russian troop positions).

Frei describes the bat caves as “silent labs” where bats that harbour coronaviruses exchange genetic material, allowing the virus to recombine in ways that cannot be replicated in a laboratory. In Frei’s film, they also serve as a retreat from the “noise” of conspiracy theories and what he calls “screaming narratives”.

In some of Blame’s most compelling sequences, we see Daszak exploring the caves with an Austrian-Swiss science blogger, Philipp Markolin, and an award-winning independent Chinese journalist, Jane Qiu. Markolin, we learn, has spent lockdown investigating Covid conspiracy theories and the genesis of the lab-leak theory, and is working on a book, Lab Leak Fever, aimed at debunking the narratives. Shi is unable to join the expedition, so Frei has brought Qiu to provide balance and a Chinese perspective.

Despite the absence of direct evidence for the lab-leak theory, Qiu is wary of being seen as a naive promoter of the natural origin hypothesis and accuses Daszak of having made “mistakes”. But Daszak is adamant. “Reckless are the ones who fuel people’s fears and make politics with doomsday fantasies,” he tells her.

In another sequence, Frei transports us to Daszak’s home in Rockland County, New York. There, we see him gardening with his wife. We also see him at his laptop responding to questions from journalists and members of Congress. The experience exacted a heavy toll, and when I catch up with Daszak shortly after Blame’s premiere in Switzerland in early April, he admits that while watching the film it was “hard to hold back the tears”.

“Every time I see it, I become retraumatised. You are watching yourself and your career being trashed.”

One of the most moving moments in Blame comes when Daszak reads a letter from his daughter shortly before testifying to Congress. “I am incredibly proud to be your daughter, now more than ever,” she tells him. “I understand this whole thing is of supreme consequence to you [and] the whole scientific world. As someone caught in the crossfire, you simply have to trudge on.”

Watching this, some viewers may feel Frei reveals his sympathies. Indeed, at one point, Frei states categorically that a bat virus stored in Wuhan’s lab that is closely related to the pandemic virus “could not become Sars-CoV-2 by any imaginable laboratory procedure”. However, some scientists beg to differ, pointing to evidence that Shi grew coronaviruses taken from nature and passed them through animal cells at WIV in an attempt to get the viruses to adapt to new hosts.

However, as Frei shows, the original theory promoted by Chinese dissenters was that the coronavirus emerged from a military medical university in Chongqing, as part of an alleged biowarfare programme. He also claims that, before Yan’s appearance on Fox news with Carlson, she was given media training by Trump’s former adviser-turned-podcaster Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Guo, a self-exiled Chinese business tycoon.

Yan, who also goes by the name “Scarlet”, was the subject of a New York Times profile. In media appearances, she presents herself as an expert on coronaviruses. But in Lab Leak Fever, Markolin claims that, before leaving her position at the University of Hong Kong in 2020, Yan had never worked with coronaviruses and was “a rather unremarkable postdoc”. Markolin also traces the role of an animal rights campaigner and seasoned Republican activist in fuelling the lab-leak theory.

Markolin’s book has been published in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, and was scheduled to be published in the US earlier this year. Unfortunately, his publisher, a small university press, has since withdrawn the book citing fears of being sued.

“While I am very sympathetic to the publisher’s rationale, it is deeply unsettling personally and a bad sign for journalists and writers anywhere,” says Markolin, whose Substack, Protagonist Science, aims to champion the scientific method. “If publishers and universities are self-censoring to avoid being targeted by powerful vested interests, it says something about the current US political climate.

Whether Blame will be screened in the US and UK is also uncertain. So far, the only distribution deal Frei has signed is in Germany. That is a pity, for, as Frei and Markolin show, the attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the dissemination of Covid conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. That makes it even less likely that members of the public will comply with lockdowns or other restrictions when the next pandemic virus inevitably emerges from the natural world.

“It took more than 10 years to find the origins of the first Sars,” Frei points out. “Political blame games are definitively not helpful. We have to learn to listen and to understand the complexity of nature’s silent lab.”

Photographs: Adam Dean for Christian Frei Film Productions, Christian Frei Film Productions, Getty Images