Virologist Simon Wain-Hobson Calls Out Corrupt Journals: Nature, Science, and Lancet
American media continue to ignore and attack any reporting that doesn't reenforce their preferred narrative that the pandemic started naturally.
9 minute read
Hey guys,
The German newspaper, Berliner Zeitung, has been publishing some pretty amazing dives that examine corruption in virology and the science journals that support them, however, these reports by journalist Franz Becchi are not reaching English readers. I just realized this is the third instance I’ve translated one of his articles.
Back in May, Becchi reported that Science Magazine refused to even consider a study by several scientists that concluded the COVID virus was not natural and shows molecular traces of targeted manipulation, such as that used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The study’s lead author, University Hospital of Wurzburg researcher Valentin Bruttel, told Berliner Zeitung that much of what his study concluded was later confirmed by documents that became public in the United States.
And earlier this month, I translated another Berliner Zeitung story that examined dangerous virus research performed by world-renowned virologist Christian Drosten, with Berlin’s university hospital Charité. The walls appear to be closing in on Drosten who now hides behind lawyers when reporters send him question.
Becchi recently published another blockbuster: an interview with virologist Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who told the German newspaper that many of the major science journals are corrupt and will not publish anything that points to a possible lab accident in Wuhan, China, as the pandemic’s origin. Some of the studies these journals published should be retracted, he added.
“It's not about punishment,” Wain-Hobson told Berliner Zeitung. “It's about responsibility. Anyone who has misled the world during a pandemic shouldn't be allowed to simply disappear quietly. You have to retract. And admit mistakes.”
American media are ignoring German reporting on the pandemic, but The DisInformation Chronicle has translated the interview from German into English. You can read Wain-Hobson’s back and forth with journalist Franz Becchi, below.
Virologist Simon Wain-Hobson: "Scientists can also lie."
Dangerous research, concealed risks: A virologist speaks out. HIV pioneer Simon Wain-Hobson on coronavirus, censorship, and red lines in science.
British virologist Simon Wain-Hobson gained international recognition in the 1980s for his significant contribution to the sequencing of the HIV genome. Today, he is considered one of the most prominent critical voices in the debate surrounding gain-of-function (GoF) research—a method in which viruses are deliberately made more dangerous or transmissible.
With decades of experience, Wain-Hobson is familiar with both the scientific breakthroughs and ethical pitfalls of modern virology. In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, he discusses the origins of coronavirus, the consequences of scientific censorship, and the lessons science must learn from its past mistakes.
Mr. Wain-Hobson, during the coronavirus pandemic, journalists have often been accused of behaving too much like scientists. How do you assess this accusation?
Science journalism is truly difficult—much more difficult than most people think. Even trained scientists struggle to fully understand work outside their field. I've been in science for decades, and if you asked me to comment on a malaria project, I would miss important details. A journalist has no chance—unless they can trust their sources.
The problem is: When scientists manipulate or lie—yes, it does happen—it's a breach of trust that permeates the entire information chain. Donald G. McNeil Jr., a respected journalist and formerly with the New York Times, wrote about being lied to by Kristian Andersen—one of the authors of the Nature Medicine paper "The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2," which early on dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as unlikely and claimed a natural origin.
McNeil felt it in the interview—he said, "This man is manipulating me." That shook him. And it should shook anyone who cares about public trust in science.
I also have friends in science journalism, like Volker Stollorz from the Science Media Center Germany. Even Volker, who has a doctorate in molecular biology, told me how difficult it is to judge what scientists say when they isolate themselves or speak exclusively in technical jargon. That's the trap: When a scientist manipulates the journalist, the readers are indirectly manipulated too. And in a crisis like the coronavirus, that becomes dangerous.
You spoke publicly about scientific misconduct during the discovery of HIV in the 1980s. What happened then?
Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered the AIDS virus independently of Luc Montagnier. That simply wasn't true. My team at the Pasteur Institute was able to show that the virus Gallo was working with was our isolate. In the US, they had difficulty isolating the virus, and under political and scientific pressure, they took our virus and passed it off as theirs.
Why?
Because AIDS was seen as an American problem. Politically, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) couldn't tolerate the fact that the French had solved the problem. This led to lawsuits and ultimately a settlement in which the US and the Pasteur Institute shared the royalties for the HIV test. But ethically? The royalties belonged to us.
Let's talk about gain-of-function research. There's still no clear definition. Why?
The ambiguity is part of the problem—and the strategy. Scientists have deliberately diluted the terms. But the basic concept is simple. In classical genetics, gain-of-function means giving an organism a new trait—for example, making bacteria produce insulin. That's useful. But in virology, we're talking about something entirely different. Dangerous gain-of-function research means intentionally making a virus more transmissible or deadly—or transforming an animal virus into a human pathogen. That crosses a red line.
And I ask a simple question: Why make the world more dangerous—for your children, your partner, your parents? The common argument is that such research helps predict pandemics. But that's simply nonsense. It's not just wrong—it's dangerously wrong. Scientists like Anthony Fauci and Yoshihiro Kawaoka claimed it could be useful, but there's no hard evidence to support it. I said that back in 2012. More than a decade later, even Kawaoka admitted that the H5N1 avian flu didn't pose nearly the threat he had originally portrayed it to be.
I know viral evolution—HIV taught us all about it. And from that perspective, the promises of dangerous gain-of-function research didn't hold up. There is no scientific benefit that justifies the risk of creating novel human pathogens. None.
Trump signed an executive order restricting high-risk gain-of-function research and placed critics of previous COVID policies, like Jay Bhattacharya, in key positions. What's your take on this?
Jay Bhattacharya has great potential, but he needs time to prove himself. He's taking on a difficult position at the National Institutes of Health, with budget cuts already announced. People will see that he's more complex and truly science-oriented—but that will take time. He, along with Senator Rand Paul, was a driving force behind the executive order restricting dangerous gain-of-function experiments. Even though it was signed under Trump, the scientific impetus came from people like Bhattacharya, not Trump himself.
For years, the NIH, under the leadership of Anthony Fauci, supported this risky research despite its questionable benefits—creating a culture in which few dared to challenge the status quo. Bhattacharya's commitment helped break this paradigm.
Why hasn't the debate in Europe developed the way it has in the US?
Because it's convenient for Europeans to portray this as an American problem. In France, there was virtually no public debate for ten years. In Germany, the most serious debate took place in 2014 at a meeting in Hanover organized by the Volkswagen Foundation. I was a scientific advisor. The German Ethics Council wrote a strong report questioning dangerous gain-of-function research. But the Leopoldina brushed it aside. They preferred to side with the NIH.
Across Europe—Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia—silence reigned. And that's embarrassing, especially given Europe's much-cited "precautionary principle." The United Kingdom discussed it a little more, but even there, an incident of foot-and-mouth disease from a BSL-4 laboratory was covered up. The truth only came to light much later.
What is Germany's problem with gain-of-function?
I have read the German Society for Virology's (GSV) position paper from March 2025 on safety-relevant virological research – and find it inadequate in several key points. The document is poorly structured and does not provide a clear, robust framework for risk assessment of dangerous gain-of-function research, especially what I call Gain-of-Function 2.0 – work in which viruses are made more dangerous or transmissible, or animal viruses are transformed into human pathogens.
Everything else is irrelevant in comparison. Why? Because such viruses could trigger pandemics.
The GSV has failed to precisely define "dangerous" Gain-of-Function research – which is surprising. Without a definition, no risk assessment is possible. Furthermore, they make questionable statements: Such research has contributed neither to the development of vaccines nor medications. Risk assessments are carried out by the researchers themselves.
The only comprehensive risk-benefit analysis is over 1,000 pages long and was published years ago. There's a recent story from a BSL-4 high-security laboratory in the US. It was shut down after an incident between two lovers in which one damaged the other's pressurized protective suit.
People believe that everything is manageable with safety protocols. But people make mistakes. At no point does anyone question whether dangerous GoF research, which benefits the German healthcare system, should even be conducted. The medical principle of "first do no harm" is violated.
My wife is a pediatrician, my son a cardiologist. Both have taken the Hippocratic Oath. I have a doctorate, and if I wanted to, I could engineer a dangerous virus that would cause far more harm than they ever could. Don't worry—I won't! But no one is interested in requiring scientists to take a similar oath.
Another weak point: No one talks about the fact that dangerous GoF research is published online. This information is available to any rogue state with a virology laboratory—free of charge, funded by US and European taxpayers. Responsibility doesn't end with publication. But the GSV apparently sees things differently. This paper is similar to that of the American Society for Microbiology, which has done everything possible to prevent restrictions on such research. If I were to grade the paper, it would be a maximum of a 4. And that's still generous.
Will we ever know where SARS-CoV-2 came from?
Only if the intelligence services reveal what they know. Western intelligence agencies, especially the US and German ones, must reveal their data. It's no longer about national security, but about 20 million deaths, long COVID, and ruined lives. If they have reliable information, they owe the public answers.
Unfortunately, China will never cooperate. What's striking is that we have more bat coronaviruses that resemble SARS-CoV-1 than those that resemble SARS-CoV-2—even though SARS-1 only killed around 800 people. Why aren't we finding close relatives of SARS-CoV-2? Because nobody wants to do this work—especially not in southern China.
They're afraid of what they might find. That says a lot.
Should "The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2" be retracted?
Yes. Absolutely. The same goes for the Lancet article (Calisher et al., 2020). These papers weren't genuine scientific contributions. They served a narrative, not the data. But retractions are rare because they seem like an admission of guilt. Authors usually retract their articles voluntarily—almost no one is forced to do so. And these papers were published in Nature Medicine and The Lancet—you don't want that to be lost from your resume.
It's not about punishment. It's about responsibility. Anyone who has misled the world during a pandemic shouldn't be allowed to simply disappear quietly. You have to retract. And admit mistakes.
What role did the major journals—Nature, Science, The Lancet—play?
They are part of the scientific establishment. They want to stay close to NIH directors and major funders. They haven't published lab-theory articles, supposedly because of a lack of hard data—but they were quick to publish weak papers supporting the natural hypothesis.
Example: Cell recently published an article on natural origins—it was scientifically poor. But they published it to politically protect science. That's understandable—authoritarian regimes attack scientists. But in this case, it was a mistake. Science is protected through transparency, not propaganda.
What should science and journalism learn from this?
The lesson is simple: Openness is our only protection. Science is complicated. But hiding behind jargon, legal arguments, or prestige is not the answer. If scientists had addressed the public honestly and openly, there would be less mistrust today.
We are not gods. We are not above criticism. And when we talk to journalists, it should be on equal terms. Two people at the table trying to understand the world a little better.
Thank you for the conversation.