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A Top Virus Scientist Stared Down Covid Lab-Leak Proponents. Now His Life’s Work Is at Stake
The battle over Covid’s origins has come for Bob Garry, who’s faced some of the world’s deadliest viral threats.
Garry.
Photographer: Craig Mulcahy for Bloomberg Businessweek
By Jason Gale and Max Chafkin
In late January 2020, Bob Garry flew to Washington, DC, for a regular meeting at the National Institutes of Health. A professor at the Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans, Garry is among the most celebrated American authorities on dangerous viruses. He helped identify the earliest known case of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in the US and played a crucial role in containing the Ebola outbreak that started in West Africa in 2013. At the time of the NIH meeting, he was developing a treatment for Lassa fever, an Ebola-like hemorrhagic disease for which there are no approved drugs.
Like everyone else in his field, Garry had been following reports about a new coronavirus in central China. Earlier that month, Jan. 11, the virus’s genetic sequence had been published in an online forum post, but it wasn’t until the NIH meetings that he’d really started paying attention. What he saw in the genetic code was concerning. The virus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, had a furin cleavage site, a distinctive spot on its spike protein that can be cut by an enzyme called furin, helping the virus enter human cells. Furin cleavage sites occur in many viruses, including Ebola, HIV and the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza that devastated poultry flocks in the mid-2000s, prompting the culling of more than 140 million birds across Southeast Asia. Shortly after landing in New Orleans, he answered a call from Kristian Andersen, a frequent collaborator who’s an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research Institute in Southern California. “This thing is just like high-path flu,” Garry recalls saying. “This could be bad.”
He was right about that: The World Health Organization estimates that Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, has been responsible for more than 22 million excess deaths. But what Garry didn’t anticipate was the way the pandemic — and the political reaction to it — would undermine trust in his work and, to some extent, the very idea of scientific research.
That March, Andersen, Garry and three others published one of the first scientific analyses of how the new virus emerged, “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” in the journal Nature Medicine. They argued that it had most likely not been deliberately created in a laboratory, as some were already speculating, and that it probably traced to bats, which may have first infected another small mammal that passed it to humans.
Their conclusions represented the nascent consensus among virologists, and they’re still broadly accepted. But the contention that the virus evolved naturally was being contradicted by President Donald Trump and a motley crew of contrarian academics, freethinking podcasters and conservative media outlets, who blamed the outbreak on virology researchers employed by the Chinese government. The lab-leak theory rested on what could feel, at first glance, like an improbable coincidence: The outbreak started not far from a biocontainment lab, run by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers worked with coronaviruses. Garry has pointed out that this proximity is less suspicious than it might seem, because most big Chinese cities have had coronavirus labs since the 2003 SARS outbreak.
That there was no data to back up the lab-leak theory didn’t matter much. Garry and Andersen went on to be investigated by congressional subcommittees, with their emails and chat records subpoenaed and spun up into damning-sounding articles by outlets such as the Free Press. Those messages revealed that, while writing the paper in February 2020, they’d expressed openness to the possibility of a leak. To Garry the shift proved nothing more than their intellectual honesty: He’d genuinely considered the lab-leak theory, scrutinized the genetic sequence and found no evidence that the virus had been engineered. As more data emerged over the following months and years, he became only more confident it had spilled over naturally.
But while a scientist might look at an evolution in opinion as the natural outcome of the scientific method, in which researchers form a hypothesis and then challenge it by running experiments or analyzing data, in some corners it became proof of a cover-up. The most careful critics accused Garry and his colleagues of having been blind to their own biases, causing them to hastily foreclose the possibility of a lab leak at a time when the government was eager to calm public anxiety. Less rigorous critics went much, much further, suggesting he and his colleagues reversed their findings because of pressure, or even bribes, from senior government officials, especially Anthony Fauci, who was then the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); some even suggested Fauci himself had a hand in creating the virus. Others seized on Garry’s presence in West Africa during the mid-2010s Ebola outbreak to imply that the epidemic there might have been caused by a lab leak too.
By the time Garry was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate, in 2024, the Covid lab-leak theory had gone mainstream. He was vilified, both at the hearing and afterward in the press. In June of that year, Senator Joshua Hawley, the Missouri Republican, harangued him for having “disgracefully participated in shameful propaganda.” Garry absorbed the insults, defended his conclusions and insisted he remained open to any new evidence that emerged.
None has — and numerous studies have added evidence to back up Garry’s early assessment that the virus wasn’t deliberately created in a lab. This hasn’t mattered either. Trump’s second election, in November 2024, transformed the lab-leak theory into something like official government policy. A few months after the inauguration, the Trump administration placed a video that included Hawley’s verbal beatdown of Garry on an official White House website. Around the same time, the administration cut grants to an NIH network designed to identify emerging pathogens before they cause outbreaks, on grounds that it was “unsafe for Americans.” Garry was a key member of the network, and it represented his largest source of funding.
Even so, today his laboratory in downtown New Orleans remains full of equipment and, in his mind, promise. Garry is a big man with a bushy white mustache that, with his faint Southern accent, can make him seem more like a New Orleans Saints tailgate partier than an eminent researcher. But at 75, he’s still very much the bench scientist he was in his 20s, pipetting samples and setting up his own experiments when needed. (“They’re going to have to pry the pipette out of my dead hands,” he cracks.) Appliances that conduct polymerase chain reaction tests to detect the presence of viruses sit alongside plate-washing machines and ventilated hoods for handling hazardous materials. Freezers hum quietly, holding samples collected over decades.
But there are no people. Garry isn’t accepting new doctoral students, because he can’t guarantee funding their work, and he’s spent the past two years nudging his researchers into jobs elsewhere. “It is a little sad,” he says as he walks through the empty lab. “We’ve just come through this pandemic where 20 million people died. And what’s our response? We’re going to shut down work on viruses. That doesn’t really compute.”
Garry’s five-decade career is a testament to the value of virology in a world defined by global trade and threatened by global pandemics. Unfortunately for him, it’s also become a testament to the ways politics — in particular, those of the second Trump administration — have set back the field. In addition to the White House’s attempt to unilaterally reduce NIH grants in the name of cutting “overhead” — a move that a federal appeals court ultimately blocked — it has frozen billions of dollars in research funding. Although there’s still some funding for virology, says Jeanne Marrazzo, NIAID’s director from 2023 to ’25, it’s been “highly selective,” going only to “viruses that have escaped scrutiny.” Coronavirus research is generally off-limits, as is anything to do with mRNA or any project that might mention the word “diversity.”
The funding cuts, not to mention the surreal experience of watching some of the world’s most powerful people trash your life’s work, have pushed some of Garry’s peers to leave the US. He and others who’ve stayed have tried to adapt, applying for grants from outside sources or attempting in US government applications to emphasize Trump-friendly angles (national security, mostly, with a swirl of Make America Healthy Again) on existing lines of research. “I just have to make the best case I can that our work needs to continue,” Garry says. “We’re on the verge of so many important breakthroughs. Let’s just follow through.”
When he’s not in the lab, Garry works in a cramped office across the hall. The space is furnished with an ancient-looking couch, an old office chair and a Mr. Coffee that looks to have last been cleaned sometime around 1988. The office is also filled with memorabilia attesting to West African travels and Saints fandom. Garry sometimes jokes that his career in virology has been a series of “f---ing disasters,” meaning the outbreaks he’s thrown himself into. “He’s a real virologist — an old-school virologist,” Andersen says. “If the virus is a significant threat to humans, chances are Bob has worked on it.”
Garry dates his interest in the field to the fall of 1974, when, during his first week of graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, he picked up John G. Fuller’s Fever! The Hunt for a New Killer Virus. Billed as a real-life version of Michael Crichton’s thriller The Andromeda Strain, the book was an account of the discovery of Lassa fever, which had stricken an American missionary nurse in 1969, the same year Crichton’s novel was published. Garry was captivated.
Viruses can’t be seen with ordinary microscopes and can grow only inside living cells, and at the time they weren’t an obvious choice for serious academic study. “Don’t fool around with those viruses,” Garry recalls being told. “You couldn’t study them very easily.” Most microbiologists focused on bacteria or genetics.
The challenge made the field only more appealing. Garry ended up working with a young untenured professor, learning how to grow viruses in cell culture, which involved mashing chicken embryos, isolating living cells from the tissue and trying to keep them alive long enough for a virus to infect them. It was tedious, technical work that required strict safety protocols and, even then, carried a hint of danger. One virologist got sick in 1969 after becoming infected with Lassa at a Yale University lab. A technician later died of the disease, causing scientists at the lab to discontinue their research.
Garry describes sitting in the mid-’80s in front of a biosafety cabinet, a glass-fronted enclosure with filtered airflow designed to keep whatever was inside from getting out. Wearing two pairs of gloves, he was holding a vial containing blood from a patient who had the mysterious, newly discovered disease that would soon become known as AIDS. Researchers had only recently identified HIV, the virus thought to cause it, and no one yet understood exactly what they were handling. “Do I really want to open that thing up?” Garry remembers asking himself. “Finally you say, ‘OK, yeah, I can do this.’”
The discovery of HIV in 1983 and the growing evidence of its link to AIDS, a fast-spreading disease that mostly seemed to afflict gay men, suddenly made virology the subject of wider interest and scientific controversy, as the epidemic also fueled fear, stigma and hostility toward anyone perceived to be at risk. Some denied that HIV caused AIDS, arguing instead that the disease resulted from drug use and other environmental factors. Garry helped rebut those claims in 1987, when he co-authored a paper showing that a Missouri teenager who’d died in 1969 with Kaposi’s sarcoma and severe immune deficiency — conditions associated with AIDS — had in fact been infected with HIV. The doctors who treated the boy had recognized his illness as extraordinary and preserved a blood sample until the science caught up. The paper also demonstrated that the virus had been circulating in the US for many years.
In the four decades following HIV’s discovery, basic research into its biology laid the foundation for one of medicine’s greatest successes. Scientists deciphered how the virus infects cells and replicates and evades the immune system — work that paved the way for successive generations of antiviral medicines that transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic disease. Each advance built on years of laboratory work whose practical value often wasn’t obvious when it began. That same approach has also produced long-acting medicines that can prevent HIV infection, as well as experimental vaccines capable of generating immune responses to the virus that researchers once thought unattainable.
Garry mostly back-burnered his interest in Lassa fever during the 1980s and ’90s, partly because he was focused on HIV and partly because there was almost no federal funding to study diseases seen as afflicting mainly poor people overseas. Lassa, which usually spreads via the droppings of a single sub-Saharan mouse species, kills some 5,000 people in West Africa each year but poses little risk to Americans. The attitude was essentially “it’s their problem,” Garry says. The calculus changed after 2001, when Sept. 11 and the ensuing anthrax mail attacks spurred the US to begin funding research into potential bioweapons. In 2005, Garry received his first NIH grant to study Lassa fever in Sierra Leone.
Reaching the world’s worst Lassa hot spot from New Orleans takes two days — a flight to the East Coast, then one to Brussels, then to Freetown, followed by a drive that took as long as 15 hours over rutted roads to Kenema, where a dedicated Lassa ward has operated since the 1970s. When Garry first arrived, Sierra Leone was emerging from a decade-long civil war. Infrastructure was limited. Lab samples often had to be shipped overseas, delaying diagnosis by days. Making matters worse, early signs of Lassa are difficult to distinguish from those of malaria and typhoid, which are far more common. “You basically have somebody that comes in with fever and other sort of flu-like symptoms,” Garry says. “That describes a lot of the patients.” By the time a lab result arrived or serious symptoms such as intestinal bleeding appeared, it could be too late. The fatality rate among hospitalized Lassa patients can reach about 70%.
Garry set up a lab in a low, white building on the grounds of Kenema Government Hospital, a sprawling complex of wards, clinics and administrative buildings, and began developing a rapid diagnostic test that could be used at a patient’s bedside. He took nitrocellulose strips like those found in over-the-counter pregnancy tests and treated them with Lassa antibodies modified to include small gold particles. If a sample containing the virus hit the antibodies, a line would show up and the doctor could immediately quarantine the patient, begin replacing fluids and treat any complications. The approach was still relatively uncommon in viral diagnostics. “They were just like the Covid tests, except we didn’t have Covid tests yet,” he says. “It showed you could make a rapid diagnostic for just about any type of virus.”
Garry’s lab soon expanded to include locally trained technicians, doctors and researchers. Patients could be treated, and the genetic makeup of viruses could be sequenced and studied on the spot. Solar panels were installed to keep freezers running. The lab became a hub for tracking the virus in real time. “He rebuilt this entire clinical effort to treat people after it was decimated in civil conflict,” says Erica Ollmann Saphire, president of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, who’s worked with Garry to map Lassa’s physical structure. “He was incredibly supportive of young scientists coming up and giving all of us opportunities.”
Researchers in Kenema have helped answer basic questions about Lassa that were once difficult to study: How common is it? How does the virus cause illness across a population? And how does it evolve? That scientific foundation has in turn allowed for the development of new vaccines and treatments, including a monoclonal antibody therapy Garry is working on. “People traditionally have just gone into these research places where there were outbreaks and collected samples and brought it back to fancy laboratories,” he says. The better alternative is a “roots not parachutes” approach, where “you’re right at the interface where things are spilling over, and you’re ready.”
Until the lab-leak debate made research on dangerous viruses politically contentious, the primary criticism of Garry’s work was that it cost too much. Maintaining labs in far-flung places entailed years of support whose benefits might never be obvious. Supporters argued that the investment was modest compared with the economic and human costs of a pandemic, and that the return compounded over time. Laboratories built to study one virus, and the scientists who run them, can often pivot quickly when another pathogen emerges.
That’s what happened in 2014, when workers at the Lassa lab in Kenema diagnosed a patient with Ebola. It was the first reported case in Sierra Leone, and it was an emergency: Ebola passes much more easily between humans than Lassa and kills at a far higher rate, and the strain had already been detected weeks earlier in neighboring Guinea and Liberia. There was no proven vaccine to prevent it or drug to treat it effectively.
The Kenema lab immediately shifted focus and within weeks developed the first rapid test for Ebola, using the approach Garry had pioneered with Lassa. He spent most of June there, working long days analyzing patient samples and training scientists, covered in personal protective equipment: gloves, a face shield and Tyvek coveralls that swiftly became almost unbearably hot and caused sweat to pool in his boots. The ordeal would crest at the end of the day, when he meticulously removed and disposed of the gear. “You’re taking off these things that probably have virus on them,” Garry recalls. “You have to be careful not to just get in a rush.” He estimates that he traveled to Sierra Leone at least a dozen times during the outbreak, staying two or three weeks at a time then quarantining back home for three weeks in a Holiday Inn under police guard. Garry’s three adult daughters had all moved out of the house by that point, but his wife, Jeanette, taught grade school, making the possibility of bringing Ebola back especially fraught. Still, he felt the work was worth the risks. “If you don’t do that, nobody else is going to do it,” he says. “And people are going to die from this thing.” It took a year and a half to contain the outbreak, during which 40 hospital and lab staff in Kenema died of Ebola, including the Lassa research center’s top doctor and other close friends of Garry’s.
Almost from the outset in 2014, conspiracy theorists in Sierra Leone had blamed the outbreak on foreign scientists and doctors. In the US, Alex Jones devoted large portions of his radio show that summer to the idea that the Obama administration was plotting to deliberately infect Americans. The delirium never entirely went away: A decade later, Senator Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, sent Garry a series of questions implying he’d somehow caused the Ebola outbreak. “I started HIV, too, in case you didn’t know,” Garry says, recalling the incident with a bitter smile. (Marshall didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
While he was in Sierra Leone, Garry says, he mostly ignored the media, because he was focused on his work and his team’s safety. But there were times when his anger would get the better of him. “My teammates are dying,” he recalls telling a reporter who’d asked about the idea that Western scientists were responsible for the outbreak. “And you’re spreading all this stuff.”
Garry’s approach in Sierra Leone — bringing advanced laboratory techniques to the places where emerging diseases were most likely to first appear — gained new momentum in 2020, as SARS-CoV-2 spread from China to the rest of the world. That August, NIAID announced a five-year, $82 million program to establish research centers studying emerging pathogens outside the US. Some $9 million would go to research led by Garry and Andersen in West Africa. Fauci described the initiative, known as the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, as an effort to “enable early warnings of emerging diseases wherever they occur.”
CREID reflected one of the central lessons of Covid: Outbreaks are easiest to stop before they spread globally. That didn’t keep lab-leak proponents from later claiming the $9 million grant was payola for Garry and Andersen’s origins paper. In response, Fauci, Garry and Andersen have pointed out that CREID was conceived before the pandemic and that the West Africa grant had already been recommended for funding by an independent review panel in January 2020, before they’d begun discussing Covid’s origins.
From 2021 to ’24, Garry published several more papers that helped establish the Wuhan’s Huanan market as the likeliest site at which SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals into humans. He and his co-authors even identified a possible locus — environmental samples taken in early 2020 showed particularly high levels of the coronavirus at a stall in the market’s southwest corner that had been selling live wild animals. The team also identified which animals sold at the market could plausibly have carried the virus from bats to people: raccoon dogs, masked palm civets, bamboo rats, Malayan porcupines and Amur hedgehogs.
Some scientists and lab-leak proponents have cast doubt on Garry’s findings because they relied on market samples taken by the Chinese government, saying these could have been compromised if officials were covering up a lab leak. Garry continued to push back, going so far as to appear on Megyn Kelly’s podcast in late 2022 to dispute the claim that he’d shifted his views on the possibility of a lab leak under pressure from Fauci. He also rebutted the leakers’ argument that the furin cleavage site is a telltale sign the virus is synthetic, calling it “perfectly natural.”
In July 2023, Garry appeared before a House subcommittee alongside Andersen; the following June he testified before the Senate. His approach, which he rehearsed in a mock hearing at the office of a Washington law firm hired by Tulane, emphasized his openness to following the truth, wherever it led. “I didn’t really feel like there was a whole lot of pressure, to be honest,” he says. “They’re playing kind of in my space.” After Hawley attacked him during the Senate hearing as a propagandist who’d “censored ordinary Americans,” Garry remained affable. “That was an interesting exchange, but you know, all we did was write a paper,” he said at the hearing, breaking into a half smile. “It wasn’t an attempt to distort things and to mislead the American public. It was just simply a paper, like the many other scientific papers that I’ve written in my career.”
Still, Garry understood that his work, and even his well-being, were under threat. He grew accustomed to strangers calling his home to yell at or threaten him. On one occasion someone threw a brick at his house, wrapped in a note accusing him of being a communist sympathizer. During especially intense periods, Tulane increased security around his office building.
After Trump’s election in November 2024, Garry began warning his Ph.D. students that funding cuts were likely. He urged them to finish their projects quickly, helped steer them toward postdoctoral positions or jobs elsewhere, and stopped encouraging new students to join his lab.
The cuts came the following June. Garry, Andersen and others received a letter from the NIH announcing that their CREID funding was canceled. “The research supported by CREID has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding,” the letter read. There was no further explanation.
The human and economic costs from Trump’s cuts to virology research will be harder to quantify than others it’s made to global health efforts. A paper the Lancet published last July, for example, estimated that cuts stemming from the effective dissolution of the US Agency for International Development will lead to 14 million additional deaths by 2030, largely because of reduced funding for combating well-understood illnesses such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. But the slashing of domestic virology research will undoubtedly take a toll, too, even if the costs take decades to become apparent. As universities admit fewer doctoral students, a generation of potential virologists may never enter the field. Opportunities for breakthroughs will also be missed; basic virus research isn’t something that can simply be switched off and restarted when the next outbreak begins.
And there will almost certainly be a next one. Right now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a rare strain of Ebola is spreading rapidly. It’s already killed about 3,000 people, and there are no approved vaccines or targeted treatments, offering proof, if it were required, that the world needs virology more than ever. American virologists are contributing to the Ebola response, but many who once would have worked alongside local scientists in the outbreak zone are instead supporting the response from afar.
Meanwhile, Garry and his peers are distracted by political blowback. In late July, Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who’s leading the Senate investigation into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic, released a tranche of Slack chats involving Garry and an electronic diary that Fauci kept during the pandemic. For lab-leak proponents, the release offered the thrill — so familiar in the Epstein files era — of scouring private correspondence for hidden motivations, double meanings and secret connections. But the upshot was more or less the same as before. The documents show Fauci and others engaging seriously with the notion of a lab leak but ultimately dismissing it as unlikely.
The records’ release coincided with a new Senate hearing for Fauci, during which he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. In an opening statement, he said he didn’t see the point of answering questions because Paul has vowed to imprison him. Around the same time, Politico reported that Steven Quay, a prominent lab-leak proponent who’d testified at the same 2024 Senate hearing as Garry, was “in line” to get Fauci’s old job at NIAID. “My life might get a little more interesting over the next couple of years,” Garry says ruefully.
Like many professionals who’ve been subjected to the Trump administration’s brand of public scrutiny, Garry has adopted a position of strategic ambiguity when asked about politics. He’ll simultaneously acknowledge the dire state of American science while also insisting that maybe, hopefully, everything will work out fine. “You try not to antagonize one side,” he says. “Administrations come and go.”
He notes that, although many NIH grants have been canceled under Trump, the agency’s overall budget, which Congress sets, has remained more or less unchanged. “Maybe you don’t get to work on exactly what you intended to,” he says. “But if there’s money, then you’ve got a chance.”
Garry has thought about retiring and spending more time with his grandchildren, but he hopes to convince the NIH, which backed his monoclonal antibody therapy for Lassa, to fund the next stage of its development. The treatment has already proved effective in monkeys infected with the disease; the next step will be an early-stage trial to show that it’s safe in humans. This will cost about $25 million — which Garry expects would be cobbled together from the NIH and others — and would be followed by a midstage trial to demonstrate efficacy. Then, hopefully, a pharmaceutical company will bring it to market.
The Lassa drug could save thousands of lives, though these days Garry is more likely to frame his research in terms that align with Trump administration goals, such as protecting US economic interests and maintaining a scientific edge over geopolitical rivals. “Sierra Leone is a very strategic country,” he says, rattling off mineral reserves that include diamonds, rare earths and bauxite (the primary source of gallium, a crucial material for the semiconductor industry and a market China has more or less cornered). Garry says he has heard from mining executives who have recently arrived in Sierra Leone and are trying to set up operations there. “The first thing that happens is one of their people comes down with Lassa fever and dies,” he says. “And they leave.”
As Garry writes and rewrites funding proposals, he’s found himself thinking about Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters engulfed much of the city. Power failed. Parts of Tulane’s downtown medical campus were submerged. For a time the university’s future was uncertain.
As soon as the floodwaters started to recede, Garry went back to his lab to save what he could of his own and others’ research. The power was out, which meant refrigerated samples were already lost, including the blood from the Missouri teenager who’d died of AIDS in the late ’60s. But some samples that had been stored in liquid nitrogen tanks could, in theory, be saved. After a Tulane staffer stood in floodwater and plugged in a power cable to get the elevators working, Garry and a few colleagues moved 200 of the tanks to higher floors, preserving millions of dollars’ worth of research — and, in some cases, decades of work. They also rescued hundreds of genetically engineered mice. Garry loaded the cages onto trucks and drove them out of downtown New Orleans under police escort, across Lake Pontchartrain to Tulane’s primate research center 40 miles north, where there was still power.
Today the research labs have backup power so future storms won’t destroy years of scientific work. Garry sees that time as an allegory for resilience. “You take the hit, and you have to figure out, OK, what did we do wrong?” he says.
“Are we doing the same thing now with pandemic viruses?” he continues. “Apparently not so much.” There’s a tinge of bitterness in his voice, but also of hope — something a virus hunter needs at the best of times, and perhaps never more than right now.
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