Dr. Akif Khan
(This is a point to point rebuttal of Dr. Faraz Siddiqui’s video (in Urdu language) titled FAUCI: Science, Power and Dollars on his Youtube channel called Billionneurons Faraz Siddiqui)
I am not an authority on the technical questions of virology, and specialists in that field can answer them better than I can. There are two things I can speak to. One is the standard of evidence behind a claim. The other is what actually happens inside a laboratory, because I have spent twenty years in them.
Dr. Faraz Siddiqui’s video is heavily overstated. He introduces himself as a medical doctor, but the reasoning he offers is the kind we often see from medical practitioners: procedural knowledge is there, training in how to weigh evidence is not.
One: That paper is not a research article
Roughly half the video circles around a single paper, whose sentences he underlines on screen, and which he calls a “research article” lacking “practical evidence.”
It is not a research article. It is a Correspondence, a detailed letter to the editor. It opens with the words “To the Editor,” and the category is printed at the top of the page. No new experiment was performed in it, so objecting that it contains no experimental evidence is like objecting that an editorial has no methods section. Spending half a video on one document and never identifying what kind of document it is: that is not a small slip.
His second objection is that it contains technical terminology he and the ordinary viewer cannot follow. That paper was never written for the ordinary reader. It was written for people in the field. A text being difficult for you is not a defect in the text.
And what does it actually say? It discusses, with references, the possible evolutionary routes of SARS-CoV-2: evolution in an animal host followed by transfer to humans, evolution within humans after transfer, and third, evolution during passage in cell culture in a laboratory, along with accidental release. That third possibility is discussed openly in the paper. It was not hidden. At the end, the authors write that in their opinion no laboratory-based scenario is plausible, while also conceding that the other theories can neither be proven nor disproven at present. That is a statement of belief, based on early data, in the third month of a pandemic, in the form of a letter. Treating it as decisive proof was wrong then and is wrong now, and the fault lies with those who turned it into a certificate for closing the debate, not with the authors’ words, because they never claimed certainty in the first place.
Two: The furin cleavage site
The video presents it as settled that the furin cleavage site was introduced into the virus in a laboratory.
Nothing of the kind has ever been established. There is no experimental record, no sequence, no document. I checked this separately and any reader can check it. What is true is that a 2018 research proposal included a plan to insert such a site into bat coronaviruses, but that proposal was rejected and never funded. The existence of a proposal is not evidence that the work was done. Those who present it as evidence are making exactly the leap we object to when it comes from the other direction.
Three: Fauci and money
There is no evidence that Fauci wrote cheques out of his own pocket or took money from anyone. That is pure conspiracy narrative.
Awarding grants to research institutions, which are then distributed further as subawards, is the normal system everywhere in the world. I work within that system myself. There is nothing conspiratorial about it in itself. To conclude from the existence of a grant that the funder caused a pandemic is a leap with no foundation whatsoever.
An anti-China bias is also plainly visible in these claims, and that bias substitutes for argument.
Four: When was the first case
The video says the first COVID case occurred in 2020. This is wrong.
According to the published clinical report, the earliest identified patient developed symptoms on 1 December 2019, and local health authorities formally announced cases of pneumonia of unknown cause on 31 December 2019. The World Health Organization declared a public health emergency on 30 January 2020 and a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The very paper he displayed for half the video states that genetic analysis places the most recent common ancestor of the virus between late November and early December 2019.
In October and November 2019 we were seeing somewhat more flu cases than usual and warning each other to take care while travelling. It is possible the virus was already circulating. It is equally possible it was ordinary seasonal flu. I record this as a personal observation, not as evidence.
Five: “A vaccine is not given after infection”
This is the clearest medical error in the video, and the interesting part is that he refutes himself a few sentences later by citing tetanus.
First, understand how a vaccine works. Protection does not arrive the moment the needle goes in. The body takes days to weeks to build antibodies. Now, in certain diseases there is a considerable gap between the pathogen entering the body and the disease properly taking hold. If a vaccine is given during that window, the immune system is ready before the disease establishes itself, and stops it. This is post-infection vaccination, or post-exposure prophylaxis, and it is a basic and very old principle of medical science.
Rabies is the best-known example, where doses are given after a dog bite and, if timely, provide effectively complete protection, because the incubation period for rabies can run from weeks to months. The same approach is used for tetanus, diphtheria, hepatitis A and B, measles and chickenpox, and the entire eradication strategy for smallpox rested on it. Systematic scientific reviews of all this exist. For a medical doctor to say that vaccines are not given after infection is astonishing.
Fairness requires stating the limit as well. The principle does not apply to every disease, because not every disease allows the time. The incubation period of SARS-CoV-2 is only a few days, too short for vaccine-induced immunity to develop before illness begins. This is precisely why COVID vaccines were never approved for that purpose. If he meant only the COVID vaccine, he is right to that extent. But he made a general claim, and as a general claim it is false.
Six: The booster, the antibodies, and COVID the next day
A large part of the video rests on a personal anecdote: his senior told him his antibody levels were very high after a booster, and the very next day he caught COVID.
What does this prove? Nothing at all, for several reasons.
If symptoms appeared the next day, the virus was already in his body. A vaccine does not work retroactively. And as explained above, protection from a COVID vaccine takes up to two weeks to build. Getting infected within that window is not a failure of the vaccine. It is exactly what was expected.
Second, a high antibody count in the blood is not a complete shield against infection. Local immunity in the respiratory tract and circulating antibodies in the blood are two different things. The real strength of COVID vaccines always lay in preventing severe disease, hospitalisation and death, not in blocking infection entirely. No company ever claimed a hundred percent efficacy. In the early trials it was at most ninety to ninety-five percent, and considerably lower for some vaccines. After new variants emerged, the ability to block infection dropped further still, which is a known and reported fact.
Third, and most important: this is one incident. One person, one time. A man demanding “practical evidence” from a scientific paper has built his entire argument on a personal story. If individual experience counts as evidence, then hear mine as well. I took a vaccine of relatively lower efficacy, spent three years in the country where the pandemic began, travelled widely during that period, passed through cluster and lockdown zones several times, and did not catch the virus. I caught it ten or eleven months after my last dose, when everything had reopened and the virus had weakened.
My story proves nothing either. That is the whole point. It is exactly why the world runs studies on millions of people rather than trading anecdotes between two men.
Seven: What is he actually trying to say?
The most troubling feature of the video is that it contains no clear position at all.
He says the other vaccines are fine, take the smallpox and measles ones, just not this one. He tells us he did not give his wife and children any doses beyond the initial ones. And alongside this he repeats one familiar claim after another: this vaccine causes this, it causes that, it is dangerous.
So what is the claim? If you have evidence that this vaccine is harmful, say so plainly and produce the evidence. If you do not, what is the purpose of saying all this?
The purpose is exactly this: to create doubt without accepting any responsibility for it. Make no testable claim, so that nobody can prove you wrong, but leave enough suspicion in the viewer’s mind that he hesitates the next time. This is not scientific criticism. Scientific criticism means saying: here is my claim, here is my evidence, and here is the finding that would make me wrong.
For a doctor to sow doubt this way while presenting himself as cautious and measured does more harm than the same words from an ordinary person, because the weight of a degree stands behind them.
Eight: The real arithmetic of side effects
Mild reactions were common: a sore arm, fatigue, a low fever. These are signs the vaccine is working, not signs of harm.
Serious adverse effects were extremely rare, on the order of a few per hundred thousand, meaning more than 99.99 percent of recipients experienced nothing. And the few genuinely rare problems that did emerge were not discovered by any conspiracy theorist. Regulatory agencies caught them through surveillance systems, investigated them, acknowledged them, changed labels, and restricted certain vaccines for particular age groups.
This is how science is supposed to work. It does not operate by hiding side effects. It counts them, measures them, and weighs them against the benefit. Those who take the existence of these rare events and use it to reject the vaccine wholesale are in fact citing the very system whose findings they refuse to trust.
And look at the other side of the scale. Modelling studies estimate that tens of millions of deaths were averted worldwide in the first year of vaccination alone. The estimates differ. The direction does not. Yes, the vaccines were made in a hurry and the trials were run in a hurry. That is true. The question is what the alternative was, and where the time was going to come from.
Nine: My actual position on the lab leak
I need to be very clear here, because this is precisely where people on both sides slip.
Several scenarios for the origin of the virus remain under discussion, and none has been conclusively established: evolution in an animal host followed by transfer to humans, evolution within humans after transfer, natural transmission from animals at a market, and an accidental laboratory leak. My position is not that a lab leak is the most likely explanation. My position is only that an accidental lab leak belongs on the same footing as the other possibilities, and cannot be dismissed by calling it impossible.
And with equal firmness: there is no evidence whatsoever of a deliberately engineered or deliberately released virus. An accident and a conspiracy are two entirely different things. This is my central argument against the conspiracy theorists. They take the possibility of an accident, which is real, and convert it into evidence of intent, and that leap rests on suspicion rather than on any evidence at all.
The accidental escape of a pathogen from a laboratory is not hypothetical. It has happened repeatedly. In 1973, smallpox virus escaped from a research institution and two people died. In 1978, an employee at a medical school who worked one floor above a laboratory handling the virus died of smallpox, which means the last smallpox death in the world came from a laboratory rather than from the wild. In 2003 and 2004 there were at least four separate laboratory accidents involving SARS-CoV-1, and in one of them the virus escaped and passed from person to person, infecting nine people, killing one, and sending hundreds into quarantine. In 2019 a release of Brucella from a vaccine plant infected thousands. There are also well-documented incidents involving anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease and influenza. Formal reviews of laboratory-acquired infections have been published in the scientific literature, and more than seventy incidents are on record in which a disease escaped a laboratory and reached the general population.
Ten: My own experience
Very early in my career, in the quality control laboratory of a pharmaceutical company, I was preparing a sample to test WFI, water for injection, ampoules for contamination. Despite having a cutter with me, I tried to break the ampoule by hand. It broke in my hand, punctured the glove, and left a small scratch on my thumb. I ignored it.
A few days later that sample and every sample made after it came out cloudy in the oven, meaning contaminated. This was a BSL3-type laboratory: three buffer rooms, changes of clothing, an alcohol bath, an air bath, inward airflow. Everything was in place. And still.
Had there been a dangerous pathogen there, I would have infected myself, and I would have found out days later, exactly as I found out about the samples.
This was not an isolated case. A colleague of mine had her face infected while working on a solid waste project. In one of our microbiology laboratories, petri plates were routinely left lying open. In some places mixed laboratories are common, with wet chemistry and microbiology in the same room, and in one such laboratory I saw animal innards lying around. In that same lab our nanomaterials would become contaminated. On another occasion we needed to test the antibacterial properties of our nanomaterials in a hospital microbiology laboratory. That lab was filthy. Our samples would get contaminated for no apparent reason, and when we ran scanning electron microscopy we would see highly dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria in place of nanoparticles. At one university, a security guard in the biology department bred mice at home and sold them to students for fifty rupees each.
Students getting infected in laboratories is not unusual, particularly new ones who have not yet learned how to handle things. And this is not a problem confined to under-resourced institutions. At a highly regarded Western university where I have worked, a student poured an entire two-litre bottle of acid into a disposal container. The container later exploded. We were fortunate that nobody was in the lab at the time. The lab was sealed, the department had to explain itself, the student was dismissed, and new SOPs were written.
That laboratory has fume hoods, blast-proof cabinets, eye and body showers, and dedicated disposal systems. Draining chemicals into the sink is strictly prohibited. Our waste outlets are monitored regularly by government agencies. And the explosion still happened, in a disposal container rather than a drain.
Eleven: What this experience proves and what it does not
My experience does not prove that COVID came from a laboratory. Personal observations cannot establish the cause of a pandemic, and I am not claiming that they can.
My experience proves only that saying “impossible” is unscientific. A student or a worker can be infected despite every protocol and carry contamination outside as a carrier, without carrying any contaminated material or clothing. Buffer rooms and airflow systems can malfunction, and you can go on using them without knowing they are compromised.
Good laboratories and modern practice keep improving: sensors, air and surface sampling, multiple layers of safety. In many countries you now cannot begin work without completing two safety trainings. In some places special permission is needed merely to enter certain biological laboratories, though no formal training system exists. Accidents are decreasing. But you can never be a hundred percent certain. Animal houses are a story of their own, and safety standards there are generally lower still.
And an uncomfortable truth: such accidents are very hard to trace, because nobody admits to them. A person whose career and livelihood are on the line will not say he was careless. Governments have their own interests. And if things get bad enough, someone in charge is usually made a scapegoat.
We scientists have a natural bias toward defending our own field. That bias is where words like “impossible” come from. It is a word that is rarely legitimate in the vocabulary of science.
In closing
Dr. Faraz Siddiqui, several things in your account are simply wrong: the date of the first case, the blanket denial of post-infection vaccination, and the presentation of the furin cleavage site’s laboratory insertion as settled fact. Beyond that, spending half a video on a document without recognising what kind of document it is.
On one point I agree with you. That paper does not close this debate. But it never claimed to. And the possibility of an accidental laboratory leak does exist, just as the other possibilities of natural transmission do.
It is often said that institutions concealed things and that public trust broke as a result. I do not accept this. Scientists cannot announce every internal debate and every new idea on Facebook daily, and like any profession their correspondence with each other is private. The uncertainty that existed was written down in the very paper this gentleman is holding up. And had those people repeated every other day, without evidence, that there was a thirty or forty percent chance the virus came from a laboratory, what would the result have been? Hate crimes against people of Chinese and East Asian descent occurred around the world even as it was, and that would have grown worse. An entire country’s research, technology and economy would have been damaged on the basis of suspicion rather than evidence. I am a graduate of a Chinese university myself, and I know what it feels like to go through unnecessary additional security protocols in jobs and research institutions around the world.
Nor were the documents concealed. That 2018 research proposal surfaced in 2021, and the rest of the material is emerging now. That is information opening up gradually. It is not concealment. And what, in the end, would Fauci have gained by spreading incomplete information or fear? Lockdowns saved lives. The economy took a hit, certainly, but recall the pandemic of a century ago and then make the comparison. The World Health Organization, governments, scientists, pharmaceutical companies and ordinary people did, on the whole, very well, and China cooperated with the WHO too. Personally, COVID cost me a great deal. It fell immediately after my PhD, and the loss of those four years has left me ineligible today for many early career grants. Even so, I would say the world came through this test well.
So what is it that you are actually claiming? You never said it out loud, and that is the real problem. If you have a claim, make it testable. If you do not, sowing suspicion in people’s minds and walking away does not become a doctor.
And what is it that the conspiracy theorists want? The answer is that they want nothing, because they have no testable question to ask in the first place. The day they tell us which piece of evidence would satisfy them is the day a conversation becomes possible.
Until they do, they are not doing science. They are selling doubt.
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