The Indians who made world take Chinese lab leak theory seriously

“How did we get here?” is not just a metaphysical question for college students to ponder over. It has been one that an Indian in his late-20s somewhere in East India has been agonising over for the last year or so. The “here” he has been preoccupied with is the origin of Covid-19. This man, who goes by TheSeeker268 on Twitter, is part of a group called DRASTIC – a global alliance of internet strangers who came together to discover some compelling evidence that the virus originated, not in a seafood market as China would have us believe, but from a lab in Wuhan. Their theory, once dismissed as a conspiracy, has now grabbed global attention, with US President Joe Biden even ordering a probe.

One big reason for the theory going from fringe to plausible is the effort of the anonymous Seeker, who used his background as a science teacher and his skills at “searching the back alleys of the internet” as he told Newsweek, to dig into the lab leak theory. In Pune, a scientist couple named Dr Monali C Rahalkar and Dr Rahul Bahulikar were also doing their own bit of sleuthing using Google Translate to decode reams of Chinese documents.