Katherine Eban is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist who writes for Vanity Fair, and the author of Dangerous Doses: a True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters and the Contamination of America’s Drug Supply and Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom.

She recently published this investigative piece for Vanity Fair on how an organisation dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.

What first got you interested in the controversy around the origins of SARS-CoV-2?

My editor and I were talking about what are the big unanswered questions about the pandemic? And of course, the biggest of the big is where SARS-CoV-2 came from. It remains unanswered and unknown, and so I dug in.

My first story came out on June 3, 2021 – that was an 11,000 word story – so the EcoHealth Alliance story is my second big one.

The origins of SARS-CoV-2 is a topic that seems to attract such vitriol. Why do you think that is?

I think it is because it potentially implicates science. I think we have a serious problem of trust, in part related to disinformation.

In all my reporting generally, but very much for COVID reporting – and I have reported on all aspects of this pandemic – I’ve put documents at the heart of everything I do, and I report in such a way that I try to maximise my opportunities to obtain documents.

I am not reporting speculation. I am only reporting it from documents, from meetings, from things that actually happened in the real world. You can report with much more authority, and you can guarantee accuracy.

There is a lot of speculation out there, a lot of baseless speculation, a lot of dangerous speculation and speculation that has sparked racism. I want nothing to do with any of that. So I am sticking specifically to things that are knowable in the real world.

And it’s very hard reporting, I’ll say that.

How did documents come to be accessible?

I cannot say anything more than what I’ve said about it in the article. All I can say is that I obtained over 100,000 internal EcoHealth Alliance documents,

How did you filter through all that?

It’s incredibly challenging. I spent weeks and weeks reading.

How you sort and store information becomes critical. I was cataloguing the relevant information from the key documents as I reported and read my way through them.

I always create a timeline for every story. The timeline isn’t the timeline of my timeline – the timeline is the timeline revealed by the documents, as in ‘what happened when’. It is like an inventory of information, where you’re cataloguing what you have. That becomes very critical.

And you have to be able to know what your story is about. One of the things that I always think about is, what’s the key question here, what is the essence of the story? Once you understand that, then it’s a lot easier to be able to figure out what’s important. Otherwise, it’s like a million random facts.

What was the question you were trying to answer?

I think in this case, the question that I had in my mind is, why are the scientists acting unscientifically? The whole response to this question has been dogged by a lack of transparency, certainly by the top US science officials, by top scientists. So why?

I kept my eye closely on the effort to construct a narrative from early on, before any possible answers could have been known. That is something that we’ve clearly seen, that from the very beginning of the pandemic, despite the fact that many of these top scientists had real questions about the origin, they tried to take the question of a lab origin off the table, off the public table.

Was there an ‘Aha!’ moment doing this?

I’m not sure that there was. And I have found this before. In my previous work, I’ve done reporting that is very document-intensive and sometimes it’s not so much a single ‘Aha!’ moment as a kind of fact pattern. But you have to do a lot of thinking to be able to see a fact pattern.

I think one of the difficulties with investigative reporting is you become so immersed in what you’re seeing that it’s very hard to step back. I create a timeline of everything I have – stuff that is the most important. Instead of being immersed in the documents, that lets you take a step back and think to yourself, ‘what does it mean?’.

And what did it all mean?

One of the things that was very clear is that this was a very cash-strapped organization that was following the money in the federal grant system, and made certain key choices along the way as to what to pursue or not based on grant availability. While that may not be particularly unique, they were making decisions about the kinds of risky research to pursue based on funding availability.

Do you know why they did that?

The piece laid out a series of questions as to why they might have been doing that. I don’t know for sure.

How do you get the other side the story?

First of all, it’s absolutely your job to get the other side of the story. For example, I wanted to know, from as many people as would talk to me, EcoHealth Alliance’s stature in the scientific community; what they had accomplished and achieved.

But you’re also going to take all those questions directly to them. Anything that you are going to write about, you have to give them an opportunity to respond. You’re going to hopefully try to get interviews, get comments. And if you don’t get interviews or comments, you still have to be able to make the organisation’s case for it.

In this case, Peter Daszak [the president of EcoHealth Alliance] declined to speak with me, but they did give me many pages of written responses so I drew heavily from those. I always, of course, prefer when people do speak to me, but I’m used to being in situations where they choose not to. So you have to do your best to fill in the other side, even if they’re not giving responses.

Why do you think EcoHealth Alliance declined to respond?

There’s all kinds of reasons why organisations would decide not to respond or to respond. I try not to draw any conclusion from it. In a court of law, jurors are told that if somebody invokes their Fifth Amendment right to not speak, you are not supposed to derive any conclusion from that.

My job is to be fair, my job is to give them an opportunity to respond and to reflect that response. Or to reflect the other side even if you don’t get a response.

Have you had any response from them since the piece aired?

I’ve had a lot of responses to the piece but I haven’t heard anything further from EcoHealth Alliance.

How did you handle the scientific arguments about SARS-CoV-2’s origins?

I had to try to understand the science, which is mind-bendingly complex, so I had to turn to a lot of experts because you can’t leave the science out of it – you have to understand what they’re debating.

I have reported on scientific and medical topics now for 25 years. It’s not necessarily what I imagined I would have been doing, but I’m very aggressive at educating myself.

For example, I wrote a book Bottle of Lies, which is about the generic drug industry. I went to laboratories all over the world, I watched what I was writing about, I saw it with my own eyes and had people who made generic drugs explain it to me. I visited the software manufacturers, I visited the excipient manufacturers, I visited the finished-dose factories on four continents. I watched endless YouTube videos.

There’s all kinds of ways to educate yourself. I can’t tell you how many hours of my life I will never get back reading food and drug law. But you have to. It’s like learning a language. And you have to learn the language of what you’re writing. You have to immerse yourself, you have to be a student of this stuff. If you’re sitting around waiting for phone calls, you should be watching YouTube videos about stuff.

What’s your writing process?

Oh, it’s hell. First of all, I create very detailed timelines. These are giant Excel spreadsheets that are a catalogue or inventory of all my reporting, that are chronological: the events, what happened when, who did what, where does that fact come from.

It’s like creating a huge scaffolding. You wouldn’t just start building a building, you’d create a big scaffolding and you’d have a blueprint and all of that. So I create very detailed outlines and I usually share my outline with my editor.

I try to do as much of that stuff as I can before I even start to write, even though it’s incredibly time consuming. Creating those materials is often the most time-consuming part of what I do.

Is it all electronic spreadsheets, or do you have a wall of notes?

I’ve done a combination of both. I’ve done the ‘Carrie from Homeland’ thing – red thread and all of that – because it’s a giant fact pattern that you have to figure out.

When and how do you start writing a piece this big?

I will go back and forth with my editor over my lead to try to make sure the lead is right. Because if you don’t have the right lead, it’s really hard to go beyond that.

What’s amazing is that when you have the right lead, everything is so much easier. But if you don’t have the right lead, you are just banging your head against the wall. And you know deep in your soul when it’s not right.

Do you write to a word limit, or do you just write the story as long as it needs, and then kill your darlings?

Well, my original word limit was going to be 5000 words, and I handed in the piece at about 12,000 words. We got it down to about 10,000 words – so it was about 10,000 words when it ran – and my editor said he felt it was pretty tight.

It’s going to be in the print magazine at about 6000 words. We had to cut it by about a third to get it in the magazine. We pretty much kept the pattern and just suctioned everything we could out of it that wasn’t absolutely critical to reader understanding.

It was painful, but that’s nothing compared to the agony of putting together a story like this.

What was the fact-checking like?

It was fact checked for weeks, and then lawyers. It’s a very heavy review.

How do you feel the night before something like this goes to air or goes to print?

Nervous, but I think at that point, you feel like you’re done.

You just cannot skip over any steps. You cannot be like, ‘yeah, that’s okay if I didn’t do that’. Every step of the way you cannot overlook anything. These kinds of investigative stories, it feels like open heart surgery – errors have really big consequences. So you have to be insane about factual accuracy, which I am.

What helps you sleep is the feeling that you’ve done everything you possibly can.

How do you feel about the story now?

I feel good. One thing that I always do for every one of my stories is I keep reporting them even once they’re out, which I feel is my obligation, both to make sure you didn’t get anything wrong but also you learn new things. Even though that’s not going to change the text of your story at that moment, it could change the next story you do, or lead you to the next story.

I’m like that Wile E Coyote that keeps running over the cliff and keeps going. I do keep reporting. I never stopped. That’s one thing I tell my students: the reporting never stops.

How did you come to be a journalist?

I’m a totally accidental journalist. I have a master’s degree in 17th century English poetry. I was always a writer and I have a master’s in creative writing. So I wrote fiction.

I got a call while I was at Oxford studying Paradise Lost from somebody offering me a summer job looking at how the Europeans care for their elderly. This was a guy who was an alum from my university in the US. So I took that and I ended up spending a summer in Swedish nursing homes.

When I got back to New York, I needed a job while I was working on my novel. Because of that summer job, I got hired by a New York City politician as their health care policy analyst and I started investigating New York City hospitals. And my reports wound up on the front page of The New York Times in some cases. It turned out I was really good at this, and I haven’t looked back.

I feel very strongly that I’m in journalism to expose things to public view that would otherwise remain hidden, and that it is the way that I can contribute to the world. I think without journalism, I’d end up feeling pretty powerless, given all of these seismic events in the world.

Katherine Eban spoke to Bianca Nogrady. You can read more of Katherine’s work here, and she’s on Twitter at @KatherineEban.