‘Blame’ review: Three Covid-19 scientists fall victim to truth-twisting narratives

Dir: Christian Frei. Switzerland. 2025. 123mins

Verified facts rarely impede the spread of a fanciful conspiracy myth. In Blame, Swiss director Christian Frei explores the falsehoods that have grown up around the origins of the Covid-19 virus. The focus on three key scientists helps draw the viewer into complex issues around misinformation, geopolitics and the deliberate undermining of trust in empirical evidence. This level-headed, fastidiously assembled and fascinating documentary should find a welcome from festivals, documentary channels and specialist distributors. 

Dense with information and insight into global issues

Frei, whose previous films include the Oscar-nominated War Photographer (2001), sets out his stall with a quote from a January 2025 edition of The Lancet medical journal which states that ’disinformation has become a deliberate instrument to attack and discredit scientists and health professionals for political gains’. There is a dry acknowledgement that this appeared in print two days before President Trump’s second inauguration. The sense of heading into unknown territory reverberates throughout the documentary. 

Frei’s presence and dulcet, Herzog-like tones lend a cool, calm air to a film that often confronts the hysterical. Divided into four named chapters, Blame focuses on scientists Linfa Wang in Singapore, Zhengli Shi in Wuhan and Peter Daszak, a British zoologist working in New York. Frei provides brief backstories on the trio and establishes their credentials. In 2003, they set out to find the origins of SARS, linking it to a bat cave in China. Back then, they warned that a novel coronavirus could make the jump to humans at any time. Years later, Covid-19 would put their research and findings at the centre of ’feverish debates and speculations’. Frei underlines that the film is told from their perspective.

Wang, Shi and Daszak are colleagues who have become friends, naming themselves ’the Bat Pack’. Their research into bats explores the ability of the mammals to carry viruses without suffering any ill effects from the diseases, and how easily those viruses could be transmitted into the human population. Their work comes under particular scrutiny when Covid-19 begins and Shi faces unfounded accusations that the virus was engineered in the lab at the Wuhan Institute Of Virology where she worked.

The documentary is threaded with beautiful still images that reflect the age of the pandemic: deserted city streets, empty trains, crowded hospitals, fear and loss. The impact is felt across the planet, but has a particular intensity for the three scientists in a world that is looking for easy answers and someone to blame. There is no evidence that Covid-19 was engineered in a Wuhan lab, and yet it is a theory that grows and takes hold of public opinion. The scientists are depicted as meddlesome individuals undertaking secretive, sinister research.

Daszak is a former president of the EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation which has existed since 1971 to work internationally, examining the causes of pandemics and seeking ways to avoid them in the future. Now, he is turned into a villain, receives death threats, is hauled before Congress in America, vilified and afforded little opportunity to explain his work by blustering, ill-informed politicians.

Blame becomes a chilling depiction of the way narratives are formed, amplified by politicians and embraced by hostile elements of the media. Featured is a rogue’s gallery of Trump associates, from Robert F. Kennedy Jr to Steve Bannon, who seem determined to discredit and dishonour respected scientists whose views do not align with their own. By challenging them, Blame may risk preaching to the converted but Frei does also examine why Daszak is a divisive figure and speaks to those who question his approach.  (In January 2025, the US Department Of Health And Human Services officially debarred Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance for five years.)

The film is dense with information and insight into global issues. The casual viewer will learn a lot about bats, zoonotic pathogens, threats to the sustainability of human life on earth and the consequences of our cavalier treatment of the planet. Daszak claims that he finds hope in the activism of a young generation. Yet, as everything Daszak has worked for comes under threat, Blame starts to feel more of a lament for a lost era of common sense.