- Two weeks ago, 18 scientists wrote a letter to the journal Science calling for a new investigation and describing both the animal-to-human theory and the lab-leak theory as “viable.”
- Claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon.
- The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible.
- Taiwan Publishes December 2019 Letter '#TaiwanCanHelp' Warning WHO About Coronavirus.
- Run by Dr Shi Zhengli, it boasted in 2019 of having at least 100 different Sars-like viruses in its Wuhan database.
- We cannot check these samples because the database went offline on 12 September 2019, just before the pandemic began.
The Lab-Leak Theory
We have an explainer.
May 27, 2021, 6:24 a.m. ET
President Biden yesterday called on U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble their efforts” to determine the origin of Covid-19 and figure out whether the virus that causes it accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory. Major publications and social media have recently been filled with discussion of the subject.
Today, we offer an explainer.
What are the basics?
The origin of the virus remains unclear. Many scientists have long believed that the most likely explanation is that it jumped from an animal to a person, possibly at a food market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Animal-to human transmission — known as zoonotic spillover — is a common origin story for viruses, including Ebola and some bird flus.
But some scientists have pointed to another possibility: that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As in other laboratories, researchers there sometimes modify viruses, to understand and treat them.
“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told senators yesterday.
Why now?
The subject is getting more attention because some scientists who were once skeptical of the laboratory theory have expressed new openness to it.
Two weeks ago, 18 scientists wrote a letter to the journal Science calling for a new investigation and describing both the animal-to-human theory and the lab-leak theory as “viable.” And three scientists who last year dismissed the lab-leak explanation as a conspiracy theory have told The Wall Street Journal that they now consider it plausible.
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Among the reasons: Chinese officials have refused to allow an independent investigation into the lab and have failed to explain some inconsistencies in the animal-to-human hypothesis. Most of the first confirmed cases had no evident link to the food market.
What changed?
In some ways, not much has not changed. From the beginning, the virus’s origin has been unclear. All along, some scientists, politicians and journalists have argued that the lab-leak theory deserves consideration.
Almost 15 months ago, two Chinese researchers wrote a paper concluding that the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.” Alina Chan, a molecular biologist affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., made similar arguments. David Ignatius and Josh Rogin, both Washington Post columnists, wrote about the possibility more than a year ago. Joe Biden, then a presidential candidate, didn’t mention the lab-leak theory in early 2020 but he did argue that the U.S. should “not be taking China’s word” for how the outbreak started.
But these voices were in the minority. The World Health Organization initially dismissed the lab-leak theory as implausible.
Why all the dismissals?
It appears to be a classic example of groupthink, exacerbated by partisan polarization.
Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an animal to a person.
In the U.S., one of the theory’s earliest advocates was Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often criticizes China — and who has a history of promoting falsehoods (like election fraud that didn’t happen). In this case, though, Cotton was making an argument with plausible supporting evidence.
The media’s coverage of his argument was flawed, Substack’s Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage exaggerated Cotton’s comments to suggest he was claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon. (Cotton called that “very unlikely.”) And some scientists and others also seem to have decided that if Cotton believed something — and Fox News and Donald Trump echoed it — the idea had to be wrong.
The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible, like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought the theory was wacky received widespread attention. It’s a good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where almost nobody is always right or always wrong.
Why does it matter?
The virus’s origin does not affect many parts of the fight against Covid. The best mitigation strategies — travel restrictions, testing, contact tracing, social distancing, ventilation and masking — are still the best mitigation strategies.
But there are at least three concrete ways, in addition to the inherent value of truth, in which the origin matters.
First, if the virus really did come from a lab, an immediate airing of the details might have led to even faster vaccine development and more effective treatments. Second, a leak that caused millions of deaths could lead to widespread change in laboratories’ safety precautions. Third, confirmation of a leak would affect the world’s view of China — and would put pressure on China to bear the burden of vaccinating the world as quickly as possible.
So what’s the truth?
We don’t know. Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible. And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.
For more: The Washington Post has published a helpful timeline. On Medium last week, the science writer Donald G. McNeil Jr. explained why he now finds the lab-leak theory plausible. And the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has argued that the issue highlights some of the problem with the media’s approach to fact-checking.
The Times reports on the latest details about the inquiry Biden has ordered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/briefing/lab-leak-theory-covid-origins.html
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1. Wuhan activated 1,580 5G stations in the city as of mid-October 2019
— Graviola Finland (@GraviolaDOTfi) April 20, 2020
2. Taiwan published a letter sent to officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) in December (2019-12-31) warning of "atypical pneumonia" in China. https://t.co/Yv7IV21wOy
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The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible
What was once a Covid conspiracy theory is looking more plausible
In
March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me
included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was
pseudoscientific nonsense almost on a par with UFOs and the Loch Ness
monster. My own reasoning was that Mother Nature is a better genetic
engineer than we will ever be, so something as accomplished at infection
and spread could not possibly have been put together in a lab.
Today, the mood has changed. Even Dr Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical advisor, now says he is ‘not convinced’ the virus emerged naturally. This month a letter in Science magazine from 18 senior virologists and other experts — including a close collaborator of the Wuhan lab at the centre of the debate, Ralph Baric — demanded that such a hypothesis be taken seriously. Suddenly, too, journalists have woken up and begun writing articles admitting they might have been hasty in dismissing a lab leak as a Trumpian conspiracy theory last year. CNN reported this week that the Biden administration shut down the State Department’s investigation into this.
The
turning point, ironically, was the ‘press conference’ on 9 February in
Wuhan where a team of western scientists representing the World Health
Organisation sat meekly through a three-hour propaganda session at the
end of a 12-day study tour. Strictly chaperoned throughout, the
western scientists (approved by the Chinese government) had mainly
listened to presentations by their Chinese colleagues during their visit
and done no research themselves.
Yet the result was presented to the world as if it was the WHO’s conclusion.
The press conference was told that the lab leak theory was ‘extremely unlikely’ and would not be investigated further, because the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology said so during a three-hour visit by the study team. By contrast, the theory favoured by the Chinese government — that the virus reached Wuhan on frozen meat from a rabbit or ferret-badger farm in southern China or southeast Asia — was said to be plausible, despite a total lack of evidence.
So
risible was this little stage play that even WHO’s director-general, Dr
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had to backtrack a few days later:
‘All
hypotheses remain open and require further study.’ Dr Peter Ben Embarek,
who led the study team, added wishfully: ‘I don’t think the press
conference was a PR win for China.’ The governments of Britain, America
and 12 other countries issued a joint statement expressing ‘shared
concerns’ over the study.
The
upshot was that far from putting a stake in the heart of the lab leak
hypothesis, like Peter Cushing as Dr Van Helsing in a Dracula film, the
WHO-China study acted more like Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein,
galvanising a dead thing into life with a jolt of electricity.
Almost
every day now brings a new article or broadcast demanding an open-minded
investigation. The veteran New York Times and Nature science
writer Nicholas Wade pointed the finger squarely at the lab in a long
essay published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Two lengthy
essays by left-leaning journalists, Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs and Donald McNeil in Medium,
have argued that it’s time to revisit the lab theory and that just
because Donald Trump thought the virus came out of a lab does not mean
that it did not.
The problem is partly that journalists confused two different theories last year: that the virus might have escaped from a laboratory openly doing research that was intended to prevent a pandemic, or that a secret project to create a nasty virus for use as a bioweapon had either gone wrong or succeeded all too well. The latter theory remains implausible; the former has never been so.
After all, the first Sars virus — which is not nearly as infectious — was caught in the lab by scientists at least four times in 2003-04, in Taiwan, Singapore and Beijing (twice). Alarmingly, there is still no clear evidence as to how it happened in three of those cases: no dropped test tube or punctured glove. So there need not be any record of an incident, and the Wuhan scientists who swear that no accident happened might be right, but it still might have leaked.
It
was not entirely journalists’ fault that the two ideas got confused.
Early in the pandemic, two group of scientists published articles
insisting on a natural origin and criticising lab-based theories. Both
made little distinction between a leaked virus and an engineered one.
In
early February 2020, when almost nothing was known about the virus, let
alone its origin, Dr Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance drafted a letter to the Lancet that
was eventually signed by 27 scientists: ‘We stand together to strongly
condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that 2019-nCoV does not have a
natural origin.’ This was taken to rule out the leak of a natural virus
from a lab as well as the engineering of a synthetic one.
The language was dutifully echoed by the mainstream media. By raising the possibility of a lab leak, Senator Tom Cotton was accused by the Washington Post of ‘fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts’; the New York Times said the Wuhan laboratory had been ‘the focus of unfounded conspiracy theories promoted by the Trump administration’; and National Public Radio reported that ‘scientists debunk lab accident theory’. In the Guardian, Dr Daszak wrote an article headlined: ‘Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn’t created in a lab.’
Dr Daszak, a British-born parasitologist, is an accomplished ‘grantrepreneur’ who built an empire out of hunting viruses and analysing them in laboratories, much of it in China. The EcoHealth Alliance, a foundation he created a decade ago out of a sleepy wildlife charity, has been garnering $17 million a year mainly from the Pentagon, the US National Institutes of Health and the US Agency for International Development — and paying him $400,000 a year. No wonder he wanted to squash any ‘rumours, misinformation and conspiracy theories’, as he put it in his email to fellow scientists. ‘We declare no competing interests,’ said the Lancet statement, which was odd given that Dr Daszak had collaborated closely with, and provided funding for (and shared karaoke sessions with the boss of) the laboratory in Wuhan that was under suspicion.
The other article that convinced many people, including me at first, that a lab theory could be ruled out came from Dr Kristian Andersen at the Scripps Research Translational Institute and four of his colleagues, and was published in Nature Medicine magazine in March 2020. They assembled arguments against the virus having been engineered, relying particularly on the logic that engineering a virus would have left traces in the genome and would have used a known template. Both are arguable, but in any case the paper said little about the possibility of a natural bat virus leaking from a lab by mistake. Yet it was taken by ‘fact checkers’ at Facebook, Wikipedia and in the mainstream media as ruling out that too. For months, therefore, any discussion of lab leaks got tagged as ‘conspiracy theory’.
The
lab that has been assiduously and energetically collecting
coronaviruses from horseshoe bats for more than a decade, gathering a
far larger collection of samples and genetic sequences than any other
lab anywhere in the world, just happens to be in Wuhan, as part of the
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Run by Dr Shi Zhengli, it boasted in 2019
of having at least 100 different Sars-like viruses in its database.
We
cannot check these samples because the database went offline on 12
September 2019, just before the pandemic began, and Dr Shi persistently
refuses to reopen it, arguing that it’s been subject to ‘hacking
attempts’.
Right… in September 2019? And there’s no other way to show
the data?
Dr Daszak says he knows what is in the database and that it is
of no relevance, which is why he has not asked his friend Dr Shi to
share it. Right. When I raised this lack of transparency with a senior
British scientist, he said: ‘They are communists, what do you expect?’
It is not clear why that should be reassuring.
The purpose of all these virus hunts and experiments was to predict and avert the next pandemic. At best they failed in that; at worst they might have caused it. It is still possible that somebody got Covid through an animal in a market, which had been infected by a bat. But in the case of the Sars epidemic of 2002-03, it was just a few weeks before scientists figured out that food handlers were catching it from infected palm civets on sale in markets in Guangdong province. And that was before modern high-speed genomic sequencing was invented. Today, with better technology and after 18 months of searching, Chinese authorities have tested north of 80,000 animals in markets, on farms and in the wild all across China and found precisely zero that are or were carrying Sars-CoV-2 (not counting cats, mink and so on which caught it from people once the pandemic was under way). The virus found in two pangolins in 2019 is a dead end: too distantly related, nowhere near Wuhan, and none of the pangolin handlers got sick.
Finding some close cousins of the pandemic virus last year in horseshoe bats in Thailand, Cambodia and Japan led to a flurry of excitement in China that the blame could be laid elsewhere, but no, the closest related virus to Sars-CoV-2 is still one that was swabbed from the anus of a horseshoe bat in a mineshaft at a place called Beng-ping in Mojiang county in Yunnan in 2013. And Dr Shi’s colleagues, who swabbed that bat’s bum in 2013, had travelled all the way from Wuhan, to which they promptly returned with the sample. They were there because six men shovelling bat guano in the mine in 2012 had fallen ill with symptoms like Covid-19 and three died. This was one of seven such trips to the mine: a fact that was figured out by a bunch of amateur investigators called the Drastic group long before the lab admitted it.
So
the only known link between Wuhan and the only known source of the only
known specimen of the most closely related virus to the cause of
Covid-19 is the scientists. It’s highly unlikely anybody else went down
the mine and then travelled a thousand miles to that particular city.
Yet this bat virus from Mojiang is still not Sars-CoV-2, so either there
is a closer cousin out there, or a similar bat virus was brought to
Wuhan by scientists and leaked. If we are to avoid another pandemic, we
badly need to know which.
https://spectator.com.au/2021/05/not-so-batty/
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