For more than a year, suggesting that COVID came from a lab accident in Wuhan has been derided as a conspiracy theory not worthy of discussion.
We’ve heard the same COVID origin story from many authority figures: SARS-CoV-2 originated in bats and spread to an intermediate host (pangolins being the best guess) before jumping to humans at a Chinese wet market.
In March of 2020, the scientific journal Nature published a paper on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 written by a handful of world-renowned virologists that makes the origin of the virus seem unequivocal:
“Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
This paper was written back when COVID had killed less than 5,000 people worldwide, so it emerged early on as the definitive scientific account of the origins of the virus. The fact that is was published in a journal as prestigious as Nature gave this conclusion the credibility that anyone who really “trusts the science” would accept as unimpeachable.
But I’m growing increasingly doubtful that this is true.
I want to share why I now believe it’s more likely that the pandemic started from a virus that escaped after being created in a lab than from bat-pangolin-human transmission at a wet market.
The case for the lab origin theory comes down to a number of different factors:
The surprisingly flimsy case that the virus was natural
What was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology - gain of function research to create coronaviruses that can infect humans and the lack of high level safety protocols
The genetics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus
Lack of identification of bats or any intermediate host that carry the SARS-CoV-2 virus
I want to be clear that there is no direct evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from a lab, but there also isn’t any direct evidence that it was natural. I’ve become persuaded that the case that this was created in a lab is stronger than the case that it was natural.
Let me share with you how I came to this point.
Let’s start at the beginning - why do we think that COVID came from a wet market?
Apart from the Nature paper I referenced above, the WHO issued a report on the origins of the pandemic in early 2021. If you’re really interested in diving into this, I recommend reading both in their entirety.
Both come to the same conclusion: the virus likely started in bats and then spread to an intermediate animal before jumping to humans and that this event likely occurred in the Huanan market in Wuhan, China.
The case for this starts with the fact that both SARS and MERS spread from bats to an intermediate animal before spreading to humans (civets for SARS and camels for MERS).
But the authors of the Nature paper have really flimsy reasoning to draw the conclusion that they did. Their argument has two major points:
They report that they believe the virus is of natural origin because the way that the virus get into cells is not the optimal method that would be calculated from computational analysis.
They report the genetic sequences in the virus have not been “previously described.”
That’s really the essence of the argument.
The WHO report describes why they suspect bats and pangolins but also admits that they haven’t actually found a link to say this with certainty:
“Evidence from surveys and targeted studies so far have shown that the coronaviruses most highly related to SARS-CoV-2 are found in bats and pangolins, suggesting that these mammals may be the reservoir of the virus that causes COVID-19. However, neither of the viruses identified so far from these mammalian species is sufficiently similar to SARS-CoV-2 to serve as its direct progenitor. In addition to these findings, the high susceptibility of mink and cats to SARS-CoV2 suggests that additional species of animals may act as a potential reservoir.”
The research going on in the lab at Wuhan was creating viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and their security precautions were inadequate
The fact that the virus emerged from Wuhan and there is a Wuhan Institute of Virology has been described as a huge coincidence - and nothing more.
But if you dig into the type of research that was going on there, you quickly realize that it’s an awfully big coincidence to just explain away.
At this institute, there was a lot of research going on regarding creating coronaviruses with “gain of function” mutations impacting their ability to infect human cells.
If you want to dig into the science in detail, I highly recommend this article detailing the work going on in Wuhan.
The scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were funded partly by our own NIH and they were doing work to create chimeric coronaviruses that could cause severe disease in humans. In other words, creating a virus exactly like the one that causes COVID-19 was the type of work that was going on there for years.
In addition, a lot of the work on the chimeric coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute was taking place under less stringent safety precautions than you would want. The majority of coronavirus research there was carried out under biosafety level 2 or 3 (BSL2 or BSL3) conditions, which doesn’t provide researchers with the type of protection from the virus that you would be wearing if you were taking care of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2.
So at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, you had research going on for years that was creating SARS-CoV-2-like viruses and was taking place at low level biosafety precautions.
The genetics of the virus raise a real possibility that it was man-made
To dive deep into this, I highly recommend the article I referenced above as well as this one, from science writer Nicholas Wade.
The original SARS virus underwent incremental genetic changes adapting to better infect humans as it transitioned from bats to civets and then us:
“In the case of SARS1, researchers have documented the successive changes in its spike protein as the virus evolved step by step into a dangerous pathogen. After it had gotten from bats into civets, there were six further changes in its spike protein before it became a mild pathogen in people. After a further 14 changes, the virus was much better adapted to humans, and with a further 4 the epidemic took off.”
But SARS-CoV-2 had a much more abrupt transition to high levels of infectivity:
“Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected. The sudden appearance of a highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 presents a major cause for concern that should motivate stronger international efforts to identify the source and prevent near future re-emergence.”
The fact that this emergence was so genetically rapid is concerning for a man-made origin. A more natural origin would be likely to have successive genetic changes identified prior to showing up in a pandemic.
Both SARS and MERS made multiple jumps from an intermediate host to humans. It’s curious that if COVID did jump from an intermediate host, it seems that it only jumped once.
There is also a suspicion raised by the specifics of some of the amino acid sequences surrounding a part of the virus called the “furin cleavage site.” The sequence of genetic code raises alarm for a laboratory origin of the virus:
“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus,” said David Baltimore, an eminent virologist and former president of CalTech. “These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”
The suspected carrier animal has not been identified
From the WHO report:
“However, the presence of SARS-CoV-2 has not been detected through sampling and testing of bats or of wildlife across China. More than 80 000 wildlife, livestock and poultry samples were collected from 31 provinces in China and no positive result was identified for SARS-CoV-2 antibody or nucleic acid before and after the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China. Through extensive testing of animal products in the Huanan market, no evidence of animal infections was found.”
This is really quite a bit different from past pandemics:
“This was surprising because both the SARS1 and MERS viruses had left copious traces in the environment. The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months. Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 pandemic began, and a presumably intensive search, Chinese researchers had failed to find either the original bat population, or the intermediate species to which SARS2 might have jumped, or any serological evidence that any Chinese population, including that of Wuhan, had ever been exposed to the virus prior to December 2019.”
We aren’t likely to get definitive answers anytime soon
You might have seen the 60 Minutes account of lab leak hypothesis on the origins of COVID documenting the complete lack of transparency from Chinese officials allowing an adequate investigation of true starting point of this pandemic.
As a consequence, we’re left guessing about the exact details of the research going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The WHO report came from a highly chaperoned tour of China rather than an unimpeded investigation into the origins of the virus.
Another snippet from Nicholas Wade’s outstanding article:
“The records of the Wuhan Institute of Virology certainly hold much relevant information. But Chinese authorities seem unlikely to release them given the substantial chance that they incriminate the regime in the creation of the pandemic. Absent the efforts of some courageous Chinese whistle-blower, we may already have at hand just about all of the relevant information we are likely to get for a while.”
Determining the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is vital for preventing another pandemic
The reason I’ve been reading so much about this and that I’m writing about it now is that we need to understand where this virus came from if we care about preventing another pandemic.
Since I’m not convinced that we’ve gotten that answer right, I’m worried that we are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to solutions.
When you read about pandemic prevention, a lot of the focus is on our food supply.
Listen to Bill Gates:
“You’re not going to ever drive zoonotic diseases — diseases that cross species barriers — to zero. This will always be a risk and we can prepare for that risk. You can reduce the risk a little bit by having fewer wet markets and less bushmeat, but it’s very hard to regulate in the rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa. If you had to say where’s the next one likely to come from, that would be it. That’s very dangerous.”
Or Ezra Klein:
“As best we can tell, the novel coronavirus jumped from bats, to some other animal, to humans, with the locus of infection being a Chinese meat market. There’s nothing unusual about that. Swine flus — yes, plural — jump from pigs to humans. Avian flus jump from birds to humans. Ebola most likely came from monkeys. “Preventing the Next Pandemic,” a report by the United Nations Environment Program, estimates that 75 percent of the new infectious diseases that threaten humans come from animals.”
This article in the Lancet agrees:
“Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, may have emerged at a wet market in Wuhan, China. The term wet market denotes any place selling fresh produce, but global attention has focused on markets selling live, sometimes wild, animals. To avoid future pandemics of zoonotic diseases, leading international figures have called for an international ban on wet markets.”
So what if the wet market theory is wrong? Doesn’t that mean that we’re wasting our time, energy, and other limited resources on the wrong thing?
I’m not suggesting that a safe food supply isn’t important or that wet markets are good or that I’m pro-CAFO. But if we’re operating under the wrong assumption about the origins of COVID, our future pandemic mitigation steps are at best inefficient and at worst ineffective.
Now again, I want to emphasize that there’s no smoking gun that says that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab or that there was an international coverup. But in my view, the evidence points much more towards the direction of escape of a man-made virus from a lab than from the direction of a natural jump from bats -> pangolins -> humans.
The implications here are enormous. And it’s vital that we get this right.
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