Did Covid-19 virus escape from a Wuhan lab?

 

At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic early last year, there was a flurry of discussion about its origins. Very quickly, the theory that gained prominence and the endorsement of most scientists and the scientific establishment was that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

The theory goes that since many early cases occurred around a wet market in Wuhan, that was its point of origin. Here, the legions of proponents of the theory postulate, the coronavirus jumped from bats to an intermediary animal host and then finally to humans.

This seemed plausible enough at first glance. After all, this is similar to how both the SARS and MERS epidemic first took root.

However, another, more sinister-sounding theory soon started circulating – that Covid-19 was in fact a manmade virus that was concocted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and had somehow leaked into the general population.

China refuted it and insisted that there was no evidence to support this theory. Backing this up was a highly consequential letter published in the Lancet by several leading virologists in February 2020.

In it, they stated: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” They added that scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife”.

Another letter authored by another group of virologists published in the journal Nature Medicine – just a month after the Lancet paper – drove the point home further, saying “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

This largely put the debate to bed as most of us took these experts’ words at face value. Why wouldn’t we? We expect them to deliver us the truths that we might not have the academic training to dissect and comprehend.

Little did we know then that Peter Daszak – the virologist who organised and drafted the hugely impactful Lancet letter was the president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.

According to science writer Nicholas Wade: “Daszak’s organisation funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 (Covid-19) virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, ‘We declare no competing interests’.”

Wade continues in an article this month in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Virologists like Daszak had much at stake in the assigning of blame for the pandemic. For 20 years, mostly beneath the public’s attention, they had been playing a dangerous game. In their laboratories they routinely created viruses more dangerous than those that exist in nature.

“They argued that they could do so safely, and that by getting ahead of nature they could predict and prevent natural ‘spillovers,’ the cross-over of viruses from an animal host to people.”

Wade, who has worked for prestigious publications Science, Nature, and the New York Times, writes: “It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanised mice.

“This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2 (Covid-19)-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory (the biosafety level of a US dentist’s office). So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute. The virus was already well adapted to humans, as expected for a virus grown in humanised mice.”

However, there hasn’t been any direct evidence to support the theory that the virus did indeed leak from the Wuhan Lab of Virology – largely because the research has been sealed up.

However, this didn’t stop some prominent scientists who thought the mainstream explanation didn’t quite add up from voicing their concerns.

This includes the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, French Nobel Prize-winning virologist Luc Montagnier, and even Dr Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

It certainly didn’t help the Wuhan lab leak theory’s credibility that many who vocally propounded it were also spewing sinophobic insults and were often considered to be on the “wrong” side of the political aisle. Take Donald Trump, for instance, who had been railing about it and as a consequence had put off many who would have otherwise taken the idea seriously.

But now, more than a year later, the increasing viability of the lab-leak hypothesis has impelled some leading academics, including Dr David Relman, a professor of immunology at Stanford University; Dr Ralph Baric, a professor of epidemiology and a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina; and Dr Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard to publish a letter in the journal Science, calling for further investigation into the origins of Covid-19.

They, along with the US and 13 other countries, expressed their dissatisfaction at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) conclusion following a months-long investigation into the origins of Covid-19.

The report – which WHO published in March 2021 with the help of Chinese scientists and under the tight control of Chinese authorities – stated that a spillover from wildlife to an intermediary host and then to humans was the “likely to very likely pathway” that the virus took and that the lab-leak hypothesis was “extremely unlikely”.

However, the letter the virologists above (Relman, Baric, Lipsitch et al) penned in the journal Science panned the WHO report saying: “The two theories were not given balanced consideration” and that “there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident”.

They continued: “A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight and responsibly managed to minimise the impact of conflicts of interest.”

This conflict of interest was most glaring with the inclusion of Peter Daszak in the investigative committee – yes, the very same man who had funded the coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Also, it’s certainly puzzling that as the science writer Nicholas Wade states: “…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.”

He continues: “Yet some 15 months after the SARS2 (Covid-19) pandemic began, and after 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. Natural emergence remained a conjecture which, however plausible to begin with, had gained not a shred of supporting evidence in over a year.”

At the end of the day, irrespective of whether Covid-19 originated from nature or was man made, we deserve to know the answer. This would be most consequential to vaccine research. What if the virus was indeed man made and the research that was conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology could shed some light on how we could best protect against it?

It would also push scientists to be more careful when conducting future research that could result in such catastrophic outcomes. And if there’s been foul play, it’ll help us bring the perpetrators to light so as to ensure such major missteps never happen again.

More than three million people have died worldwide due to Covid-19. It’s about time we got some answers. - FMT

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.