And if the theory’s true, no doubt some people would prefer that the virus’s origins always remain a mystery.
And if the theory’s true, no doubt some people would prefer that the virus’s origins always remain a mystery.
T his morning, New York magazine unveiled “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” — Nicholson Baker’s lengthy and detailed exploration of the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus and ongoing coronavirus pandemic is the result of a lab accident in Wuhan, China. Baker goes even further, speculating that the reason this virus is similar to many previously discovered viruses but not quite the same is that it may have been altered through gain-of-function experiments.
In other words, the theory suggests that Chinese scientists wanted to study a particularly dangerous version of an existing virus and thus deliberately accelerated a virus’s process of growth and change to generate a more virulent and contagious version of it. Baker notes that SARS-CoV-2 is similar to other viruses found in nature, but more contagious among humans — and asks whether laboratory efforts might explain what makes SARS-CoV-2 so easily spread:
The zoonoticists say that we shouldn’t find it troubling that virologists have been inserting and deleting furin cleavage sites and ACE2-receptor-binding domains in experimental viral spike proteins for years: The fact that virologists have been doing these things in laboratories, in advance of the pandemic, is to be taken as a sign of their prescience, not of their folly. But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact: This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?
This is a variation of the question that has confronted the skeptics since the beginning. The city of Wuhan had not one but two laboratories — the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control — studying coronaviruses that originated in bats. If there were a terrible outbreak of a rare or new virus in Atlanta, Ga., people would understandably wonder if the virus’s local origins had anything to do with the nearby headquarters of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If someday there is an outbreak of a new, strange, and deadly virus in Frederick, Md., people will understandably wonder if the outbreak has anything to do with the nearby U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. While it is possible for a naturally occurring virus to coincidentally manifest in the same city as one or more labs known to be researching similar viruses, Occam’s Razor instructs us that when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.
The Chinese government has disavowed the initial theory that the virus outbreak started with bat consumption at the Huanan Seafood Market — an admission against interest that aligns with research indicating some of the virus’s earliest cases could not be traced back to the market.
Baker is pretty blunt about the fact that many scientists have had these suspicions, or at least concerns, since the beginning of the pandemic, but didn’t want to speak publicly about the possibility of a lab accident while the Trump administration was touting the same idea:
Over the course of the fall, and especially after the election muffled Donald Trump’s influence over the country’s public-health apparatus, that proximity problem — and the uncomfortable questions of origins it raised — began to grow somewhat more discussable. The BBC, Le Monde, and Italy’s RAI have all recently taken seriously the scientific possibility of a lab leak. In late October, the World Health Organization convened the first meeting of its second inquiry into the origins of the disease. The WHO’s effort is perhaps the world’s best chance to satisfy its curiosity about goings-on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and at the Wuhan CDC’s virus lab near the Wuhan seafood market. But, as the New York Times has reported, the WHO’s information gathering has been hindered by Chinese secretiveness since February, when an initial investigative team sent to Beijing was told its members’ access to scientists would be restricted and that it couldn’t visit the seafood market, then considered a hub of the pandemic.
I explored and detailed past warnings about gain-of-function research of viruses in April and May. Bright minds disagree: some think that enhancing a virus is a necessary step in learning how to combat them; others argue that this kind of research creates the very threat that the research is designed to prevent.
Baker speculates that this pandemic’s roots date back to April 2012, when three men were hired to shovel bat guano out of a copper mine in Mojiang, China, and who shortly thereafter succumbed to a pneumonia from a virus never encountered before. “The bat disease that the men encountered wasn’t necessarily all that dangerous except in an environment of immunosuppressive overload.” Fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, were recovered from the men and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
This is where the uniquely peculiar furin insert and/or the human-tuned ACE2-receptor-binding domain may come in — although it’s also possible that either of these elements could have evolved as part of some multistep zoonotic process. But in the climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice and other experimental animals, isn’t it possible that somebody in Wuhan took the virus that had been isolated from human samples, or the RaTG13 bat virus sequence, or both (or other viruses from that same mine shaft that Shi Zhengli has recently mentioned in passing), and used them to create a challenge disease for vaccine research — a chopped-and-channeled version of RaTG13 or the miners’ virus that included elements that would make it thrive and even rampage in people? And then what if, during an experiment one afternoon, this new, virulent, human-infecting, furin-ready virus got out?
It is welcome and refreshing that New York magazine acknowledges that the question of the virus’s origins has not yet been answered, and Baker’s legwork, interviews, and investigations are exhaustive. But there’s something a little infuriating about how the question that was once largely dismissed by elite media circles as a crazy conspiracy theory can now be examined and taken seriously in a mainstream publication, roughly a year later. For a long stretch, in many circles, such speculation was either ignored or even labeled xenophobic or racist scapegoating.
New York magazine reaches a different audience from National Review, and it is good that a more left-of-center audience will be exposed to all of the evidence and arguments about this possibility. The possibility of a lab accident should not be seen as another crackpot conspiracy theory in a year full of them.
Lab accidents happen all the time, including ones involving dangerous pathogens. In 2018, U.S. visitors to the Wuhan Institute of Virology warned of a “shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4 laboratory and lack of clarity in related Chinese government policies and guidelines.” Other Chinese labs have had all kinds of unethical behavior, including selling laboratory animals on the black market and “chronic inadequate management issues” at laboratories, including problems with biological disposal. Reportedly, intelligence indicates that cell-phone use in the Wuhan Institute of Virology stopped for three weeks in October 2019, which may or may not indicate some sort of problem or precaution. Finally, the Chinese government has lied about the transmission of the virus from the start, which means their vehement denials of any lab accident mean nothing.
But the hard fact is that we may not know for certain, ever. If there was any physical evidence of the outbreak, Chinese government undoubtedly destroyed it at the first opportunity. The regime’s ability to find, suppress, and disappear whistleblowers has few equals. And if four out of every ten people are symptomatic, it is possible that someone in a Chinese laboratory was infected — say, by handling a sample and not following every safety procedure — never realized it, and then left the lab, infecting others who did have symptomatic reactions.
Finally, there is the unnerving possibility that a lot of people with significant responsibilities in government, academia, and media didn’t want to look too hard at the lab-leak possibility because of its far-reaching ramifications. If the recklessness or negligence of a Chinese government lab released a virus that killed, as of this moment, more than 1.8 million people around the world, many people around the world would hate the Chinese government with a raging passion and seek to settle the score. The consequences of the Wuhan lab leak would make the Soviet management of Chernobyl look like a firecracker accident. The rage at Beijing would not subside for a generation; it would be too great for any government to maintain a normal diplomatic relationship with the Chinese government. Many voices, far and wide, would demand Beijing pay reparations. And we all know how well Xi Jinping and the hardliners in Beijing respond to criticism and confrontation.
If the lab-leak hypothesis is the truth, no doubt some people would prefer that the virus’s origins always remain a mystery.