It was never a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Here is everything we know.
It was never a far-fetched conspiracy theory. Here is everything we know.
N o, the lab-leak theory isn’t quite proven.
But there is a clear and verified sequence of events that strongly suggests that this pandemic, which has caused more than 168 million cases and more than 3.4 million deaths worldwide, may well have originated from viruses carried in bats in an abandoned mine that then passed through a Chinese research facility before spreading out of control among the people of Wuhan.
In April 2012, six miners were assigned to clean bat guano from a copper mineshaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, China. This is south-central China, about a 120-mile drive from the border of Laos, and a 195-mile drive to the border of Vietnam.
Four miners had been working at the site for two weeks, and two had been working for four days when they all grew ill with a cough and fever, difficulty breathing, aching limbs, heavy and bloody mucus and saliva, and headaches — symptoms of a viral respiratory infection that is similar to the effects of COVID-19. All six miners were admitted to Kunming hospital in late April and early May, and three died — one after two weeks, one after a month and a half, and one after three months. The other three survived.
Dr. Zhong Nanshan, a prominent Chinese pulmonologist who has been compared to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s high-profile role in the United States, consulted on the cases of the miners. Recognizing that the virus afflicting the miners could be comparable to SARS, blood samples from the miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for antibody testing.
In 2012 and 2013, teams of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology conducted a study of coronaviruses in bats in that abandoned mineshaft. In 2016, the researchers published a paper concluding,
We found a high frequency of infection by a diverse group of coronaviruses in different bat species in the mineshaft. . . . The surveillance identified two unclassified betacoronaviruses, one new strain of SARS-like coronavirus, and one potentially new betacoronavirus species. Furthermore, coronavirus co-infection was detected in all six bat species, a phenomenon that fosters recombination and promotes the emergence of novel virus strains.
In other words, the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected a lot of virus samples from the bats in this mineshaft.
And the institute did a lot of additional research on coronaviruses found in bats, year after year, and discovered many new bat viruses. On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a job listing that declared, translated, “Long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified” (emphasis added).
In 2015, the Wuhan Institute of Virology became the first facility in China to complete construction of a Biosafety Level Four laboratory, the highest level of safety possible, to work with the most-dangerous viruses and pathogens. For perspective, Level Two handles bacteria and viruses, such as Lyme Disease and the standard flu; Level Three handles ones more dangerous, such as anthrax and HIV; and Level Four handles the most dangerous, such as Ebola.
Jamison Fouss, the U.S. consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology, and health, repeatedly visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and in January 2018 wrote a memo to Washington articulating their concerns. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The U.S. visitors had good reason to be worried about lab accidents, which are much less rare than the general public may think. A review of seven years of data of U.S. BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories found 749 incidents, including needle sticks and other through-the-skin exposures from sharp objects; dropped containers or spills and splashes of liquids containing pathogens; bites or scratches from infected animals; pathogens manipulated outside a biosafety cabinet or other equipment designed to protect exposures to infectious aerosols; failure to follow safety procedures; failure or problems with personal protective equipment; mechanical or equipment failure; and failure to properly inactivate pathogens before transferring them to a lower biosafety level lab for further research.
Perhaps the least plausible argument in opposition to the lab-leak theory is that the staff of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other Chinese facilities are just too diligent to ever make a consequential mistake. The original SARS virus had accidentally leaked from the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing, part of China’s Center for Disease Control. Twice.
The State Department memo also noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s research into the viruses in bats in Yunnan Province was funded, at least in a small part, by U.S. taxpayers:
Over a five-year study, [redacted] and their research team widely sampled bats in Yunnan province with funding support from NIAID/NIH, USAID, and several Chinese funding agencies . . . it demonstrated that SARS-like coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bat in a single cave contain all the building blocks of the pandemic SARS-coronavirus genome that caused the human outbreak. These results strongly suggest that the highly pathogenic SARS-coronaviruses originated in this bat population.
It is worth noting that scientists who wanted to research and work with the virus that caused SARS and those like that virus did not require a BSL-4 level laboratory under the World Health Organization guidelines. As Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology argued, “bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”
In February 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged around China, a team of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology concluded that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19, was “highly similar throughout the genome to RaTG13” — the virus found in the mineshaft — “with an overall genome sequence identity of 96.2 percent.”
Wuhan is about 1,140 miles away from the mineshaft, a 21-hour drive by car, roughly the distance from New Orleans to New York City. The city of Wuhan is well beyond the natural habitat and natural migration patterns of bats who are most likely to carry viruses such as this one.
No outbreaks of COVID-19 were found between Yunnan Province and Wuhan before the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019. According to Chinese health officials, the first COVID-19 patient in Yunnan Province was diagnosed on January 21, 2020.
To believe that the COVID-19 pandemic was simply a natural outbreak of a virus found in bats in the mineshaft in Yunnan Province, you have to believe that SARS-CoV-2 infected someone in Yunnan who was asymptomatic or exhibited symptoms so mild that they did not elicit concern. (While different studies show slightly different figures, around 30 percent of people with COVID-19 never develop symptoms.)
That theoretically infected person, Patient Zero, would have had to either immediately leave for Wuhan, or everyone he interacted with in Yunnan Province before his departure would also have been asymptomatic or exhibited symptoms so mild that they did not elicit concern. Patient Zero would have had to make a 21-hours-at-minimum trip to Wuhan, and either not infect anyone else along the way, or everyone else he interacted with would have needed to be within that asymptomatic minority — and every one of those people he interacted with would also have needed to be within that asymptomatic minority, and so on.
After completing the journey and not infecting anyone, Patient Zero would have had to interact with someone in Wuhan, who would then have exhibited symptoms and spread it to others, and the pandemic would have been off and running. That scenario is not impossible, but it stretches credulity. Recall that the six miners who went into the mineshaft all eventually exhibited serious symptoms.
In addition to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control also conducted research on novel coronaviruses found in bats. Virologist Tian Junhua, who worked at the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control, traveled into caves to collect virus samples from bats, and in past interviews, he had described self-quarantining for two weeks because he had come in contact with bat blood, urine, etc. Chinese state television ran a brief documentary about him; in the video, he’s wearing glasses, not protective goggles, and discussing the dangers to bare skin, while researchers are showing a bit of bare skin on their necks and sides of their faces. The point is not that Tian Junhua caught SARS-CoV-2 on this particular excursion into the caves; the point is that it’s nonsense to think that the Chinese virus researchers are simply too diligent and careful to ever have an accidental infection.
Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist nicknamed “Bat Woman” who works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, told Scientific American in March 2020 that when she heard about local doctors reporting novel coronavirus in two hospital patients with atypical pneumonia, her first thought was, “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong. . . . I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China. . . . Could they have come from our lab?” But she assured the magazine that the virus did not come from her lab.
The first and most common theory was that the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood market. Years before this pandemic, scientists had warned that China’s “wet markets” represented a unique threat for outbreaks: “Nowhere else on earth do so many people have such close contact with so many birds.”
But there were a couple of problems with this theory. Twenty-seven of the first 41 COVID-19 patients could be traced back to the market — suggesting that someone infected and contagious was at the market early on, but not necessarily indicating that the virus first originated there. In fact, the person with the earliest onset of symptoms, on December 1, 2019, could not be traced back to the market, and three of the first four patients could not be traced back to the market. A later larger study of the first 99 people diagnosed with COVID-19 found that only 49 could be traced back to the Huanan Seafood Market.
For what it is worth, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, publicly declared in May 2020 that the Huanan Seafood Market was not the origin of the outbreak. In early 2020, Chinese researchers also took samples from 188 animals from 18 species at the market, all of which tested negative. The joint WHO-Chinese preliminary investigation, completed in February 2021 concluded, “Through extensive testing of animal products in the Huanan market, no evidence of animal infections was found.”
The never-quite-definitively-proven contention that the virus required an intermediate species such as pangolins was complicated by the fact that no one had yet found evidence that pangolins were at the Huanan Seafood Market, or even that venders at that market trafficked pangolins. We are left with the mystery of a virus that is spectacularly contagious among human beings and that is genetically similar to viruses found in bats and pangolins, but that is nowhere to be found in bats and pangolins.
Georgetown University professor and pandemic specialist Daniel Lucey concludes that the focus on the Huanan Seafood Market as the pandemic origin point is simply misplaced. “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace.”
If the onset of symptoms in the first diagnosed patient was December 1, the infection probably occurred sometime in November. One of the oddest reports in the past year arrived in May 2020, when NBC News reported, “Private analysis of cellphone location data purports to show that a high-security Wuhan laboratory studying coronaviruses shut down in October, three sources briefed on the matter told NBC News.” It continued, “The report — obtained by the London-based NBC News Verification Unit — says there was no cellphone activity in a high-security portion of the Wuhan Institute of Virology from Oct. 7 through Oct. 24, 2019, and that there may have been a ‘hazardous event’ sometime between Oct. 6 and Oct. 11.”
Since that report, there has been no subsequent elaboration, no further details, no ensuing leaks of new information of what, if anything, happened in that laboratory building in that autumn. Perhaps the cellphone-location data is inaccurate, or perhaps the sudden halt in cellphone activity represents a management crackdown on employees talking on their cellphones in the office. Or maybe something went seriously wrong within the walls of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October.
While it is not likely that SARS-CoV-2 represents a deliberate attempt at a biological weapon — it is too contagious to be useful, and it killed Chinese civilians before it killed anyone else — it is undeniable that the Chinese military is exceptionally interested in the military application of biological knowledge, innovations, and technology.
In 2015, the People’s Liberation Army Daily ran an article declaring, “Biotechnology will become the new strategic commanding heights of the future military revolution. . . . Biological cross-technology, drawing on and using the many excellent structures and special functional principles of biology, will provide a new source for the leapfrog development of weaponry and equipment.”
As Elsa Kania and Wilson Vorndick of the Jamestown Foundation wrote in 2019:
The [People’s Republic of China] is not alone in recognizing the potential of biotechnology on the future battlefield, but the ways in which Chinese research is seeking to integrate developments among industry, academic institutions, and military-oriented programs — including through research collaborations and the procurement of dual-purpose commercial technologies — may prove striking. In particular, China is at the forefront of today’s breakthroughs in CRISPR-Cas, a new technique for gene editing that has demonstrated unique potential and precision despite its current limitations.
The state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology was not officially a military institution, but there’s much less of a civilian-military distinction in an authoritarian regime. On February 21, 2021, former deputy national-security adviser Matthew Pottinger said on CBS News’s Face the Nation, “We have very strong reason to believe that the Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory, going all the way back to at least 2017.”
And when we contemplate the steadfast denials from the Chinese government and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, we should observe that those who could be doing dual-use research in violations of biological-weapons treaties would be extremely unlikely to just admit it to the world.
Skeptics and critics of the lab-leak theory often contend there is a lack of proof. Of course, outsiders cannot enter the Wuhan Institute of Virology or other Chinese biological-research facilities. When a team from the World Health Organization visited Wuhan in February 2021 — more than a year after the pandemic began — Chinese officials refused to turn over raw data from the earliest COVID-19 patients, and “disagreements over patient records and other issues were so tense that they sometimes erupted into shouts among the typically mild-mannered scientists on both sides.” According to the New York Times, “Chinese officials told the team that they did not have enough time to compile detailed patient data and only provided summaries.” Contemplate that: Chinese authorities said in February 2021 that they had not had enough time to compile detailed patient data from infections that occurred in December 2019 and January 2020.
When Chinese authorities offer that kind of implausible excuse, they are lying. Just as the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission lied when it insisted from December 31 to January 20 that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical-staff infection, despite doctors on the ground in Wuhan seeing and experiencing the opposite. Zhang Jixian, a veteran respiratory doctor in a Wuhan hospital, recalled examining CT-scan images from a family on December 27 and concluding, “It is unlikely that all three members of a family caught the same disease at the same time unless it is an infectious disease.”
Contemplate how the Chinese government treated those who told the truth about this virus in the earliest weeks and months. The Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued summons to Dr. Li Wenliang, accusing him of “spreading rumors.” Two days later, at a police station, Dr. Li signed a statement acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts.” Seven other people were arrested on similar charges, and their fate is unknown.
On January 3, 2020, China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them.
From the beginning of the outbreak, the local Wuhan and national Chinese government’s strategy has been to lie and to punish those who were telling the truth. To say that the Chinese government has acted as if they have something to hide is an understatement of monumental proportions.
The zoonotic theory — that is, believing the virus jumped from bats to humans without one of the Wuhan laboratories playing a role — is missing an infected bat. Or an infected pangolin. Or a verifiable patient zero. Or evidence that any of the animals at the Huanan Seafood Market were the source of the initial infection. Or evidence that any animals at any other wet markets in Wuhan were the source of the initial infection. Or a bunch of animal-smugglers who got sick with COVID-19–like symptoms in November 2019. Or any diagnosed cases in Yunnan Province until well after the initial outbreak in Wuhan.
The lab-leak theory requires us to believe that SARS-CoV-2 is either a mutated version of the strain that attacked the miners in 2012, another virus found in the bats living in that copper mine, or a version of one of those viruses altered through gain-of-function research. It fits with the remarkable coincidence of an outbreak of a pandemic of a coronavirus found in bats beginning in a city with two facilities researching coronaviruses found in bats. It explains why no cases of COVID-19 were diagnosed in Yunnan Province until late January. It might even explain why cellphones went dark within the lab for several weeks, if that NBC News report is accurate.
This lab-leak theory would at least partially explain the Chinese and Wuhan government’s secrecy, the regime’s initial lies about the contagiousness of the virus, the sweeping efforts to cover up the truth about the virus, including threatening doctors with arrest, the persistent refusal to cooperate with the World Health Organization and its teams, the withholding of data about the initial patients, and the Chinese foreign ministry’s laughable accusations that COVID-19 is a U.S. bioweapon.
Which scenario makes more sense to you?