The MIT Technology Review offers a long and mostly even-handed look at the hunt for the origin of Covid-19, featuring many new quotes from Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and an account of a tour through the facility’s labs. The piece is generally skeptical of the lab leak theory, but notes that Peter Daszak, who is a prominent advocate of the natural origins theory, “has potential conflicts of interest,” “there are still concerns that the biosafety standards in the Wuhan lab might not have been rigorous enough to prevent research activities from causing the pandemic,” “some of the Wuhan institute’s behavior has certainly raised red flags,” and “instead of tackling the publicity crisis directly, China has exacerbated mistrust by running obfuscation and disinformation campaigns of its own.” It is worth reading in full.
But there’s one line in the MIT Technology Review article I want to focus upon for a moment: “But one year after the WHO’s visit to Wuhan, the disease detectives have yet to find the guilty animal or other indisputable evidence of natural origins.”
The WHO team visit to Wuhan was in February 2021, so this means after two years of looking, and “tens of thousands” of samples, no one has found SARS-CoV-2 naturally occurring in animals in and around Wuhan, China.
As noted earlier this week, SARS-CoV-2 is spreading like wildfire among American white-tailed deer. The CDC affirms “many mammals, including cats, dogs, bank voles, ferrets, fruit bats, hamsters, mink, pigs, rabbits, racoon dogs, tree shrews, and white-tailed deer can be infected with the virus.” Gorillas at the Dallas zoo, snow leopards at a Bloomington zoo, lions at the Akron Zoo, – you name the animal, there’s a good chance they’ve caught Covid-19. And of course, we know how contagious this virus is among human beings.
So why is this virus so hard to find in Chinese bats? If this virus originated in a bat, and naturally evolved to maximize its ability to infect bats, and is genetically most similar to other viruses found in bats in China… why is SARS-CoV-2 proving impossible to find in bats in China? To modify Jon Stewart’s memorable metaphor, this is like finding chocolate everywhere except in the Hershey’s factory.
This is not how things played out in the first SARS outbreak. That coronavirus outbreak began with a handful of cases at the end of 2002 and hit more and more Chinese cities from January to March 2003. This passage from an April 2003 New York Times article stirs an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu:
…it would be three and a half months before China’s leaders would admit that their country had an epidemic of SARS. From January through the middle of March, doctors in Asia and Canada were encountering patients carrying a virulent and highly contagious germ, unaware that they were facing potentially lethal infection.
During that period, hundreds of health workers fell ill. During that period, well-meaning doctors were placing SARS patients in ordinary wards — as they would patients with normal pneumonia — and those patients were passing the infection on to hundreds of others.
By May 2003, researchers at the University of Hong Kong had found four masked palm civets were carrying the coronavirus that caused SARS and concluded “it was unlikely that people had been infected by eating civets. But the virus may have jumped into humans as they raised, slaughtered and cooked them.” The puzzle pieces started quickly falling into place – “one of China’s first confirmed SARS patients, Huang Xingchu, 34, worked as a cook in a Shenzhen restaurant.”
In other words, within a few months, investigators looking for a particular virus found that particular virus, where they expected to find that particular virus, near where people had developed the earliest cases. With the virus causing this pandemic – assuming we’re being told the truth – SARS-CoV-2 just cannot be found either in bats in caves or in animals in the wet markets in Wuhan.
There are three options:
- SARS-CoV-2 was in at least one of the animals in the local wet markets, but by the time anyone started looking for it, all traces of it were gone – even though this is a really contagious virus. I’m hoping natural-origin theorists would at least concede that this is unexpected.
- SARS-CoV-2 was in at least one of the animals in the local wet markets, and someone in an investigation did find it, but covered it up because they didn’t want to have to shut down the city’s wet markets. (For what it is worth, which is not much, this is the natural-origin scenario I find most likely.)
- SARS-CoV-2 was never in any of the animals in the wet market, because it originated someplace else – like, say the giant repositories of novel bat coronavirus samples being used in research, including gain-of-function research, in one of the city’s multiple research labs.