From the closing paragraphs of a book review written by former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb in the Wall Street Journal, evaluating David Quammen’s new book Breathless.
Chinese officials, for their part, put forward a third narrative, claiming that the virus arrived in China on frozen food shipped from the U.S. or Europe. “If the world could be persuaded that the virus reached Wuhan in a package of frozen halibut imported from Greenland,” Mr. Quammen writes, “. . . no one was to blame.” Such an explanation seeks to absolve China’s vast trade in illegal animals and their sale in crowded food markets, where Mr. Quammen believes the spillover occurred. In medicine we say that common things are common. It’s a variation on Occam’s Razor, a reminder to doctors not to hunt for some arcane cause of a disease when a patient’s symptoms point to an obvious conclusion. Spillover events have become frighteningly common.
That said, Mr. Quammen’s chronicle, with its emphasis on scientific inquiry, doesn’t recount the national-security reporting that can be used to buttress the lab-leak theory. We now know that scientists at the Wuhan Institute were performing research on coronaviruses by infecting animals whose immune systems had been engineered to resemble that of humans—a line of research that could have helped a virus adapt to infect people. We know that there was an outbreak of a flulike illness at the institute in the fall of 2019, around the time the virus is believed to have made its jump to humans. We know that scientists at the Wuhan Institute conducted research on novel coronaviruses in labs that took only basic precautions to guard against spread outside the lab. And Ms. Shi never disclosed to the World Health Organization the full sequences of the viruses she had in her possession. We don’t know, for example, if the Wuhan Institute had the strain found in the pangolins in March 2019.
The search for Covid’s origin seems to have stalled, which is lamentable. If the pandemic “came to humans by way of some direct, catastrophically unfortunate interaction with wild animals,” as Mr. Quammen believes, there’s much we can do to lower the risks of it happening again. If it came from a lab accident, we can tighten the procedures for handling novel respiratory pathogens in research settings. For now we are left with a battle of competing narratives—with just enough facts to support everyone’s preferred conclusion. There is a “very important reality about science,” Mr. Quammen wisely writes. “It’s a rational process leading toward ever-clearer understanding of the material world, but it’s also an activity performed by humans.”
Quammen wrote a book published in 2013, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, and in that book, he described his conversation with EcoHealth Alliance’s Alexsei Chmura about the lack of safety gear:
At this moment, I became conscious of a dreary human concern. Though we were searching for SARS-like coronavirus in these animals, and sharing their air in a closely confined space, none of us was wearing a mask. Not even a surgical mask, let alone an N95. Um, why is that? I asked Aleksei. “I guess it’s like not wearing a seat belt,” he said. What he meant was that our exposure represented a calculated, acceptable risk. You fly to a strange country, you jump into a cab at the airport, you’re in a hurry, you don’t speak the language — and usually there’s no seat belt, right/ DO you jump out and look for another cab? No, you proceed. You’ve got things to do. You might be killed on the way into town, true, but probably you won’t. Accepting that increment of risk is part of functioning within exigent circumstances. Likewise in a Chinese bat cave. If you were absolutely concerned to shield yourself against the virus, you’d need not just a mask but a full Tyvek coverall, and gloves, and goggles — or maybe even a bubble hood and visor, your whole suit positive-pressurized with filtered air drawn in by a batter-powered fan. “That’s not very practical,” Aleksei said.
Oh, I said, and continued handling the bagged bats. I couldn’t disagree. But what I thought was, catching SARS — that’s practical?
I wish I had a cheerier or more optimistic outlook, but I doubt we will ever definitively know the origin of Covid-19 because a lot of people are comfortable not knowing, and deeply uncomfortable with the ramifications of confirming a pandemic that has killed as many as 27 million people around the world was the result of a lab leak. As I wrote last month, “I think the Chinese government would prefer that the origin of the virus remain a mystery; that way, it doesn’t have to admit any fault, permanently shut down any wet markets, or allow international inspectors into its biological-research labs. Our current confusion, division, and waning interest is exactly the outcome that works out best for China.”
As long as the origin of Covid-19 is a mystery, life can go on, and people – including those with deep economic interests in China, and U.S. policymakers – can more or less live their lives the way they did before the pandemic. The moment someone finds smoking-gun evidence that it was a lab leak, everything regarding China and the rest of the world changes, and likely in dangerous and unpredictable directions.
We don’t know, because we don’t know. But we also don’t know because we don’t want to know.