On the menu today: Remember the lab-leak theory? A few scientists argue that it is dead, with new studies contending that the global pandemic, which likely killed three to four times the official death-toll numbers, must have started from someone catching the virus from an animal in a wet market. Other science writers say, “Not so fast,” arguing that the lack of cooperation from China and incomplete data make it impossible to rule out any point of origin. But two and a half years after Covid arrived and turned our lives upside down, the U.S. and the world have grown disturbingly comfortable with not knowing the answers.
We’ve Grown Accustomed to Not Knowing the Origin of Covid-19
According to the official numbers, Covid-19 has killed more than 6.5 million people and infected 611 million people around the world. Those numbers are undercounts; the estimate at the Economist calculates that since the start of the pandemic, humanity collectively experienced between 15.8 and 26.2 million more deaths than it ordinarily would. The team at the Economist explains the difficulty in nailing down a more precise figure:
Among the world’s 156 countries with at least 1 million people, we managed to obtain data on total mortality from just 84. Some of these places update their figures regularly; others have published them only once.
As we approach the autumn of 2022, Covid-19 is a nonentity in American daily life, with most Americans giving the virus little thought since the end of the Omicron wave. That’s not the case over in China, where “more than 70 Chinese cities have been placed under full or partial Covid lockdowns since late August, impacting more than 300 million people.” With daily life returning to normal in North America, Europe, and much of non-China Asia, very few people are still asking the question of what started the worst global pandemic since the Great Influenza of 1918. We have collectively moved on.
A bit more than a year ago, the U.S. government issued its summary statement about its investigation, infuriatingly shrugging and declaring, “The [intelligence community] remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” This was akin to declaring that the coin could have landed heads up or tails up.
If the intelligence community is continuing to investigate the origin of Covid-19, it’s being awfully quiet about it; the past year has brought no significant new updates. And it seems as if most of America’s leaders have effectively decided that they don’t want to know.
In the past month or so, Dr. David Gorski, writing under the pen name Orac, has argued that “two new studies published last month strongly support a natural zoonotic origin for COVID-19 centered at the wet market in Wuhan, China,” and lamented that “the conspiracy mongers” haven’t changed their tune a bit.
Over at UnHerd, Thomas Fazi argued that the lab-leak theory was not dead, but in fact was very much alive:
Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance. This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China.
One of the new studies Gorski refers to contends that the virus actually jumped from an animal into humans at two different points in Wuhan in the autumn of 2019:
If SARS-CoV-2 was already able to infect humans, it shouldn’t be surprising that more than one introduction occurred. In any case, this study is robust evidence that the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in an animal reservoir and that it very likely it first made the jump to humans in the wet market at Wuhan in November 2019. The study did not successfully identify the intermediary animal and is observational. It is, however, powerful.
Gorski also writes that “there were claims that workers at WIV were infected with SARS-COV-2 in November 2019, but exhaustive contact tracing failed to find these cases.”
A lot of this comes down to whether you think the Chinese government is making a genuine, good-faith effort to find the origin of the virus. The Chinese government has certainly been secretive and obscurant at many times: silencing Li Wenliang and other doctors who tried to warn about the virus, passing along inaccurate information about human-to-human spread to the World Health Organization to share with the world, refusing to cooperate with international inquiries, and contending that the whole pandemic can be traced back to Maine lobsters. As the New York Times reported: “To push the idea that the virus didn’t come from China, the government has misrepresented experts’ remarks and given dubious theories the veneer of science.”
Many scientists, who think of themselves as reflexively honest and adamantly dedicated to telling the truth, do not like the idea that other scientists could be dishonest or complicit in a cover-up.
I am open to the argument that the Chinese government’s secrecy could reflect something besides an attempt to hide a lab leak. The Wuhan Institute of Virology likely houses some Chinese biological-research secrets that are unrelated to the Covid-19 pandemic; the U.S. State Department contended in January 2021 that “the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
I cannot concur with the assessment of Angela Rasmussen, who contended that, “for the Chinese government, it’s actually worse if Covid-19 came from the market.” (Really? Really? A zoonotic origin is worse than the world learning that Chinese scientists are recklessly conducting dangerous research?) But let’s concede that the concept of a global pandemic that kills 10 to 20 million people starting in a wet market would still be a great embarrassment for the Chinese government. But the wet markets in China are still open — “Authorities said half of the cases could be traced to wet markets and 20 per cent of the infections might have occurred on public transport” — and there are reports that recently killed animals are hanging out to dry at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. If Covid-19 started at this or some other wet market, the Chinese and Wuhan authorities are not acting like they are particularly worried about a repeat.
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.
Richard Ebright summarized the state of the lab-leak hypothesis in a series of tweets on Monday, laying out all the ways in which the virus that emerged just down the road from the WIV is similar to what was being researched inside the WIV.
The bats that carry the virus most similar to SARS-CoV-2 don’t live anywhere near Wuhan. During the period from 2015 to 2017, scientists and science-policy specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting and contemplating research that posed an unacceptable risk of lab accident and pandemic. In 2017 and 2018, the WIV constructed a novel chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate in human airway cells. In 2018, in an NIH grant proposal, WIV and its collaborators proposed constructing more novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, “targeting chimeras that replace natural spike gene with novel spike genes encoding spikes that have higher binding affinities to human cells” — in other words, viruses that are even more infectious and contagious among human beings. “In 2017-2019, WIV constructed and characterized novel SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a biosafety level patently inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and patently inadequate to contain a virus having transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.” Finally, since the start of the pandemic, we have repeatedly learned that initial sweeping statements and denials from the likes of Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance were misleading and inaccurate.
If all of that was going on inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and then in autumn 2019, a completely separate bat virus — so genetically similar to the ones being studied and altered inside the institute that just happened to be so spectacularly effective at infecting human beings — happened to jump from a bat, or a pangolin into the respiratory system of a human being . . . it is just a mind-boggling, astronomical-odds astounding coincidence. It is akin to Jon Stewart’s metaphor of an outbreak of “chocolatey goodness” just down the road from the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania.
But if smoking-gun evidence ever existed, it was likely destroyed long ago. Separately, a WIV worker could well have absent-mindedly forgotten or ignored a safety precaution, inhaled the virus, remained asymptomatic, and went about his day, not even realizing that he was Patient Zero.
Finding the origin of Covid-19 does not appear to be a priority of the Biden administration. Even among China hawks, the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate on solving the mystery takes a back seat to concerns over Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, the genocide of the Uyghurs, the crackdown in Hong Kong, etc.
There is occasional talk of Republicans’ holding more hearings on the subject if they win control of the House, but the typical Republican is probably more interested in holding hearings on the subject of Hunter Biden. From early on, certain Democrats concluded that even discussing the lab-leak theory was dangerous: “This conspiracy theory — promoted by former President Donald Trump — is extremely dangerous. If the American public were to believe that China caused 600,000 Americans to die, more than the World War II, Korea and Vietnam wars combined, there may well be demands for war.” The responsible thing, in their minds, was to refuse to even consider the possibility.
(By the way, would the U.S. really jump into a shooting war with China if we determined it was responsible for a global pandemic? Does that path really get us where we want to go? Wouldn’t it be more useful to use the revelation to diplomatically isolate China or to destroy its reputation for competence all across the globe?)
We don’t know how the Covid-19 pandemic started, and a lot of people are just fine with that mystery remaining unsolved.
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Paddington, who kindly writes of my latest thriller:
The first two Dangerous Clique books were fun, but Gathering Five Storms is an excellent thriller that crackles with tension. Jim uses flashbacks explore his characters in depth. And unlike any thriller we have ever read, it focuses on the joys and challenges of parenthood. Of course, it has the quips, cultural references, and exotic locales that you expect, but Jim has really upped his game in Gathering Five Storms. It is a must read for thriller lovers looking for something really different.
Over at GoodReads, Jonathan assesses:
Geraghty keeps improving as a novelist. This is a great improvement from the last installment. Good plotting, and great reflections on parenthood. The call-backs to Geraghty’s -Heavy Lifting- are both explicit (in a funny line) and implied. A good beach or rainy day read.