For much of the past year anyone who considered the possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, originated in a Chinese lab was accused of racism, tinfoil-hattery, or both. But that is no longer working, as the anthropogenic argument gains credibility, and momentum.
There is something painfully resonant about the fact that Dr Ai Fen, first to blow the whistle on Covid-19’s emergence from Wuhan, has gone blind in one eye. Dr Ai described herself as having a mental breakdown at the start of this year. She could not get eye treatment at the hospital she worked in because all three ophthalmologists, including Li Wenliang, who was arrested for warning Chinese authorities about SARS-CoV-2, died during the pandemic.
Looking back now is painful, and potentially humiliating, and it is in part impossible to see what really happened. What follows cannot shine a light into blind corners; rather it surveys key persons and points of fact, with links to texts that every curious reader will pursue.
The People – Half a dozen journos & a preponderance of scientists
Nicholas Baker. The most comprehensive piece appeared on the first cover of the New York Magazine in January 2021, headed ‘The lab-leak hyphothesis: For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if…?’
The lab-leak hyphothesis by Nicholas Baker is 12 000 words long, none wasted. Baker is a seasoned author and journalist who has contributed to the London Review of Books and the New Yorker. He has also written erotic novels in the highfalutin tradition of the 14th Century Italian master Boccaccio, and made the daring, somewhat nerdy argument in Harper’s that while some children excel at mathematics (Baker was one of them) none should be forced to study it beyond grade 9.
Agree with his conclusions or not, Baker is a serious journalist when that is his mission, and his lab-leak hyphothesis is profound in scope and depth. His piece would have sent shockwaves across the US and beyond were it not for the fact that two days after its release Capitol Hill in Washington DC was invaded, leaving little room to consider much else in the months that followed.
Alison Young. Momentum returned to the lab-leak hypothesis via a punchy piece by Alison Young. Young heads the Public Affairs department at Missouri’s School of Journalism and writes for the largest newspaper in the US, USA Today.
Young spent more than a decade exposing dozens of major lab-leaks in the US, culminating in a 2015 award-winning investigative exposé, Inside America’s secretive biolabs. This showed, to America’s shock and horror, that ‘more than 100 U.S. labs working with potential bioterror pathogens had faced secret federal sanctions for safety violations, and that regulators had allowed them to keep conducting experiments while failing inspections, sometimes for years.’
In March 2021 Young’s piece asked ‘Could an accident have caused COVID-19? Why the Wuhan lab-leak theory shouldn’t be dismissed‘. It provides horrifying context, and asks the glaring question: if the US and UK have been literally plagued by lab-leaks, why ignore the possibility of this happening in Xi’s China? Detail on the actual Wuhan Institute of Virology is largely in line with what Baker already indicated.
Nicholas Wade. The most recent and terrifying contribution to the lab-leak hyphothesis is by Nicholas Wade, who spent three decades as a staff writer in the science section of the New York Times, ending in 2012. Wade’s 11 000 word piece, Origin of Covid – Following the Clues, was published on the well-established Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences and was given a supporting precis in the Wall Street Journal, among others.
Is Wade still credible? Some would say not. In 2014 he published a book proposing a new biological theory about race which was panned in the New York Times. Wade observes that evolution never ends and speculates that forcing European Jews into mathematical professions for most of the last millennium might partially explain, through genetic pressures, why Ashkenazi Jews won so many Nobel prizes in the last century. This idea is taboo in many circles. When it was floated in a different context by Bret Stephens on the eve of 2020, he was nearly fired from the New York Times and denounced as a ‘eugenicist’ by colleagues.
The Washington Postechoed a subtler form of this criticism against Wade, while acknowledging that his latest book also shows that most people in Africa have a distinct gene that helps combat malaria, and that European descendants evolved greater lactose tolerance, among other facts that suggest we can look into our recent evolutionary past without turning into mad Nazi scientists like Dr Mengele.
In short, both Nicholas Wade and Nicholas Baker are mavericks whose successful careers nevertheless will leave some asking questions, while Young is unimpeachable but largely repeated Baker’s points on Wuhan. The same cannot be said of the UK Sunday Times which, in July 2020, published an expose titled ‘Revealed: Seven Years coronavirus trail from mine deaths to a Wuhan lab‘.
Colvert, Arbuthnott, Sherwell. The ‘Revealed’ piece, coming in at 5 500 words, is circumspect but clearly lays out the evidence and argument for the claim that a virus extracted from bat faeces in 2013 was taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which it may have been artificially turned into SARS-CoV-2 and then accidentally leaked into Wuhan’s population. This evidence has only grown since then.
The ‘Revealed’ article, perhaps the original high-quality punt for seriously considering the lab-leak hyphothesis, is co-authored by Jonathan Calvert, editor of the UK Sunday Times’ Insight section and one of the UK’s most accoladed journalists; George Arbuthnott, an award-winning rising star and Insight deputy editor; and Phillip Sherwell, the Times’ Asian correspondent.
Calvert, Arbuthnott, Sherwell, Baker, Young and Wade are all quality journalists, intermediaries between jargon-heavy scientists and lay people like you and me. Dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis out of hand, and you dismiss not only them, but also the publications that support them, from USA Today, the Sunday Times, Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, the Wall Street Journal, and more. No one can pretend anymore that the lab-leak hypothesis is fringe.
Scientists
Professor Richard H. Ebright. The chief scientist considering the anthropogenic thesis is Professor Ebright, who teaches and heads a research institute at Rutgers University, the top-ranked public university in the US Northeast. In July last year Professor Ebricht told the Sunday Times in London that it is ‘a distinct possibility’ that the Wuhan Virology Institute may have created SARS-CoV-2. When writing to Baker at the New York Post he upgraded his language to say, ‘the news of a novel coronavirus ***screamed*** lab release’.
Dr Robert Redfield. Former Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr Redfield told CNN in March 2021 that the ‘most likely’ origin of SARS-CoV-2 was ‘from a laboratory’.
Redfield and Ebright are forthright, but many more academics are coming out in cautious tones. Professor David A. Relman of Stanford University is one example. He argued that one cannot rule out the anthropogenic hypothesis at this stage, while noting that ‘if SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again’.
Against this, the World Health Organisation (WHO) was reported as saying that it is ‘extremely unlikely‘ that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab. But an open letter written by 26 experts from some of the most respected institutions in the US, UK, France, Belgium and Austria, and published by the Wall Street Journal, have begged to differ. These experts charge that it was ‘all but impossible’ for the WHO to figure out how the virus originated because of ‘structural limitations’ built into their method of ‘investigation’, which rendered it basically blind to anything but a preconceived conclusion.
The names of these scientists and links to their standing is available in the link above. Their surnames are Butler, Canard, Cap, Chan, Claverie, Colombo, Courtier, Ribera, Decroly, de Maistre, Demaneuf, Goffinet, Halloy, Leitenberg, Lentzos, McFarlane, Metzl, Morello, Petrovsky, Quay, Rahalkar, Segreto, Theißen, and van Helden.
Anyone who claims that the lab-leak hypothesis is a mad conspiracy theory should bear in mind that these are mainstream scientists who really do know better than to dismiss it out of hand.
The Anthropogenic Argument – Cleavage, language, static and teletransportation
Perhaps the most important evidence in favour of the lab-leak hypothesis is highlighted by the two Nicholases, Baker and Wade, sourced from professor Decroly (in the list above) of the Aix-Marseille University and his colleagues.
In February 2020 Decroly et al published what might turn out to be the most important scientific investigation into the lab-leak hyphothesis, titled ‘The spike glycoprotein of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV contains a furin-like cleavage site absent from CoV of the same clade‘.
Put in plain English that means there is something very dangerous in SARS-CoV-2 that is not found in its much broader family of coronaviruses. Call it an evolutionary oddity.
Simplifying things to a cartoon, you ‘have a protein cutting tool’, as Wade puts it, in your cells called furin and the virus has a problem where furin could help. The part sticking out of the virus that detects when it has come into contact with a host cell is like a sensor that has to break off before ‘the tiny morbid ballet’ begins ‘whereby the virus burns a hole in a host cell’s outer membrane and finds its way inside’, as Baker puts it. All known beta-coronaviruses break off their edge sensor in a clunky way. But SARS-CoV-2 tricks your own furin to do the cutting neatly for it, turning your body into an instrument for the virus’s break-in.
The way SARS-CoV-2 does this is diabolically efficient and is, on the available evidence, unique in SARS-CoV-2’s section of the genetic family tree. So, for this ‘god-awful’ furin cleavage site to have adapted naturally by natural selection is stunningly unlikely, though not impossible.
As against this several Chinese scientists, and one Australian, led by Professor Hong Zhou, published this scientific analysis about RmYN02. That strangely named beast is the second closest relation to SARS-CoV-2, a virus extracted straight from bat samples dating back to May 2019, which shows some similar features at the furin cleavage site to SARS-CoV-2.
This research (not acknowledged by Wade or Baker) published in June 2020 has been widely used to support the natural origins theory, but it does have a couple of problems. The most important is that although Zhou’s team observe some similarity between RmYN02 and SARS-CoV-2, they do not claim that RmYN02 can actually pull off the diabolical trick of furin cleavage. Further scientific investigation published in 2021 shows ‘RmYN02’ and other candidates ‘are predicted not to be cleaved by furin’. In short SARS-CoV-2 is still the only virus of its kind known to be able to do this. Cleavage is unique in the ‘clade’, and so hard to square with natural evolution.
To understand the second major argument it is worth knowing that the same genetic function can be programmed by different DNA letters, almost like how ‘brak’ and ‘runt’ are different letters with the same meaning that most South Africans understand. It turns out human cells use a particular DNA sequence, ‘CGG’, to make a kind of genetic word called a ‘codon’, but ‘CGG’ is ‘coronaviruses least popular codon for arginine’, as Wade puts it.
If that sounds like Greek, think of it like this. Humans can talk about ‘brakke’ but coronaviruses can’t easily get their tongues around it, they would rather talk about ‘runts’.
The extraordinary thing is SARS-CoV-2 has got a very human ‘CGG’ double sequence right at its furin cleavage site. That means at its most unique point SARS-CoV-2 suddenly starts speaking a whole new language, strange in the usual coronavirus world, and its whisper has been death.
Wade quotes David Baltimore, an esteemed virologist and former president of Caltech as saying: ‘When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus. These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2’.
Now if the odds of the new virus developing these features naturally are ‘smoking gun’ high, what about the odds of if it happening on purpose?
Dr Steven Quay (listed above) observes, in ‘An Introduction to a Bayesian Analysis of the Laboratory Origin of SARS-CoV-2‘ that ‘since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory’. Moreover, this has been achieved at least eleven times in experiments ‘published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
The genetic language in the unique cleavage makes the natural hypothesis unlikely, while fitting exactly with the anthropogenic hypothesis for the current pandemic.
The third major argument against the natural hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 did not behave as one would expect if it naturally evolved from bats or some other animal to infect humans. After natural zoonotic transfer one would expect a lot of adaptations early on, as the virus moulded into its new, human environment. But, instead, SARS-CoV-2 was relatively static in genetic formulation for most of 2020 and has evolved like conventional human coronaviruses since then, finding new ways to escape part of the immune-defence system every eight months with scant ‘host adaptations’ in between.
It is almost as if SARS-CoV-2 has been around in humans as long as the common cold, evolving in similar ways that do not easily compute with the natural hypothesis according to which the virus only just arrived from a non-human environment.
Finally, there is the more well-known fact that the bats that carry the closest relations to SARS-CoV-2 occur 1 500km away from Wuhan. That is greater than the distance between Joburg and Cape Town. The odds of the virus travelling all that distance without leaving a trace in between are small to invisible. And yet no in-between infections have been found.
Compound the odds of SARS-CoV-2 moving 1 500km without leaving a trace with the odds of it then evolving like it has been in humans for decades with the odds of it achieving the only furin cleavage site of its kind with the odds of it also speaking a language at that very furin site which is foreign to its own kind but familiar to anyone splicing genes in a laboratory and you might begin to wonder why anyone accepted the natural hypothesis in the first place?
The Ad Hominem
Everybody knows that science works best when scientists don’t look too deeply into each other’s pockets or try to read each other’s minds for nefarious motives. Better for them to confront facts and data in good faith while competing with one another in a race for the truth. But forensic science is another matter because that means investigating a crime.
This is where journalists step up, and scientists tend to lean back. One reason Wade’s piece has already gained global attention is that he makes no reservations about identifying one of the chief villains in the alleged cover-up of the lab-leak hyphothesis, Peter Daszak, and his funders, the US government.
Peter Daszak. That is a name you might want to commit to memory. He is the president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. From June 2014 to May 2019 EcoHealth Alliance had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) which has been headed by Dr Anthony Fauci since 1984. Wade alleges this grant was for the purpose of ‘gain-of-function’ research, which means turning viruses that cannot hurt humans into super-bugs that can kill millions to see how that works and maybe later make a vaccine. (Disclaimer: I think some gain-of-function research is very important, but only when it is open and well-managed).
Senator Rand Paul levelled the allegation that under Fauci’s watch the US government sponsored EcoHealth which subcontracted the Wuhan Institute of Virology to do gain-of-function research that might have created SARS-CoV-2 in a test-tube, to which Fauci replied that ‘with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect.’
One reason to doubt Fauci are texts from the grants to EcoHealth/Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is going to sound Greek too, but a translation will follow. From 2018: ‘Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.’
And from 2019: ‘We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.’
Here is Wade to translate: ‘What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi [head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology] set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (‘reverse genetics’ and ‘infectious clone technology’), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (‘in vitro’) and humanized mice (‘in vivo’). And this information would help predict the likelihood of ‘spillover,’ the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.’
‘The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.’
That is a massive claim, meaning Shi applied to do exactly the kind of research that could create a new super-virus like SARS-CoV-2. Did Shi think that she might have created SARS-CoV-2? Yes indeed.
Baker quotes Shi as saying that she was panicked when SARS-CoV-2 was first identified as spreading through humans in Wuhan. She checked the records and says she found no exact matches with whatever she had been brewing up and said ‘that really took a load off my mind. I had not slept a wink for days’.
But as Baker infers, ‘If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab.’
Peter Daszak, however, had other ideas. In February 2020 Daszak allegedly organized, drafted and certainly co-authored a paper stating categorically that ‘(we) stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin’.
What should be condemned, and Wade does it so well, is Peter Daszak’s failure to declare a conflict of interest. Daszak declared ‘no conflict of interest’, but consider the facts. Since Daszak was involved in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab-leak hyphothesis puts him in the zone of culpability. Covering that fact up by declaring no conflict of interest is a prima facie reason to have the paper withdrawn from Lancet, though there is no indication of this happening.
Moreover, the reasoning employed by the paper, namely that SARS-CoV-2 does not bear obvious traces of human intervention (the furin cleavage site was not yet a point of interest) is offensively disingenuous since Daszak knows as well as anybody that new ‘no-see’m’ techniques had been developed for gain-of-function research for decades. The ‘no-see’m’ label was coined by Dr Ralph Baric, who has been able to artificially create viruses ‘just like the real thing’ since at least 2002. Baric taught and worked with Shi.
Stunningly, in a 9 December 2019 interview that you can watch here Daszak talks about his and Shi’s Wuhan works and brags about gain-of-function research, saying, ‘coronaviruses – you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily…You can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab’ and so it goes on. With all that, Daszak pretends that if humans made a virus they would have to use techniques decades out of date to justify his claim that the anthropogenic hypothesis is a wild ‘conspiracy’.
There is nothing pretty about Daszak’s anti-scientific behaviour in 2020. He continued to condemn anyone who did not agree with him as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ spouting ‘pure baloney’. He told the London Times that the bat sample that most closely resembles SARS-CoV-2 – a vital sample for understanding the origins – which had been stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now ‘gone’. But it does get worse.
When the WHO established a commission to investigate the origins of the virus, Daszak joined as a member of that commission to investigate a matter in which he not only had a conflict of interest but had already declared any version but his own to be unthinkable.
Conclusion
Do not be fooled. All the journalists and scientists I’ve mentioned here who consider the anthropogenic hypothesis, repeatedly express that they are open to the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally. Wade and Baker repeat this point emphatically. They are not like Daszak. They do not wish to condemn open-minded independent actors, or curious readers, who want to consider both versions. Just the opposite. The want to open minds, not shut them down.
As it stands the evidence is incomplete. At this stage it leans heavily in favour of the lab-leak hypothesis, but more might come in. So long as there is doubt there will be outrage. With Washington and Beijing both potentially implicated, doubt may linger indefinitely, and that would be its own kind of evidence.
In the meantime, we all are forced to look at the Covid-19 origins metaphorically, with one eye blind. For Dr Ai, things are worse than that. Matters are worse still for the families of the millions that have died.
[Image: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay]
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