This article by Justin Ling in Foreign Policy is the best thing I’ve read about the Wuhan lab leak. Here are some excerpts:
When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.
When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”
And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.
Blaming humans for disease is as old as time itself. It’s inherently hard to trace outbreaks that take tangled paths from their origin point to where they’re first detected. Without firm answers, humankind loves to invent stories, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. In the absence of certainty, both sets of theories—natural or man-made—seem plausible: like Schrödinger’s cat, for virology.
When infectious diseases can be explained, however, nature is almost always the culprit. After SARS emerged, scientists suspected that the coronavirus had jumped from a bat to another mammal—probably the masked palm civet—but couldn’t explain how it had appeared on a farm in Foshan, in China’s Guangdong province.
More than a decade after the outbreak, researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered something interesting: Villagers who lived near bat-ridden caves in Yunnan province, around 900 miles from where the first outbreaks were recorded, had high levels of SARS antibodies, despite having never been infected. While it is next to impossible to figure out exactly how SARS traveled that distance, scientists are now fairly sure the journey began in that cave before passing to a mammal that ultimately infected a person.
Bats likely played a crucial role in incubating Ebola as well. A very similar strain of HIV to the ones seen in humans was discovered in chimpanzees in 1999, although it’s still unclear when exactly it jumped to humans. It’s still uncertain where Ebola or Lyme disease truly came from—and we may never know. But what we do know is that they almost certainly did not come from a U.S. government lab.
But, of course, sometimes governments do experiment on unwitting civilians. Sometimes viruses do escape from labs.
Yet although lab spillovers do happen, the vast majority are rapidly contained. Instances of serious outbreaks caused by malice or incompetence are vanishingly rare. One of the only known examples dates back to 1977, when a previously eliminated strain of H1N1 reemerged, likely as the result of a Soviet live vaccine program gone awry.
Given that history, it was no surprise that theories around COVID-19’s supposed lab origins emerged. But this time around, it’s not just idle speculation. It’s being taken as a serious possibility by some of the highest levels of the U.S. government—and by media keen for a new narrative.
When COVID-19 was first detected in December 2019, the Chinese government responded in its usual fashion: with repression and secrecy. Weeks of cover-up suddenly switched to countrywide containment. The ham-fisted attempt at secrecy raised the question: What else were they hiding?
It didn’t take long for online sleuths to hold up a compelling piece of evidence: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same one that had helped identify the likely origin of SARS, was just about 9 miles from the first reported outbreak.
In January 2020, the theory began on the fringes, with allegations of a secretive bioweapons program. Within weeks, the theory had broken loose on a network of shady and disreputable websites armed with little more than questions and supposition. The mainstream media’s silence, they said, was evidence of their complicity. They latched on to crumbs of evidence emerging in the early bedlam of the global pandemic, like a paper, later withdrawn, suggesting HIV genes had been inserted in the virus.
Then, the theory found a powerful constituent. Fox News reported in April 2020 of “increasing confidence” in the U.S. intelligence community around the idea that the virus came from the Wuhan lab—maybe not as a biological weapon, but as the result of an accidental leak. Then-President Donald Trump, in response to the news network, coyly endorsed the theory.
By that May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was promising “conclusive” evidence to back up the hypothesis.
That conclusive evidence didn’t materialize: Instead, there were dodgy dossiers and yet more sources talking up an “agreement” among “most of” America’s 17 intelligence agencies around the lab leak theory. (The Times would later report that then-Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger had endorsed the lab leak theory early on and had been pressing intelligence agencies to back him up.)
But while the theory was reported, many media outlets also dismissed it as conspiracy mongering. The possibility of a routine lab accident became caught up in the theories about bioweapons and germ warfare. Scientists were keen to focus debate on how to deal with the pandemic, not a geopolitical fracas.
Some circumstantial evidence emerged to support the theory, such as State Department cables reporting security issues at the Wuhan lab from 2018—although the full cable was less dramatic than the headlines about it. Big claims by the proponents didn’t pan out, however. Not one other country from the Five Eyes intelligence community backed up the claim that certainty was mounting—Australia even contradicted it outright, as did other parts of the U.S. intelligence community.
But as the Trump administration was collapsing, its former members saw pushing the theory as a path to future credibility.
In late December 2020, Pottinger popped up again in the British press, after telling Conservative members of Parliament that “there is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus.” One Tory MP reported Pottinger had said a Chinese whistleblower was providing the U.S. government with evidence for the theory.
A “fact sheet” from Pompeo’s State Department from around that time was simultaneously more ambiguous than Pompeo had been, acknowledging that it was indeterminate whether the virus’s origins were natural or accidental, and more conclusive, reporting that “several researchers inside the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The article then lays out all the recent speculation. You can click over to the article to go deeply into it …
But it’s a mirage. Despite proclamations to the contrary, there has been scant new, hard evidence pointing to the lab leak theory. What we have are the same conclusions drawn from China’s malign incompetence, the same pieces of circumstantial evidence, and a speculative theory.
None of this means a lab leak is impossible. But the “growing evidence” simply isn’t there.
“I don’t think that we’ve learned anything new in the last few months,” said Stephen Goldstein, who studies evolutionary virology at the University of Utah.
“We’re completely in want of evidence.”
To date, there are few—perhaps just a couple—peer-reviewed papers seriously entertaining the lab leak idea. Meanwhile, there have been numerous credible studies pointing to COVID-19’s natural origins. An exhaustive study published in Nature in March 2020 found “SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” The paper’s author Kristian G. Andersen said in a statement that the conclusions in the paper “have only since been further strengthened by additional evidence, of which there is a great deal.”
One of the most effective parts of the lab leak theory is not the quality of evidence but the quantity. Bits and pieces are fired out at a rapid pace, some of them even contradicting each other, before they can be adequately discussed or broken down.
Take the report of the sick lab workers: “What does it mean that three people, out of a large research staff, were sick with flu-like symptoms in flu season?” Goldstein said. Snappy headlines highlighting that the workers “sought hospital care” fall apart when the context is considered; in China, primary care is largely delivered through hospitals, and sick notes are compulsory for time off. Visiting a hospital in Wuhan was the equivalent of a trip to the doctor’s office in the United States.
Cheryl Rofer spent 35 years as a chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and specializes in arms control. She spent years handling plutonium in tightly controlled and highly secretive lab environments. “If these people became ill while working on a weapons program, or gain-of-function research, or anything like that—they would not go to a hospital,” she said.
Even the damning coincidence of the lab’s proximity to the outbreak is weak. It’s not certain that Wuhan was the origin of the virus, rather than simply where it happened to first be detected. As with SARS, the virus may have originated hundreds of miles away and gone unnoticed amid China’s underdeveloped rural medical system even when it jumped to humans. How SARS spread in 2003 makes a mockery of Wade’s claim that the distance involved is implausible.
Recently, the Daily Mail and New York Post trumpeted an “explosive” new study that supposedly offered firm proof that the COVID-19 virus was man-made. One of the paper’s authors told the Mail that four positively charged amino acids in the virus’s genetic makeup were the key evidence: “The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,” the author told the British paper.
Scientists wasted no time shredding the idea. One, calling it “unbelievable bullshit,” pointed out that a third of the proteins in the human body carry that characteristic. As another noted, “even man-made things must obey the laws of physics.”
“It has gotten utterly crazy,” Rofer said. “Even intelligent people are just losing it.”
Claims about the intelligence community’s conclusions must be viewed with a careful and cynical eye as well. U.S. intelligence contains a huge range of agencies—some with much better hit rates than others, and none of them geared toward answering complicated scientific questions. An exhaustive Vanity Fair feature, digging into the intelligence community’s inquiries—or lack thereof—provides much fanfare to the same meager pieces of evidence offered by Baker and Wade. The story provides the backstory to Pompeo’s brash claims of “enormous” evidence for the lab leak. The story reveals that a team inside the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance had doggedly pursued the theory as recently as this January. The feature alleges that Christopher Ford, then the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, was “so hostile to their probe that they viewed him as a blinkered functionary bent on whitewashing China’s malfeasance.”
In a lengthy rebuttal, Ford notes that he actually supported the lab leak theory—his main crime, it seems, was insisting that the conclusion that COVID-19 was a lab leak be put to independent experts. When those independent experts got a look at the State Department’s analysis, he wrote in an email at the time, they found it rested on a single statistical analysis prepared by one scientist “a pathologist, rather than a virologist, epidemiologist, or infectious disease modeler” without expertise in that type of modeling. The “statistical case seems notably weak,” Ford wrote.
CNN reported similar problems: “The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,” one source told the network, adding that “it smelled like they were just fishing to justify predetermined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their ‘science.’”
Imagine that. There’s a lot more about the ways in which these theories are super thin and where the current science is. He concludes:
Were some people, myself included, too glibly dismissive of the lab leak theory early on? Can a theory be right even when it’s pushed by bad actors for political ends and crank theorists? Sure. But that doesn’t mean the possibility wasn’t being actively explored. It was. There was not a conspiracy to silence research or speculation about the Wuhan lab.
Yet even after more than a year of study, the odds that the lab leak theory is correct remain roughly the same as when it was reported on a year ago—it’s theoretically possible but far less likely than zoonotic origin.
The origin of this virus matters. Yes, if Beijing is culpable for the origin of the novel coronavirus it merits repercussions—and even if it is not, China still needs to be held accountable for its obfuscation.
If the caves of Yunnan and the surrounding ecosystem gave us two highly infectious coronaviruses in two decades, there is no telling when the next such coronavirus could emerge—or from where.
If the COVID-19 virus, as previous viruses have done, hopped between various animals, perfecting its ability to infect humans along the way, it’s another indicator of how humanity’s intrusions into wilderness are unearthing new pathogens at a worryingly fast rate. That requires a substantial rethink of how we settle the Earth and how we manage wild nature.
That, of course, is a more unsettling prospect than simply blaming Beijing.
Discovering, with absolute certainty, the exact origin of COVID-19 may be impossible. But it is crucial that we let science, not hype or anxiety, determine the possible scenarios.
Those are all highlights that I pulled out, probably without the necessary scientific knowledge to know what’s truly important. I urge you to read the whole thing. But I think the opening is what’s really relevant. Pandemics always spur conspiracy theories and people always have their reasons for buying into them.
Skepticism or maybe more importantly, agnosticism is the smart way to deal with this. People who know a lot more than the rest of us are not in agreement about this. And they may never be.