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A lab leak has already been dismissed by many as a conspiracy theory. But the concept is gaining traction, even as the fact that the virus has emerged from a market increases.
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By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Benjamin Mueller
WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2021, when studies on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic are going nowhere and the factor is shrouded in sour partisan politics, Stanford microbiologist David Relman quietly made a request to his congressman.
He told his representative, Anna Eshoo, that he was preparing a letter from leading scientists calling for an open and independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19, adding whether it came from a lab in Wuhan, China. He asked if she would publicly approve of the idea.
Consciousness worked. As soon as the letter was published in the prestigious journal Science, Ms. Eshoo became one of the first Democrats in Congress to call for an investigation into the origins of Covid.
It’s the prelude to a radical policy shift on the issue: Within weeks, President Biden ordered a comprehensive review of intelligence on the onset of the pandemic, which has since yielded combined conclusions.
Part of the Covid hunting story is China’s obstruction that has left scientists with incomplete evidence, all about an ever-evolving virus. out of reach, as is the case with competing speculation that the virus leaked from a lab.
But the story is also about politics and how Democrats and Republicans have filtered for evidence through their partisan lenses.
Some Republicans have become obsessed with the concept of a lab leak after former President Donald J. Trump raised it in the early months of the pandemic despite little evidence about it. This made the theory poisonous to many Democrats, who saw it as an effort through Mr. Trump to divert attention from his administration’s mistakes to involve the spread of the virus.
The intense political debate, now in its fourth year, has at times turned scientists into lobbyists, vying for time and favor with lawmakers. Relman is one of many like-minded researchers and thinkers who have worked effectively in Washington’s corridors of force to force skeptical journalists, lawmakers and Democrats to take the concept of lab leaks seriously.
But the political momentum has not aligned with the evidence. Although the concept of an accidental lab leak has now gained traction in Washington, the findings reported last week have strengthened market theory. Extracting a treasure trove of genetic knowledge taken from swabs at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in early 2020, virus experts said they discovered samples containing genetic curtains of the coronavirus and illegally traded raccoon dogs. The discovery, while inconclusive, indicated an inflamed animal.
New market knowledge suggests China is clinging to clues that may reshape the debate. But for now, at least, the concept of a lab leak turns out to have prevailed in public opinion: Two recent polls show that about two-thirds of Americans believe covid is probably in a lab.
In January 2020, when the virus began circulating in Wuhan, Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser who had worked as a journalist in China, developed suspicions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, known for its complex studies on bat coronaviruses.
Mr. Pottinger quietly made a formal request asking the intelligence services to investigate the new outbreak.
In Washington’s polarized ecosystem, the concept that the virus might have originated in the Wuhan lab was seeping into the public debate. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, raised the concept at a Senate hearing and on Twitter.
Around the same time, according to emails later leaked, some U. S. virologists have been in the U. S. The U. S. Department of Health and Security privately told fitness officials, adding Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the virus could have been conceived in a lab. . , but requires further study.
When they analyzed the data and added herbal viruses that shared critical characteristics with the new virus, they concluded otherwise. In one study, they wrote that the virus is “not a laboratory creation or an intentionally manipulated virus. “
The study also indicated that the virus was unlikely to evolve in some laboratory experiments (it didn’t pay much attention to whether a scientist collecting or isolating an herbal virus might have accidentally released it, a speculation for which no direct evidence remains).
These findings reinforced the view of a February 2020 letter in The Lancet in which scientists, fearing that lab leaks could threaten China’s knowledge sharing, condemned “conspiracy theories” about a lab-related origin.
Prominent scientists would likely have publicly lined up, but the president did not share their views. In late April 2020, Trump announced that he had seen data supporting a lab leak, but was “not allowed” to share it. Pottinger said he did not tell Mr. Pottinger about the origins and that he had not noticed the president’s comment coming.
Democrats have been reluctant to investigate the origins of the pandemic. Like the president’s references to the “Chinese virus,” his suggestion of a lab leak sounded xenophobic and risked fueling anti-Asian sentiment. They trusted Dr. Fauci, who said evidence strongly suggested the virus had been manipulated. (He has since said he is open to the concept of a laboratory accident. )Eshoo said his comments made him doubt who was espousing a lab leak theory.
“It seemed to me that Dr. Fauci, no matter what he knew, didn’t get him to where he was,” Eshoo said.
When Biden won the 2020 election, some experts who called for further investigation into speculation of a lab leak saw an opportunity to convince Democrats to take a closer look at the idea.
In December 2020, Jamie Metzl, a biosecurity and generation expert at the Atlantic Council who had worked in the Clinton administration, arranged a personal phone call with Jake Sullivan, the new national security adviser. Metzl argued, he said, that “an investigation — the related origin is a very genuine possibility. “
Metzl joined a small organization, organized through French and Belgian scientists, who said speculation of a lab leak simply cannot be ruled out. Scientists, he said, fought to get the letters published in clinical journals. The organization published its reviews in the media around the world.
Around the same time, in March 2021, some virus experts were frustrated by a long-awaited report on the origins of the pandemic through the World Health Organization and China.
The report did not hint at covid cases as far back as experts wanted. And he classified the idea that the virus is transported to Wuhan in frozen food packages: an unlikely scenario, but one that China liked because it could carry the blame beyond the country’s borders. – as more likely than a laboratory incident.
There was still no evidence of a lab leak, but much remained to be known, and China seemed so determined to stand in the way of answers, that more scientists began calling for further examination.
Stanford’s Dr. Relman arranged the letter to Science along with other prominent colleagues, adding Alina Chan, a scientific adviser at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.
In August, Mr. Metzl helped plan a bipartisan briefing for senators on lab leak speculation, in which Dr. Relman and Dr. Bloom spoke.
“I left the assembly with a much more open mind,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
While proponents of the laboratory leak concept have made their case to Congress, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, has set out to verify those claims. He once researched, and helped debunk, a theory that AIDS originated from infected polio. He believed that a lab leak was imaginable and that’s why he signed the Science letter.
He first pushed the clinical journal Nature, he said, to ask researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make public the genetic sequences of previous coronaviruses they had reported in the journal. They did, and soon after, in May 2021, they published a study describing those viruses, none of which were similar enough to the pandemic virus for genetic tweaks to create it.
Next, Dr. Worobey analyzed the first Covid patients and found that a disproportionate number had worked or visited the market.
Meanwhile, evidence has emerged that living mammals known to transmit coronaviruses, in addition to raccoon dogs, mammals with fox-like fur, were sold in the Huanan market before the pandemic. And in September 2021, a report on coronaviruses recently discovered in Laos bats showed that grass viruses fixed in human cells.
The news about the Wuhan Institute of Virology also raised considerations about a lab leak, even if solid evidence of such an incident remained elusive.
For some scientists, the institute’s efforts to examine novel coronaviruses have raised questions about what else it might have collected. Defense in 2018 to marry the Institute of Virology over experiments that allegedly genetically changed coronaviruses.
The unfunded proposal. But considerations have fueled Republican attacks on Dr. Fauci over his institute’s investment in other EcoHealth projects and drew attention to the lab leak theory.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who had publicly argued that a lab leak deserved to be investigated, said he helped congressional aides ask the questions Republican Senator Rand Paul wanted to ask Dr. Fauci at upcoming hearings. And Dr. Relman said he tried to help Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who were reviewing the investigation, find common ground with Democrats.
Congressional research gained momentum even as Dr. Worobey’s studies leaned toward advertising origin. In February 2022, he and others reported that the clustering of the first Covid cases in the Huanan market could be explained only through possibility. The genetic diversity of the viruses collected early in the outbreak also targeted the market.
The studies, published in Science, persuaded many virologists that the notoriously insecure industry had triggered, as in past events in China, a fatal epidemic.
But some scientists and policymakers weren’t convinced. In the Senate, aides spent several months on a bipartisan investigation into the origins of the pandemic, adding the concept of a lab leak. The resulting report, a sign of persistent partisan divisions, was endorsed only through Republicans, said security hazards at the Wuhan Institute of Virology made a lab leak likely. But he presented no direct evidence to recommend this happening.
A few weeks after the report’s release, Republicans took over the House.
This month, the new House subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic convened its first hearing to read about the origins of the pandemic. Market theory has hardly been discussed.
Some scientists saw hearing as one-sided and full of clinical inaccuracies. Ebright, however, saw an opportunity. With House Republicans leading covid hearings and Democrats occupying the Senate by a narrow margin, he hopes to mobilize the public to push for bipartisan Senate hearings on the origins of covid.
“Political balance is on a knife’s edge,” he said. “A very small amount of support can have a significant impact. “
Other scientists, however, said the crusade through supporters of lab leaks, since creating a more open discussion, has resulted in such vitriolic attacks that many researchers are reluctant to speak publicly about the issue.
The latest knowledge about raccoon dogs, which virologists say has added compelling evidence of an advertising origin, has created new tension in China for percentage of data that can link the origin of Covid to wild animals. But others said new market-related discoveries, as past, contained holes.
“I’m very concerned that we’ll jump over bits that are incomplete and can’t be verified,” Dr. Relman said.
After 3 years of divisive politics, Ms. Eshoo said she would like to see the investigation into the origins of covid out of the hands of Congress and passed to an independent panel.
“If you take partisan politics and combine it with science,” he said, “it’s a poisonous combination. “
Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed to the research.
Audio produced through Kate Winslett.
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