A week ago, Vanity Fair and ProPublica published a lengthy exposé on the origins of covid-19, in which they revealed new evidence of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in November 2019.
The big reveal: The report makes it much more likely that before Covid-19 was born of a twist of fate at the WIV, where one of the scientists was likely exposed to the virus. The new evidence in the ProPublica report largely centers on the paintings of a translator, Toy Reid, who claims to have an exclusive gift for interpreting the “secret language of the Chinese administration. “Even local Chinese speakers can’t stick to it, he states in the article.
Reid reviewed a collection of internal and external WIV communications and said it discovered messages in the fall of 2019 indicating “inhumane operating situations and hidden protection hazards. “And most importantly, a Nov. 12 message refers to some sort of biosecurity breach, which may have simply referred to an accidental exposure of a user in the lab to a virus.
The date of this incident appears to coincide with an incident described on a Wall St. Journal of 2021, which reported that 3 WIV workers had requested hospital care in November 2019. This incident has never been proven to involve Covid-19 infections.
To take some context: Reid’s findings were published through a Republican U. S. senator. U. S. Secretary of State Richard Burr in a report that was not approved by the Senate Plenary Committee investigating the origins of COVID-19. Burr’s report concluded that Covid-19 “is likely more than not, the result of an investigation-related incident. “
Unsurprisingly, this news has attracted a lot of attention.
First, the report might seem convincing, until you realize it contains no real biological evidence: there are no reports of actual infections and no major details about viruses that might have escaped the WIV at the time. It turns out to be fully founded on Toy Reid’s translation superpowers.
It didn’t take long for other experts to intervene. There are many Chinese speakers, adding local speakers who speak much more fluently than Toy Reid. One translator wrote on Twitter that Reid “screwed up. “Another said a critical passage known through Reid “does not recommend at all that a biosecurity factor has occurred. “
Hmm. Here, I will have to admit that I have no idea who is here, since I do not speak or read Chinese. However, it turns out that ProPublica and Vanity Fair would possibly have relied too heavily on a single translator who may also have simply been politically biased.
Several virologists weighed in to point out that the Vanity Fair article ignored reports that the Huanan (Wuhan) seafood wholesale market located the source of the virus. I wrote extensively about these studies in March, when 3 new clinical papers (in the form of preprints) had just been published, all pointing to the seafood market as the source of the pandemic.
Unfortunately, all the evidence in those documents was circumstantial. None of them discovered an inflamed animal that was the true source of Covid-19. Instead, they found that many early instances in other people focused on the seafood market. Even assuming this is the right kind (and maybe not, since China has never allowed outdoor scientists to travel to Wuhan and visit other people in the city), this is only circumstantial. day, we might never know.
But let’s go back to this week’s controversy, shall we?A virologist who led one of the articles I wrote about in March, Michael Worobey, also quoted in the Vanity Fair article. He had main objections to what they wrote, and posted them on a lengthy Twitter here, which is worth reading.
Vanity Fair described Worobey’s paintings as evidence that a zoonotic herbal origin (in other words, an origin in an animal at the Wuhan seafood market) for Covid-19 is “plausible. ” Worobey demurred, pointing out that his comments were much more definitive and that his position was as follows:
“OUR TWO RECENT ARTICLES identify that an herbal zoonotic origin is THE ONLY credible situation for the origin of the pandemic. “(All caps in the original)
After the appearance of Worobey’s Twitter feed, Vanity Fair and ProPublica updated their stories so that they came out with precisely this quote, without capital letters.
Worobey makes a compelling case that Vanity Fair and ProPublica misquoted him (or at least overlooked the details), and it turns out they corrected that error. However, neither Worobey’s Twitter feed nor clinical article concludes that, as it says, an herbal origin is the “only credible scenario” for Covid-19.
You are welcome. The paper by Worobey and colleagues concluded that “the first known cases of COVID-19 in December 2019 were geographically concentrated in this market. “Let’s assume this is correct: even so, their knowledge does not prove that the market was the “origin” of the pandemic, especially since they did not find any animals infected with Covid-19 in this market. They found only human cases. This leaves open the question of where the first human case occurred: it is completely imaginable that the first human became inflamed elsewhere, perhaps at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that this human visited the seafood market while actively spreading the virus.
And their knowledge is based on samples taken in Wuhan, which of course is controlled by the Chinese government. Note the wording of this conclusion of the document, which refers to “first known cases”. China doesn’t need the global to think that the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have caused the pandemic, so how can we know if there were early cases of WIV?
On the other hand, as I wrote in March, China has known for decades that its live animal markets are a source of new human viruses, adding to the 2003 SARS outbreak and cases of bird flu that were transmitted from birds to humans. done nothing to close those markets.
So it’s complicated. In any case, as Matthew Iglesias pointed out in The Guardian, even if the entire Vanity Fair article is incorrect, speculation of the lab leak remains absolutely plausible. However, one of China’s leading virology studies institutes, known for studies on SARS-like viruses and was known for collecting bat viruses, is located just a few kilometers from the live animal seafood market. It’s a coincidence.
Finally, let’s take a step back: why all the attention to know if the virus comes from a virology institute or a live animal market?Either way, the implication is that humans caused this pandemic. As I wrote in March, we deserve to be informed of at least two kinds of this experience: first, that live food markets deserve to be closed, especially those selling wild animals than livestock; and secondly, that studies on gain of function in deadly viruses also deserve to be stopped.
So let’s avoid arguing about the exact origin of the pandemic and start taking steps to save the next one.