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By David Quammann
David Quammen is the author of “Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus”, about Covid-19, and “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic”, among other books.
Where is he from? More than 3 years into the pandemic and millions of untold deaths, this question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains moot and weighty, with facts shining through a tangle of analysis and assumptions like Christmas lights hanging from a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought argues that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spread to humans from a non-human animal, most likely at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a cluttered shop in Wuhan, China, filled with fish, meat and wild animals for sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was designed in the laboratory to infect and harm humans, a biological weapon, and was possibly designed as a component of a “shadow project” sponsored by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. A third school, more moderate than the current one but also involving laboratory work, suggests that the virus entered its first human victim by a twist of fate at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W. I. V. ), a study complex east of the city, likely after well-intentioned but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more harmful to people.
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If you feel through those possibilities, hesitant, wary of overconfident claims, or just tired of the whole issue of the pandemic and the small mistake that caused it, rest assured that you are not alone.
Some warring parties say it doesn’t matter what the source of the virus is. What matters, they say, is how we deal with the disaster it has caused, the illness and death it continues to cause. These opposites are wrong. It’s important. Research priorities, preparedness for a global pandemic, fitness policies, and public opinion toward science itself will be permanently affected by the response to the original, if we ever get a definitive answer.
But much of the evidence that this answer can provide has been lost or cannot yet be obtained, it was lost due to the inability to collect quickly applicable data; due to intransigence and cover-up, especially in the component of Chinese management at various levels.
Take the hypothesis of herbal spread, for example, and assume that the virus was transmitted to humans through a wild animal, perhaps a raccoon dog (a fox-like dog) or a Malayan porcupine, somewhere in the Huanan market. Less significant pieces of their genome, they would then do comparative genome research, adding some of the earliest human cases, to infer whether other people contracted the virus from wildlife or vice versa.
But it can’t do that, because all the raccoons, porcupines or other wild animals that were on sale on the market in December 2019 were missing until January 1, 2020. On that date, the market closed on the orders of the Chinese authorities, without any (informed) effort to model the maximum bureaucracy suspected of wild animals.
Or take the lab-designed bioweapon speculation, as recently proposed in an article in the Sunday Times of London. The two Times reporters cited “unnamed U. S. investigators” who “examined top-secret intercepted communications” and concluded that the Chinese military supports a secret plan to spread an armed coronavirus. The article also posited a similar vaccination effort, to protect the Chinese population once the killer virus has been unleashed on the world. It’s a compelling story. The engineering of the virus occurred, according to this account, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The bloodhounds did not call their intelligence resources or provide evidence to corroborate their allegations, but if they did, it would be explosive news.
Or take the lab leak scenario, some accounts of which point accusingly to a New York nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance and its collaborative dating with Dr. Zhengli Shi, a principal investigator at W. I. V. Shi and his team examine coronaviruses, especially those transmitted by bats. extracting fragments of viral RNA (the molecule on which coronavirus genomes are written) and live viruses, from samples of guano and other physical materials, and assembling complete genomic sequences, like puzzles, from the fragments. carry out experiments, combining a detail of one virus with the backbone of another, to know how that detail might serve in nature; And they publish clinical papers, warning that bat viruses can pose a risk to humans. What happens if a researcher or technician under Shi’s direction, who handles a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2, accidentally becomes inflamed and then transmits the infection to others?This consultation became, from the first months of the pandemic, a suspicion, then a speculation and then an accusation.
Even today, the claims and counterclaims industry continues to flourish. Last month, in a Substack newsletter titled Public, 3 authors claimed, citing “U. S. government officials. “U. S. Anonymously, one of the first people became ill with SARS-CoV-2, a scientist named Ben Hu, from Shi’s lab. 3 months earlier) a declassified report outlining everything that U. S. intelligence networks have done to do with the U. S. The U. S. Department of Disease and Drug Administration knew about possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the pandemic. The report concluded, inter alia, that W. I. V. Staff had occasionally collaborated on coronavirus studies with scientists related to the People’s Liberation Army, but (as far as the available evidence shows) these studies did not involve “any known viruses that could plausibly be an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. “
And then, on July 11, the House Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, led by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, convened a hearing in which he and his colleagues questioned two scientists, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, about their authorship of an influential 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine. This article titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”. The content of the hearing was foreseen through its own announced title: “Investigating the proximate origin of a cover-up”, and the proceedings of that day consisted of accusation and defense, without losing new light, much less certainty about the origin of the virus.
Certainty is an elusive purpose and a superior presumption, even for science, even for a director of national intelligence, even for the chairman of a congressional subcommittee. Philosophers have identified this, as have novelists and poets. “He had 3 spirits,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “Like a tree / In which there are 3 blackbirds. “, and to do justice to the question, you, like him, will have to stay several probabilities in the brain at once.
How you view a blackbird or an original speculation can be influenced by its origin. It’s an old fact, but I was reminded of it in a verbal exchange with Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, and one of the most qualified among those arguing that lab leak speculation deserves further investigation. Bloom studies the evolution of viruses, for two reasons: it happens rapidly and sheds light on evolution in general, and it has big implications for public health.
When I spoke to him in February 2021, a year after the pandemic, and asked him about the origin, Bloom said, “I think a lot of other people vigorously renounce their past beliefs. “Suppose it is a laboratory leak. National security experts with strong perspectives on the oppressive and secretive Chinese government lean toward scenarios involving embezzlement and cover-up by China.
More recently, Bloom told me that his own “previous” inclination would be toward an excess of herbs.
He gave me pause to consider my own background. For more than 40 years, I have written nonfiction about the herbal world and the sciences that examine it, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. For the first half, my attention was mainly focused on giant visual creatures like bears, crocodiles, and bumblebees and wild places like the Amazon jungle and Sonoran desert. I first came across the topic of emerging viruses in 1999, during a National Geographic mission, when I walked for 10 days through the Ebola virus habitat in a central African forest. Later, I spent five years writing an e-book on zoonotic diseases and the agents that cause them, and added the SARS virus, the ancient killer coronavirus now called SARS-CoV-1, which emerged in 2002 and spread among human travelers from Hong Kong to Singapore, Toronto and elsewhere, deeply alarming experts. Scientists have traced SARS-CoV-1 to palm civets, a type of wild cat-like carnivore sold for food in some markets and restaurants in southern China. But civets were found to be intermediate hosts, and their herbal host later became known as horseshoe bats.
The SARS story is just one bankruptcy in the saga of harmful new viruses emerging from animals. The dark story of how H. I. V. entered humans and caused the AIDS pandemic is another: a story known partly by inference and partly by molecular evidence, and dating back to a case of single-blood mixing between a user and a chimpanzee, probably hunter and hunted, in the southeast corner of Cameroon in the early 20th century. Human contact with non-human animals is also to blame for our influenzas, which arise regularly from wild waterfowl. The Hendra virus in Australia is transmitted to humans by bats, usually via an intermediate host: horses. The Machupo virus in Bolithru remains in rodents when it does not infect people. The Hantaan virus, discovered in Korea, and its relative Sin Nombre virus, in the southwestern United States, are also spreading among rodents. The Nipah virus, in Bangladesh and some neighboring countries, comes from bats. It is excreted in bat droppings, saliva and urine, and when some fruit bats stop at date palms to have their sweet sap extracted (a tradition in Bangladesh), the virus contaminates the sap, which is sold new on the street to local traditionalists, some of whom die. These cases and many more like them are among my own background, and certainly incline me towards the concept of natural overflow. This often happens, with disastrous consequences.
Research lesions have also occurred in the history of harmful new viruses, and long-standing considerations about such lesions are the background of some favoring speculation of laboratory leaks for Covid. Such injuries can add up to loads or thousands, depending on where you set the threshold of importance and how you describe “accident. “attentive scientist, Kelly Warfield, while researching Ebola (but it turned out he wasn’t inflamed with Ebola). Also in 2004, just one year after the global SARS crisis, two workers at a virology laboratory in Beijing independently became inflamed with the virus, which spread to a total of nine people, one of whom died. This followed two other accidental laboratory infections with the SARS virus last year, one in Singapore and the other in Taiwan.
When the first known cases of “atypical pneumonia” began appearing in Wuhan hospitals in late 2019 and then exploded in a coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, the place itself seemed to match, in other respects, history that might lean toward a natural explanation or a lab leak explanation. a prime link for the gigantic domestic wildlife industry for classic food, fur, and drugs (estimated at more than $70 billion annually), where those creatures and the viruses they carry were sold in many crowded markets, one of which, Huanan, at or near the middle of the space trend of the earliest known instances.
So, from those circumstances alone, was a turn of the lab’s fate more “likely” than an overflow of weeds?And in any of those scenarios, to what extent has the Chinese government’s tension and obscurantism limited the availability of evidence to compare either?Because there is still no definitive account of the specific events that transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to the human population, even experts are forced to frame their assessments as probabilities, based on knowledge and circumstances, influenced in tactics through past ideas about how the world works.
When assessing the odds for yourself, you may need to move away from the noise, anger, vitriol, and politicization that have clouded the controversy and evidence we have. For this purpose, it would possibly be helpful to note certain occasions in the order in which they occurred.
On January 11, 2020, in Shanghai, just 11 days after the first reports on the outbreak in Wuhan were published globally, a team of scientists led by Yong-Zhen Zhang of Fudan University published a preliminary series of the genome of the new virus through an online page called Virological. org. (including coronaviruses), his perfectly bald head, and his acerbic frankness. Everyone in the box knows him as Eddie. The show was released at 1:05 a. m. m. , Scotland time, at the time, the curator of the site in Edinburgh, a professor of molecular evolution named Andrew Rambaut, was alert and ready to speed things up. He and Holmes wrote a brief introductory note to the genome: “Feel free to download, share, use and analyze this information,” he said. They knew that “data” is plural, but they were in a hurry.
Immediately, Holmes and a small organization of colleagues began analyzing the genome for clues to the evolutionary history of the virus. They drew on a history of known coronaviruses and their own understanding of how those viruses take shape in nature (as evidenced in Holmes’s 2009 book, “The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses”). They knew that coronavirus evolution can take place rapidly, driven by common mutations (single letter changes in a genome of about 30,000 letters), recombination (a virus swapping sections of the genome with another virus, when the two mirror each other in a single cell), and a variety of Darwinian herbs acting on those random changes. Holmes brainstormed with Rambaut in Edinburgh, a friend of 3 decades, and with two other colleagues: Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research in La Jolla, California; and Robert Garry of Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. Ian Lipkin, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, joined the organization later. These other five people would form a kind of remote research organization, with the aim of publishing a paper on the SARS-CoV-2 genome and its probable origin.
Holmes, Andersen and their colleagues affirmed the similarity of the virus to bat viruses; However, with more studies, they saw a couple of “remarkable features” that got them thinking. These features, two brief moments in the genome, constituted a very small percentage of the total, but potentially of maximum importance for the virus’s ability to dominate and infect human cells. known receptor binding domain (RBD). All viruses have RBDs, which help them attach to cells; An FCS is a feature that helps certain viruses enter. The original SARS virus, which terrified scientists around the world but caused only about 800 deaths, unlike the novel coronavirus in some ways. How did SARS-CoV-2 come to take this form?
Andersen and Holmes genuinely feared, at first, that it might have been rigged. Were those two features planned additions, inserted into a coronavirus backbone through genetic manipulation, making the virus more transmissible and pathogenic in humans? We had to think about it. Holmes called Jeremy Farrar, a disease expert who was then a director of the Wellcome Trust, a foundation in London that supports fitness research. Farrar got the point and temporarily arranged a convention call with a foreign organization of scientists to discuss the puzzling facets of the genome and imaginable scenarios of its origin. The organization included Robert Garry at Tulane and a dozen others, most of whom were leading European or British scientists with applicable skills, such as Rambaut in Edinburgh, Marion Koopmans in the Netherlands, and Christian Drosten in Germany. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health and thus Fauci’s boss, were also on the call. This is the call from February 1 where, if you believe some critical voices, Fauci and Collins persuaded others to suppress any notion that the virus might have been engineered.
“The circulating narrative that Fauci told us, let’s replace our minds, blah, blah, blah, blah. They paid us,” he told me Holmes. Es everything [swearing]. “
Anderson agrees. “There is no universe in which that is possible,” he told me. Recently, based on picks from their personal emails and Slack traffic made public, Andersen and his colleagues have been accused of cover-up and cover-up: Their messages, critics say, turn out that while they were deeply personally involved in the virus engineered or the lab’s chances of its release, they were racing to stay out of the public debate. But as the researchers describe, those obvious contradictions were just a mirror image of their conversion views. After first fearing that SARS-CoV-2’s receptor-binding domain might be an engineering signal, for example, they learned some time after the Feb. 1 convention that a very similar RBD in a coronavirus was infecting pangolins. It was detected in a public database by Houston bioinformatician Matt Wong and posted on the Virological website, where it eventually came to the group’s attention. He showed that such an RBD evolved in nature and could well have entered SARS-CoV-2 through recombination, the herbal process of gene swapping. Andersen et al. also identified that furin cleavage sites occur herbally in other coronaviruses, such as the MERS virus, but not (as detected so far) in any other members of the subgenus to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs.
The new knowledge led to a new conclusion, in what Andersen called on Twitter “a transparent example of the clinical process. “Sixteen days after the convention convening, they published a preprint (a draft, not yet peer-reviewed) of their paper, and 4 weeks later it gave the impression in the journal Nature Medicine: it was the one titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”. Andersen and his co-authors stated their earlier conclusion: “Our analyses transparently show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a constructed laboratory or an intentionally manipulated virus. “This still left the option of an herbal virus, evolved into an animal host and transmitted to humans through a zoonotic movement, or perhaps a filtered herbal virus?Toward the end of the article, they said something more nuanced: that while intentional engineering of the virus can be ruled out, “lately it is highly unlikely to result in or undo the other theories about its origin described here. “That said, they added, “we don’t think any kind of lab situation is plausible. “
Another coronavirus temporarily emerged as the closest known fit to SARS-CoV-2. It was not a virus “in the flesh,” in physical presence. It was a genomic sequence, assembled from RNA fragments extracted from a fecal swab from a bat, captured in a mine several years earlier in 2013. The mine was in Yunnan province, 1,200 miles southwest of Wuhan. other people at the beginning of the pandemic. This degree of similarity, or a difference of 3. 8%, suggests a common ancestor of the virus a few years ago and an independent evolution in the following years. Therefore, it represented a cousin of SARS-CoV-2, not its ancestor.
The work of sampling the bat and assembling the series (first only a part, then, with greater technology, almost everything) was directed by Zhengli Shi, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi and his team classified the RaTG13 series, coding for the fact that it came from an individual of Rhinolophus affinis (Ra), the intermediate horseshoe bat, captured at this mine in Tongguan (TG), a city in Yunnan’s Mojiang district, in 2013. RaTG1 3 gained fame, only because it provided strong evidence of SARS-CoV-2’s ancestry in bat viruses, but also because the Mojiang mine is in some of the bleakest scenarios for the origin of a lab leak.
Part of what makes Mojiang’s call sound grim is that in 2012, 3 mine personnel died of unidentified respiratory infections after days of working underground there. What did they put into their lungs and kill them? Was it a mushroom? Was it a virus? Some proponents of lab leaks recommend that those deaths, described in two difficult-to-understand medical documents written in Mandarin, constitute the first known deaths from a virus, most likely RaTG13, which already, or in Shi’s lab, became SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate ancestor (i. e. , something much more similar than a cousin). The inference is that Shi’s team, a year after the miners’ deaths, possibly brought the virus to Wuhan. But the Mojiang deaths were also reported in 2014 in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases by scientists discovering an entirely different virus, also potentially harmful because it bore similarities to the Nipah and Hendra viruses, and was brought into the Mojiang mine via rats, not bats. One takeaway: Take samples of rats, bats, and other animals in a mine, and you might find a variety of viruses you don’t need in their lungs.
Another challenge with the RaTG13 scenario: its genome differs from that of SARS-CoV-2 by more than 1100 scattered positions in its genome. According to Holmes and other coronavirus genomics experts, designing SARS-CoV-2 starting with RaTG13 would have been unreasonable and unfeasible. In addition, it is vital not to forget that RaTG13 was a genome sequence, not a living virus: it was information, not a biological entity. It is difficult to grow ants in bat guano in a mobile culture and often the effort fails. Zhengli Shi told Jon Cohen, senior correspondent for the journal Science, in his reaction to a series of email questions, that he had never grown RaTG13 in his lab. He told me the same thing during a two-hour Zoom conversation: “No, no. We were unable to tame any samples from this cave in Mojiang.
Shi in Shanghai for a meeting on the evening of December 30, 2019, as he explained to me, when he learned that a mysterious respiratory disease was spreading dangerously among the people of Wuhan. Preliminary lab results suggested that a coronavirus, not the SARS virus, but something similar, could be the cause. He asked for help in identifying the problem. He put his lab team to work without delay and took an exercise to Wuhan the next day. Within hours, his lab had obtained partial images from another lab. His first intuition was to compare it to the sequences of viruses they had painted themselves, “and we thought of it differently,” he told me. “So, on the afternoon of December 31, I already know that this has nothing to do with what we did in our laboratory. “
Some critics, she well knew, had warned that her urgency to review her own records was an implicit admission of error or guilt. “It’s normal!” Your Answer
Jon Cohen discussed the option of a lab leak in a report published in Science on January 31, 2020, noting that not all of the early cases shown had a direct link to the Huanan market. Fourteen of the 41 most sensitive, according to one study, did not. Would those other people have contracted their infections elsewhere, and not from an animal?After describing some brilliant but unsubstantiated claims, he added the concept that SARS-CoV-2 resembled a snake virus (and that snakes were being sold in Wuhan’s rainy markets), Cohen added, “The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the first lab in China to study bats and human coronaviruses, has also been criticized. Concerns have been expressed, he wrote, about the protection of the W. I. V. bioprotection procedures and facilities.
The evidence related to the origin of the virus, outside of what can be read in the genome itself, remained scant during the first months. Instead of evidence, there was the weight of clinical authority on the one hand, and the volume of protest on the other. On February 19, 2020, an open letter went to print online in The Lancet, a British journal, signed by 27 scientists, some of them eminent figures in virology and public health, others budding researchers with distinguished careers. It was an act of solidarity with Chinese scientists and medical professionals, who were then on the front lines of understanding and controlling the virus. The letter was organized through Peter Daszak, a British-American disease ecologist, member of the EcoHealth Alliance, and a collaborator of Zhengli Shi. In addition to expressing his support to his Chinese colleagues, he said: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories that suggest that Covid-19 does not have a herbal origin. ” This expression of confidence would, in the short term, backfire, and the word “conspiracy theories” lands like bacon grease thrown on a campfire, sending skeptics into a sizzle and rage.
Meanwhile, the concept of the lab breakout stuck in some political circles, in part because it aligned with attitudes toward the Chinese government, its repressive policies, and penchant for secrecy. In late January 2020, even before Cohen’s January 31 article, The Washington Times published an article suggesting links between W. I. V. and a covert Chinese military biological weapons program. The article (returned last Thursday with an editor’s note) was based largely on claims by a former Israeli army intelligence officer. Several weeks later, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas voiced a similar suspicion about the Wuhan lab on Fox News. “We have no evidence that this disease originated there,” Cotton said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty early on, we have to at least ask the question. ” Soon, Donald Trump’s brain began to change. The president spoke encouragingly about China in the early weeks of the pandemic, and on February 7 he said of President Xi Jinping: “I think he handled the scenario very well. ” Then the tide turned, and four months later, Trump urged his crowds to rally by calling Covid-19 “the kung flu. “
The attractions of the laboratory leak concept were not entirely partisan. Jamie Metzl is a political commentator who worked on the Clinton administration and, at one point, as a Senate committee staffer competing heavily with Sen. Joe Biden. An expert advisory committee on human genome editing, Metzl called early on for an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, including, in his own words, “the clear choice that this crisis stemmed from an incident related to the research in Wuhan. “
After talking about it in the first few months of 2020, Metzl encountered resistance that turned out to have surprised and harmed him. “When I saw this other story,” he told me, “and started talking publicly about it, my friends were saying two things. “Do you have all those experienced scientists, Nobel laureates and others who say it comes from nature?Who are you to say that, based on your research and deductive reasoning, you have more questions? »
The proselytizing of Metzl and others who have noted a “different story” of the consequences of herbs, plus the change in Trump’s message, plus the dominant cultural willingness to distrust experts, among other factors has undoubtedly had an effect on public opinion and media attention, if not on clinical consensus. twist of fate or intentionally. In September 2020, another voting organization found that herbal functions were followed almost equally rather than labs. In June 2021, a Politico-Harvard vote put the original concept of the lab in the lead by a two-to-one margin: 52% of Americans versus 28%.
Metzl himself maintained the somewhat agnostic position that accidental release is an option, but not the only option. In his imaginable March 2023 testimony before Congress, he suggested “taking into account all applicable origin assumptions, including, of course, a laboratory origin, but also a market origin, which some experts I respect take more into account. “Among the experts, he cited Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona.
Worobey is a Canadian-born, Oxford-educated scientist who speaks softly and infrequently considers provocative theories. One such theory was O. P. V. , the speculation of the “oral polio vaccine” at the origin of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I first interviewed Worobey a dozen years ago to hear about it. or vaccinate unsuspecting African “volunteers,” adding piles of thousands of children. The vaccine was developed in mobile cultures of chimpanzees, according to alleged speculation, and was infected with a chimpanzee virus that became H. I. V. -1-M.
His main spouse on this wild expedition was William Hamilton, a celebrated Oxford biologist who considered the plausible hypothesis of OPV. Worobey and Hamilton collected their chimpanzee patterns, with the help of local forest guides, then ran out of Kisangani, Worobey with his arm in a sling due to a badly inflamed wound in the forest, Hamilton desperately ill with malaria. They arrived in England and Hamilton died shortly afterwards from complications.
Such are the jobs and frustrations of science. Worobey, along with other scientists, depending on other evidence, eventually proved the oral vaccine speculation wrong. Openness to provocative speculation and a commitment to verify or refute it based on evidence are among his priorities.
With SARS-CoV-2, 20 years later, Worobey also felt amenable to pay due attention to the provocative and heterodox hypothesis. Concerned about what he saw as an unwelcome rejection of the option of a lab leak, he signed a public letter in the spring of 2021, along with 17 other scientists, saying that “greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is mandatory and feasible. the other co-signatories of the letter, first on the list, was Jesse Bloom. Worobey had helped publish the letter, with emails to Bloom on March 21 of that year, adding the suggestion: “Idea something like a scientific attitude or an editorial in the NY Times. “
The letter originally written through Bloom and two others: Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who authored a 2020 preprint arguing that SARS-CoV-2 is already suitable for infecting humans in the first place, raising questions about its provenance; and Stanford’s David Relman, a prominent microbiologist who has long been involved with biosafety issues and some gain studies. Other members of the organization contributed, and the letter was published in Science on May 14, 2021, under the imperative name “Investigating the origins of Covid-19. “
Strong tides of opinion moved in the spring of 2021. A foreign team of scientists, recruited through the World Health Organization for their joint WHO-China study into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, had returned from a month in Wuhan and released their phase 1 report, locating an “extremely unlikely” lab leak. This location was criticized by Worobey, Bloom and their co-authors of the Letter to Science, published weeks later. Even the director general of the W. H. O. himself, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, hoped for further investigation. At a press conference marking the report’s release, Tedros said, “As far as the WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table,” noting the need for further research. disease scientists who will continue to examine the origin of SARS-CoV-2, as well as other harmful new microbes.
Maria Van Kerkhove, Technical Manager for Covid at WHO, spoke about the obstacles to progress. “There’s very little data available in terms of lab leaks, in terms of biosafety non-compliance or biosecurity non-compliance, and that’s the problem,” he told me recently, saying he had discussed the factor directly with Chinese officials. “That’s what’s frustrating,” he added. With this lack of data, you end up with those huge holes. “
Popular articles embracing the concept of laboratory leaks also began to flourish around this time, in magazines and newspapers and on Internet platforms. In January 2021, New York magazine published an article on the origin of Covid by Nicholson Baker, who had recently published an e-book on American bioweapons studies in the early 1950s and his frustrations with the Freedom of Information Act. Baker has now raised the “What if?” consultation on coronavirus studies. In May 2021, Nicholas Wade (previously a New York Times nominee) published a lengthy article in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describing collaborations between Zhengli Shi’s lab and EcoHealth Alliance, for studies of bat coronaviruses as potential threats to human fitness; studies that Wade said could have led to the leak of a virus that was deliberately made more harmful to humans. Soon after, another scientist with former ties to The Times, Donald G. McNeil Jr. , moved through Wade’s article to investigate and question and published a more insightful essay, concluding: “All we have so far is speculation, and all explanations are unsatisfactory. ” In early June, Vanity Fair followed up with a report by reporter Katherine Eban suggesting that studies at W. I. V. – or, alternatively, the collection of samples from bats at the checkout and the accidental infection of a checkout employee – may have transmitted the virus, handled or not, to people.
On June 14, 2021, the comedian appeared on Stephen Colbert’s screen and announced, with sublime confidence and transcendent superficiality, his reasons for ensuring that the virus first detected in Wuhan came from a laboratory in Wuhan. “If you look at the call!” he shouted. Stewart got the call wrong from the establishment, in fact, he called W. I. V. the “Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus laboratory”, understood the city’s call well. It’s unclear how much this mattered to Colbert’s millions of viewers.
Throughout 2020 and 2021, scientists with extensive experience in applicable fields, namely molecular evolutionary virology, veterinary virology, and molecular phylogenetics (drawing a circle of family trees by comparing genomes), were also employed. His efforts have added knowledge and research to the herbal aspect of the scale.
A study, conducted by two Chinese and three Western researchers, showed that Wuhan’s rainy markets, not only the well-known Huanan, but also three others, contained many department stores promoting wild animals as food from May 2017 to November 2019. Offerings included raccoon dogs, masked palm civets and Malay porcupines. to legalize its sale under China’s hedging law.
This is vital because it led local authorities, as the pandemic spread, to close the market (as they did on January 1, 2020) and cover up any illegality that had been ignored by law enforcement officials. Despite all the assumptions made about China’s motivation to cover a lab leak, it’s worth remembering that they would have had similar motivations, adding this $70 billion domestic industry, to cover a market leak with devastating consequences.
Another study, published through Science in July 2022, with Michael Worobey as first author, along with Eddie Holmes and Marion Koopmans and many others, tested the spatial trend of more than 150 of the first cases of Covid-19 as of December 2019. Worobey and his colleagues found that not only consumers and staff at the Huanan market (and others in contact with those consumers or staff) among those cases lived in close proximity to the market, but also patients with no known epidemiological link to the market place. Therefore, this market square is the “early epicenter” of the pandemic, as the newspaper headline said.
A separate but similar study that gave the impression around the same time, with Worobey and other co-authors, but in this case with Jonathan Pekar as first author, tested the shape of the SARS-CoV-2 family tree. It was unexpected. Drawn from the comparison of genomes sequenced from human samples, taken at the beginning of the pandemic, it consisted of two thick branches branching off from a trunk, and then each branch exploded into many tiny stems, with no branches in between.
The two main members were lineages, classified Lineage A and Lineage B, from which all the following diversity of the virus originated. Line B has been the most prolific and successful, accounting for the highest number of Covid-19 cases worldwide, adding all the first cases directly connected to the market. The A line was also discovered in the market through the Chinese team that took a pattern after the abstract closure of the place. This stain of A gave the impression on a pair of discarded gloves. A tree-style high-tech investigation (those two giant branches, and then this explosion of twigs is derived from each) and concluded that the maximum virus probably entered humans several times. The epidemic of human infections, they judged, maximum probably had (at least) two distinct beginnings.
Why was this discovery important? Two consequences in individuals, from a market stall containing inflamed raccoon dogs, were more parsimonious than two inflamed laboratory workers, independently transporting their infections to the same market. This is partly due to geography: the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as Jon Stewart tried to put it, is in the city of Wuhan, but it’s across the Yangtze River, more than seven miles (as the crow flies) from Huanan Market.
Since the beginning of this year, the popularity of the idea of the lab’s twist of fate, which has developed from 2020 to 2022, has gained several additional momentums. On February 26, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U. S. Department of Energy had not yet done so. The U. S. Treasury Department, one of the organizations previously commissioned by President Biden to read the origin issue, has proposed a new ruling. Previously undecided, DOE intelligence facilities have now concluded, albeit with “low confidence,” that the pandemic’s peak likely began from a lab leak. The Journal reporters had extracted it from a “classified intelligence report,” which has not yet been turned over for public review to the White House and “key members of Congress,” who were not identified.
The next day, CNN’s online page published a follow-up article stating that 3 sources, also unidentified, had told CNN that the Department of Education based its replacement component on data from studies conducted at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, another disease-related facility in the city. more than 11 kilometer(s) from Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is concerning that a virus leak from the medium may correspond to the spatial clustering of early instances across the market, as analyzed by Worobey and colleagues, such that an alleged leak of the W. I. V.
But nothing more was heard about this provocative claim from CNN, or any other media outlet, in the months that followed. I was reminded that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. moved to its new location, near the market, only on December 2, 2019; This date, plus the maximum time it will likely take to bring lab paints back online, may not correspond to a viral outbreak that likely began last November. In any case, two other resources with smart access to the networked paintings of Chinese studies told me that Wuhan CDC (unlike the national CDC in Beijing) did not have a coronavirus studies program before the pandemic. One of the resources, Jane Qiu, a Chinese-born freelance journalist, added that Wuhan’s mandate basically consisted of technical responsibilities, such as disease surveillance, rather than studies. (Qiu may also simply not call his own resources because of his potential danger in China. )
Even more recently, in mid-June, the Substack article I alluded to earlier came out, stating that Ben Hu and two others from Zhengli Shi’s lab were “the first other people inflamed with the virus” and thus the starting point of the pandemic. Posted via Michael Shellenberger and two colleagues, this article cites unnamed resources “within the US government. ” Hu was the first of a 2017 paper describing the Shi group’s discovery of several coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2, in bats from a cave (not the Mojiang mine) in southern China, and experimental paintings on 3 of those viruses that some critics considered risky. Hu and the other two scientists, according to Shellenberger and his colleagues, had contracted “COVID-19-like illnesses” in November 2019, suggesting they were the conduits of a laboratory leak. Hu himself temporarily denied the allegation in an email to Science’s Jon Cohen: “I had no health problems in the fall of 2019 and did not have any Covid-19-like symptoms at that time. ” In addition, Hu told Cohen that he and his two colleagues had tested negative for symptoms of a recent covid infection (antibodies) in March 2020.
The rise of opinion about the concept of a lab leak stopped in March, when Florence Débarre, a scientist running for France’s National Center for Scientific Research, discovered another set of compelling evidence, long lost but now deciphered. It is genomic knowledge, from swab samples of door and appliance surfaces and other items, adding this pair of discarded gloves, collected in the Huanan market in early 2020 but retained since then. Knowledge was released, perhaps by mistake, and Débarre was alert enough to detect it and recognize what it was. Array A team of researchers, who added Worobey, detected a trend in knowledge: a strong proximity between samples containing raccoon dog DNA and others containing fragments of SARS-CoV-2 (and some samples containing both), from stalls in the southwest corner of the market where wild animals were sold for food. Malayan porcupine DNA and Amur hedgehog DNA were also discovered very close to the virus, but raccoon dogs were of specific interest due to their known susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2.
These findings identified that raccoon dogs had brought the virus to market, but added plausibility and detail to this scenario.
Despite the revelations of the Débarre group, the concept of laboratory leakage has remained strongly favored by public opinion, and not only in the United States. According to one survey, in April 2023, 62% of respondents in Italy, 56% in France and 50% in the UK found the concept of lab leakage more compelling, with giant segments of other people insecure (and perplexed), leaving only modest minorities embracing the consequences of herbs. Previous surveys have shown that laboratory-related scenarios are further favored in other countries, ranging from 73% in Kenya and 64% in Hungary to 58% in Brazil.
Several points would possibly explain this drift of the public towards speculation of the leak in the laboratory. In my opinion, the preponderance of empirical evidence is not one of them. I agree that it is important to keep an open mind about the possibility of a leak in the laboratory, but most of the arguments put forward in favor of this option boil down to conjecture of circumstances and unsubstantiated accusations.
To speak of a “laboratory leak hypothesis” in the singular is, of course, misleading. There are various hypotheses for laboratory leaks, just as there are various tactics in which an overflow of herbs may have occurred. A more encompassing and emollient word is “studio-related incident,” favored by Jamie Metzl and other critics. This covers several possibilities, adding the possibility that poorly designed gain-of-function studies in the W. I. V. or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. or who knows where, produced a new harmful hybrid virus that escaped through a faulty autoclave or an inflamed technician or graduate student. (In this scenario, proponents point to a grant proposal known as DEFUSE, made through the EcoHealth Alliance to a US defense studies firm in 2018, though never funded, for experiments that some critics interpret as potentially harmful gain-of-function studies. ) Another “studio-related” option: the nightmare that a Chinese biological warfare program deliberately created a fatal virus but released it into the world through a mistake. catastrophic. Yet another: the concept that a box scientist caught fire while collecting bat samples from, say, the Mojiang mine, where Zhengli Shi’s team discovered RaTG13.
They are all brilliant, but not all logical, and I find that they do not combine with each other. If a wild coronavirus from the Mojiang mine was able to infect and transmit between humans, for example, he didn’t want to insert a furin cleavage site into reckless or malicious lab work. What if you inflamed a cash scientist in 2013 and that cashier’s clerk returned to Wuhan, where the virus remained for six years before exploding among the city’s population in 2019?And if the virus was engineered in Shi’s lab, employing complicated gene-editing methods, or became this harmful pathogen by passing a less harmful virus through mobile cultures or live mice (which is implausible), and then escaped, then the Mojiang mine, with all its sinister narrative appeal, it is irrelevant. In other words, the different mishap hypotheses of the studies might all be credible (some more than others), but they compete with each other. You can’t stack them all on the scale and make a judgment about the likelihood of an unnatural origin through their combined weight.
Proponents of lab leaks have focused intensely on Shi and his lab, but it’s vital to remember that Shi made his career by publishing studies and issuing warnings about potentially harmful coronaviruses discovered in nature, without keeping them secret. Harmful: Most likely, he would have announced this vital discovery in the pages of a major newspaper. for their professional gain as well as for the advantages they get from the world. He didn’t.
And there’s a little framework of recently recovered lost evidence that turns out to help this logic. In 2018, a scientist named Jie Cui conducted a study of SARS-related coronaviruses in bats. His goal was to shed light on the evolution of the original SARS virus by hitting it on a family tree of his relatives. Cui had been a postdoctoral fellow in Eddie Holmes’s lab, moving from there to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a few years and then to a position in Shanghai. Cui and an organization of colleagues, as well as Holmes and Zhengli Shi, analyzed partial genomic sequences of 60 coronaviruses detected in bat samples collected between 2011 and 2016. They wrote a paper and submitted it to a leading virology journal. It was rejected. They tried another. Refused. The journal reviewers searched for complete genome sequences, but the team only had partial sequences. So in October 2018, they dropped that article. They got rid of it from the shipping process. They forgot. Meanwhile, they had sent their partial but revealing genomic knowledge to a foreign database, GenBank, with a regime stipulation that they would be seized, in this case for 4 years. The embargo allowed them to retain exclusive access to the knowledge during this period, they deserved if they wished to revive the project.
Four years passed and then, in October 2022, the embargo expired. The data, saved from just before the pandemic and now available to the public, revealed what it didn’t include: an ancestor of the pandemic virus. Here are 60 coronaviruses that Zhengli Shi and others had found intriguing in 2018. But nothing that corresponds to SARS-CoV-2.
“Where’s the virus?” said Eddie Holmes, telling me this recently. “The virus is surely there. “
Two other arguments about what laboratory leaks look like deserve attention. Why did SARS-CoV-2 appear so well adapted to humans in the first place?And why, if your plant host is some kind of bat, has this host not yet been found, after 3 and a half years?
The first of those queries ignores the fact that SARS-CoV-2 has been shown from the beginning to be quite capable of infecting other mammals (cats and dogs), and in all likelihood a wide diversity of them (tigers, gorillas, mink, white-tailed deer and others), not just humans. The timing of the consultation reveals a lack of familiarity with the history of emerging viruses. The work is complicated to do in the midst of the public health emergency of an epidemic, and once the epidemic (or epidemic or pandemic) is under control, the sense of urgency and budget available for studies tends to disappear.
Finding the host animal is rarely easy, lucky, and rarely difficult. It took 15 years to identify, with any luck, horseshoe bats as likely hosts of the original SARS virus. Tracing Marburg virus back to its reservoir host in Egyptian fruit bats took 41 years (or 42, if you count the time of publication). a hospital project far from what was then Zaire. The suggested link between Ebola and some form of bat remains a hypothetical and unestablished clinical fact, and we already have enough assumptions similar to this issue.
So what is it that tips the balance of public opinion towards laboratory leaks?The answer to this question is not deeply rooted in the hard-to-understand information I’ve traversed here. What tips the balance, for me, is the cynicism and narrative appeal.
I asked about this in a verbal exchange with David Relman, the biosecurity expert who was also the author of the “Investigate” letter with Jesse Bloom. To some extent, Relman agreed. ” When you sow the seeds of distrust or recommend that you were not transparent with what you knew,” he told me, “you are setting yourself up for persistent, insidious, and ongoing distrust. “This inclines other people to assume that “there was something planned or planned hidden. “
The seeds of distrust have long been developing on the American civic lawn and around the world. More than 60% of Americans, according to polls conducted in recent years, still deny that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, killed John F. Is it because other people read the Warren Commission report, found that it was not convincing, and examined the “silver bullet” theory?A small explanation, such as the concept that a reckless loser can kill a president by hitting two out of three shots with a $13 rifle.
Most of us don’t arrive at our reviews by thoroughly calibrating the empirical evidence. As Jesse Bloom pointed out, we adopt precedents by default, or embrace stories that have undeniable plots, clever and bad characters, and melodramatic trajectories, and that seem proportionate to the occasion at hand. The procedure of clinical discovery is a confusing story involving knowledge gathering, speculation testing, hypothesis falsification, hypothesis review, more testing, and brilliant but fallible humans doing all this work. embezzlement motivated by pride and leading to uncontrollable trouble, on the other hand, is a much easier story that harkens back at least to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, “Frankenstein. “
Carl Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist and commentator on clinical misinformation. It asks, among other things, how science scholars are informed, or at least how they are informed, not only about what science says, but also about what science is. I asked Bergstrom about human affinity for obscure theories of big events.
There was something about it in Thomas Hardy, he told me. “It’s in ‘Tess des d’Urbervilles,’ where Tess is convicted by an unfortunate coincidence. Sucks! Living in a global world where we are at the mercy of an unfortunate coincidence.
I had never read “Tess de los d’Urberville”, to my shame, so I stuck with SARS-CoV-2. “This is a festival now, in the public domain, among bodies of evidence,” I proposed. “It’s a contest between stories. “
“Yes!” Bergstrom said. “That’s right. “
David Quammen is a journalist founded in Montana. His 18 books include “Spillover” (2012) and “Breathless” (2022): the first, predicting a pandemic that would be triggered by a newly emerged virus; the second, to trace the clinical effort to notice the origin and stick to the evolution of Covid.
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