INSIDE WUHAN’S VIRUS LAB
TRUMP SAYS OUTBREAK CAUSED BY FACILITY MEANT TO RESEARCH DEADLY PATHOGENS
Astate-of-the art facility purpose-built to handle research into the world’s most deadly pathogens, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), played a crucial role in identifying the virus now known as COVID-19.
It was Shi Zhengli, the laboratory’s globally respected expert in the transmission of animal-borne coronavirus to humans, who led a team that worked tirelessly to find the cause of the mysterious disease that appeared in Wuhan, a city of 11 million on the Yangtze river 960 kilometres south of Beijing, in late December.
Now U.S. President Donald Trump has accused the lab of causing the very pandemic it helped identify — to the fury of scientists and Chinese authorities. “We’re going to see where it comes from,” the president said on Thursday. “We have people looking at it very strongly — scientific people, intelligence people. I think we will have a very good answer eventually, and China might even tell us.”
Trump refused to say what, if any, intelligence he had seen suggesting COVID-19 may have originated in the WIV. He wasn’t allowed to say, he said.
The United States Intelligence Community Friday said it, in common with most scientists, had ruled out the theory that the virus had been man-made or genetically modified, but did say it was looking into the possibility it escaped as “a result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” That, experts say, is highly unlikely, but far from impossible.
Completed in 2015 and formally opened in 2018, the lab was first planned by China’s academy of sciences in 2003 as one of the World Health Organization’s reference labs — facilities around the world storing samples of the most dangerous diseases to humans. Initial research focused on Crimean-congo haemorrhagic fever: a tick-borne virus affecting livestock, as well as Ebola and the West African Lassa virus. But it also became a centre of global research into the potentially deadly consequences of coronaviruses — something Chinese scientists had been alerted to by the East Asia SARS outbreak in the early 2000s.
Groundbreaking research was led by Shi, 55, who was in charge of a series of field expeditions to remote locations to work out how such viruses could jump between species. In 2004, she discovered a natural reservoir of coronaviruses in bats living in caves in southern China. Over the next 15 years, she worked closely on animal-to-human transition with experts from around the world, including Peter Dazak, the British-american president of the New York-based non-profit Ecohealth Alliance, who was one of the first scientists to warn that a “disease X” could cause a global pandemic. In 2017, she and her team established that the coronavirus that caused SARS came from bats. It was that expertise that helped her team identify COVID-19 in early January.
But the coincidence of a pandemic in the same city as the lab raised an obvious, and troubling, question. In an interview with Scientific American magazine in March, she recalled thinking: “Could they have come from our lab?” After all, she and her colleagues had gathered and stored countless samples of bat-borne viruses over the years.
The Wuhan lab is one of a handful in the world with the highest internationally recognized levels of biocontainment security, a standard known as BSL-4. It follows strict protocols: air and water are filtered and treated before leaving it, researchers are obliged to change clothes and shower. There is no evidence that its strict procedures were breached, and Shi and the lab have since issued firm denials that safety protocols failed.
But accidents can happen. In 2003, an outbreak of SARS in Singapore was linked to an accident in a hospital lab when a 27-year-old doctoral student became infected. That outbreak involved labs cleared for BSL level 3 containment — one level below the standards in place in Wuhan. An investigation found that safety standards had been jeopardized because researchers were forced to work together while another lab was being renovated. The SARS virus was also reported to have escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing several times. And it is not clear that COVID-19 was always handled only in level-4 labs.
“Of course it is possible that is was human error,” said a French scientist who visited the Wuhan lab. “But you must remember that the most virulent coronaviruses are considered level 3 and others are level 2.” That would raise the possibility of a leak from another lab — possibly Wuhan’s Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, a separate institution based 300 metres from the Wuhan market initially identified as the source of the virus.
The WIV has long been entangled in a web of international tensions over the handling of hazardous pathogens. It was originally the product of a joint venture with France, which has its own BSL-4 laboratory in Lyon. Michel Barnier, the EU Brexit negotiator, at that time Jacques Chirac’s foreign minister, signed the decree that led to the Wuhan lab’s creation in 2004. But French firms got only minor roles in the building of the lab, and by the time it opened, co-operation had collapsed. Technip, the French company supposed to certify that the building complied with safety standards, refused to do so after pulling out of the project in 2015, and 50 senior French scientists, who were meant to move to Wuhan to work there in its first five years of operation, never arrived, according to Le Figaro and France Inter, the state broadcaster. Challenge, a French business magazine, has reported that the project foundered when French military officials refused to supply China with deadly viruses or antivirus suits in case they were used for biological weapons research.
That was not the end of international co-operation, however. In 2013, a U.S. team filled the gap when the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas, the top pathogens research institution in the U.S., began training Chinese researchers for work in BSL-4 laboratories. The move left some French officials suggesting Paris had lost out to the Americans. James Leduc, the director of the Galveston lab, played down the likelihood of an accidental leak from the WIV, but said accidents could not be ruled out.
Beijing did not appear to rise to Trump’s bait Friday, but it has repeatedly denied that the COVID-19 virus came from the Wuhan lab, with senior foreign ministry officials insinuating on several occasions that it could have originated in the U.S.