Wild theories that didn’t stand up to scrutiny
BACK in April, a slickly produced investigative documentary, Tracking Down The Origin Of The Wuhan Coronavirus, was released online. It claimed conclusive proof that the Covid-19 virus had been created as a biological ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in a Chinese lab.
At first sight, it seemed a shockingly convincing piece of journalism.
On behalf of this newspaper, I cross-checked every claim: The experts it cited and the factual evidence unearthed. I also researched the backgrounds of its makers.
I then approached some of the world’s best independent scientific authorities to ask their opinion. They all agreed – this enticingly spicy story just didn’t stand up.
It had been produced by a US based antiChinese government media organisation called the Epoch Times. Its ‘experts’ were veteran hard-Rightists. Most damningly, its scientific ‘facts’ were twisted out of shape.
So much, then, for the Chinese-manufactured coronavirus conspiracy... Well, not quite. Around the time I was researching the film, I became aware of rumours emerging about a ‘blockbuster’ piece of biological science by British and Norwegian investigators to be published in a reputable journal.
Experts who were sent the paper for ‘peer review’ prior to publication were astounded because it claimed to have established ‘beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is an engineered virus’.
The authors alleged the Covid19 virus had ‘unique fingerprints’ that could not have evolved naturally, and were ‘indicative of purposive manipulation’.
In other words, someone had manufactured this virus. Who exactly? The paper reportedly concluded Covid-19 should correctly be called the ‘Wuhan virus’.
When the paper was finally published this week, it sparked global headlines, largely thanks to former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. In a newspaper podcast interview he claimed the research was smoking-gun evidence the virus pandemic had ‘started as an accident’ when a man-made virus escaped from a Chinese lab.
The paper – co-authored by Professor Angus Dalgleish, a renowned oncologist and vaccine researcher who works at St George’s Hospital, University of London, and Birger Sorensen, a Norwegian virologist – contains none of the stark allegations that originally stunned its reviewers.
The initial paper that triggered wild rumours failed stringent tests of verification and is understood to have been rejected in April by eminent international journals such as Nature and the Journal of Virology. Biomedical experts from the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London are said to have refuted its conclusions.
Then one of the paper’s coauthors, Dr John Fredrik Moxnes, chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, asked for his name to be withdrawn. This week, after numerous rewrites, the paper was published by the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery. And those original world-shaking conclusions have now withered to innuendo. No accusation of Chinese manipulation appears.
THE rewritten paper describes the virus as a ‘chimera’ – this means it contains the viral genetic material of more than one virus. This may occur naturally when two viruses infect a living creature at the same time.
It is the reason leading investigators believe that the Covid-19 virus acquired its pandemic powers by jumping between species.
The other definition of a ‘ chimera virus’ is one that has been created in a lab as a bioweapon, but the published paper only vaguely implies foul play. In conclusion, the paper argues that: ‘A comprehensive analysis of the aetiology of the target virus is prerequisite, not optional’. ‘Aetiology’ is defined in medical terms as ‘the cause or origin’. In other words, Professor Dalgleish and his colleague are demanding to know where Covid19 came from.
Well we’d all love to know the answer to that one. Certainly, the Chinese authorities have done plenty to arouse suspicion about the virus’s origins. And they have form when it comes to poor biosecurity: they let a lethal Sars virus escape from a Beijing lab in April 2004, infecting nine people before the outbreak was contained.
None of this changes the fact that the overwhelming consensus is Covid-19 originated in nature, and most likely infected us through the cruel trade in live wild animals for the cooking pot.
What this furore does do, however, is distract us from the most truly explosive warning contained in Professor Dalgleish’s paper. It is well established that the coronavirus invades our bodies via ACE2 receptor sites on cells in our noses and lungs.
But his detailed study of the virus’s make-up indicates that it can break in to the human body through a variety of other routes. An effective vaccine may have to ‘educate’ our bodies to block the virus from multiple points of entry. In this respect it shows many similarities with the Aids virus HIV.
Prof Dalgleish’s warning to those working to create a conventional vaccine against Covid-19 is this: ‘The world was promised an HIV vaccine that would be ready in 18 months. That was 36 years ago.’
Could coronavirus prove similarly immune to our best vaccine efforts? We can only hope the researchers’ science on this question proves as thin as their Chinese conspiracy theory.