The possibly strong case for COVID-19 escaping Chinese lab
After months of being dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory, official support is starting to build for the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic is not a freak accident of nature, but was rather the result of an accidental escape from a Chinese virology lab.
Anthony Fauci, one of the U.S.’S most visible infectious disease specialists during the COVID-19 pandemic, said this week that he was “not convinced” that the pandemic had natural origins — contradicting statements from a year prior when he dismissed any question of a lab leak as a “circular argument.”
At the time same time, U.S. President Joe Biden also confirmed that he has ordered an intelligence review into the theory that the pandemic was sparked by a “laboratory accident.”
Global Times, one of the main English-language arms of Chinese state media, dismissed all of this week’s developments as a “blatant lie” trafficked by U.S. elites who have “festered further in morality.”
The SARS pandemic was sparked by the eating of wild meat in China’s Guangdong province. HIV leaped from apes to humans in 1920s Congo. But COVID-19, a pandemic that has thus far killed at least 3.5 million and cost the equivalent of several world wars, could well be the result of a single breach in laboratory hygiene.
A bad filter change, a faulty door seal or a specimen in the garbage instead of the incinerator could be the inciting incident for the costliest disaster of the 21st century. If true, it would be the most consequential single mistake ever made.
The National Post has been reporting since May 2020 that there was credence to the lab leak theory. The official line out of Beijing at the time — that COVID-19 spontaneously erupted at a Wuhan food market — was shown to be highly unlikely. China is still holding fast to the idea that the disease is purely natural in origin — and have repeatedly obfuscated international attempts to consider differently.
While the world still has no smoking gun as to COVID19’S origins, what we do have is an ever-lengthening record of circumstantial evidence tying the Wuhan lab to COVID-19, as well as a growing roster of official voices expressing doubt in the official Chinese origin story.
Below, why the lab leak theory has always been among the most plausible theories for the origins COVID-19.
IF IT WASN’T A LAB LEAK, COVID-19’S WUHAN ORIGINS WOULD BE ONE OF THE GREATEST COINCIDENCES IN HISTORY
The world’s first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Wuhan, a city of 11 million located about a day’s drive west of Shanghai. Wuhan is also home to China’s firstever Bsl-4-certified laboratory; a rare classification given only to labs dealing with the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
Opened in 2018, the BSL4 campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is known to work with coronaviruses, and in particular bat coronaviruses, the likely origin of COVID-19. A January investigation by New York magazine is to date the most rigorous journalistic probe into the potential lab origins of COVID-19. Among other things, it noted that the Wuhan institute is home to the “most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world.”
The lab also engaged in gain-of-function experiments, wherein researchers would attempt to supercharge coronaviruses in order to infect lab mice or human cell samples. The idea with gain-of-function is to find ways to combat the emergence of new viruses from nature. But gain-offunction is also “exactly the kind of experiment from which a Sars2-like virus could have emerged,” read a lengthy scientific breakdown of COVID-19’S origins by the Indian news site The Wire.
In other words, if the Wuhan Institute of Virology turns out to have no connection to the birth of the COVID-19 pandemic, then a novel coronavirus with likely origins in bats will have coincidentally started infecting humans within walking distance of a lab that just happens to be the world centre of studying highly infectious bat coronaviruses.
TOP CHINESE VIRAL LABORATORIES, HAVE A TROUBLING TRACK RECORD
In 2018, long before any notion of COVID-19 existed, U.S. diplomats fresh from a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology drafted a cable to Washington warning that the facility’s lax standards risked sparking a pandemic. “The new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” the cable said, according to the Washington Post.
This week also saw the release of a U.S. intelligence report claiming that, in the fall of 2019, three workers at the Wuhan institute were hospitalized “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”
The Wuhan lab also had ties to a serious security breach at Canada’s own BSL4 lab, the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Although the incident has no known connection to COVID-19, in July 2019 researcher Xiangguo Qiu was escorted by RCMP from the Winnipeg facility allegedly due to questions surrounding an unauthorized shipment of Ebola and henipavirus samples to Wuhan in March 2019.
THE WHO’S OFFICIAL PROBE INTO VIRUS’ ORIGINS WERE A FARCE
When Australia first called for an international probe into the true origins of COVID-19, Beijing lashed back with a threat of major sanctions on Australian grain imports.
A probe ultimately did come into being, but it ended up being a far cry from anything approaching Australia’s initial vision. Organized by the World Health Organization, the probe comprised a team of 17 Chinese scientists and 10 non-chinese investigators who spent two weeks conducting interviews under the constant supervision of the People’s Republic of China.
“The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” said team member Peter Ben Embarek in February.
Researchers spent only hours at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they requested no documents and performed no forensic examination of lab protocols. Rather, they only conducted a handful of supervised meetings wherein laboratory staff assured them that the institute saw “no disruptions or incidents” at the time of COVID-19’S emergence.
The WHO investigation hadn’t even released its final report before more than a
dozen international senior medical researchers signed an open letter calling for a more reliable investigation to definitively rule out the possibility of a “research-related accident.”
Then, in late March, the probe’s finding were directly questioned by WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Tedros has often been criticized for a soft touch on China in regards to COVID-19. Regardless, he wrote in a March 30 statement “although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation.”
LAB LEAKS HAPPEN ALL THE TIME
It’s not just Chinese virology labs that foul up the handling of potentially planet-altering pathogens. Multiple times in just the last 10 years, North American and European labs have similarly overseen security breaches with the potential to infect millions.
In 2014 it emerged that labs connected to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control were guilty of, among other things, accidentally exposing a bunch of researchers to anthrax and losing vials of smallpox, the now-extinct virus that ranks as the deadliest disease in human history.
Lab leaks have even caused verified disease outbreaks. In 1977, a strange flu began surging through the Soviet Union and China. Subsequent analysis of the virus concluded that it was exactly the same as a 1949 flu strain, raising suspicions that the outbreak had escaped from a laboratory freezer. History’s last victim of smallpox, British woman Janet Parker, was killed by a 1978 lab screw-up at Birmingham University.
THE POLITICS WAS ALWAYS IN THE ROOM WITH US.