Expert: ‘More likely’ Covid leaked from China lab – and was made there
Harvard doctor tells MPs specialists have failed to trace any ‘missing link’ animal
A LABORATORY leak is now the ‘more likely’ cause of the coronavirus pandemic, a leading scientist believes.
MPs were told yesterday that there was a risk that Covid-19 was an engineered virus.
Dr Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), predicted that the source of the pandemic would one day become clear.
The Commons science and technology committee was told that despite 80,000 creatures being tested over two years, no ‘missing link’ animal responsible for passing the virus to people has been found.
That suggests it is less likely that the virus jumped from animals to humans and originated in the so-called ‘wet markets’ of Wuhan – where there is also a leading virology laboratory.
The city’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was originally seen as the source of the pandemic. It sold wildlife and it was thought that the virus may have jumped from bats into people, through an intermediary such as a pangolin or civet.
But Dr Chan found in May 2020 that, compared with the evolving 2003 SARS virus, the virus causing Covid-19 appeared unusually well adapted for infecting people right from its first detection.
US President Joe Biden earlier this year ordered aides to get to the bottom of whether the virus could have emerged from a ‘laboratory accident’.
Dr Chan told MPs: ‘I think the lab origin is more likely than a natural origin at this point.’ On whether this would eventually be proven, she said: ‘We’ve seen from previous cover-ups that it just takes time, because right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of this pandemic to come forward.
‘It might be five years from now, it might be 50 years from now, but we live in an era where there’s so much data being collected and stored.’
Dr Chan said: ‘We have heard from many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin is reasonable and that includes virologists who made modifications to the first Sars virus.
‘We know this virus has a very unique feature, called the furin cleavage site that makes it the pandemic pathogen it is, so without this feature there is no way this would be causing the pandemic.’
A key theory for those who think the virus was engineered by scientists is that the furin cleavage site was inserted into the coronavirus – because these types of virus do not normally have them.
Another argument is that the virus spreads so easily between people that it must have been engineered to do this.
Dr Chan told the committee a proposal was leaked showing that scientists in the US from EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were developing a ‘pipeline’ for inserting novel furin cleavage sites – genetic modifications – into novel SARS-like viruses in the lab.
‘So, you find these scientists who said in early 2018 ‘‘I’m going to put horns on horses” and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city.
‘So it really is a striking coincidence that needs to be investigated. I’d say the burden is on scientists to show that their work did not result in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.’
Viscount Ridley, who coauthored Viral, a book on the origins of the virus with Dr Chan, also giving evidence, compared the lack of answers over the pandemic with previous coronaviruses.
These were SARS, the respiratory illness which spread from Asia and infected more than 8,000 people in 2003, and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which was first discovered in 2012.
He said: ‘We have to face the fact that after two months we
‘A striking coincidence that needs investigating’
knew the origin of SARS through markets. After a couple of months, we knew the origin of MERS through camels. In this case, after two years, we still haven’t found a single infected animal that could be the progenitor of this pandemic.
‘That’s extremely surprising – 80,000 animals have been tested all across China.’
Lord Ridley has claimed scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were in possession of a batch of viruses very closely related to the one behind the pandemic. These were collected from an abandoned copper mine in Mojiang county, Yunnan, where three workers died with a SARS-like illness in 2012 after shovelling bat guano.
By 2019, the WIV had a database containing more than 22,000 wild animal samples but the data apparently became inaccessible to users outside the laboratory on September 12, 2019 – shortly before the pandemic began.
The former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, has previously said China’s ministry of state security developed an ‘information campaign’ about the origins of the virus which the West ‘went along’ with.
The head of the expert team, led by the World Health Organisation, which investigated the origins of Covid-19, said in February that it is ‘very unlikely’ a laboratory leak was the source. But there were questions raised about the team’s independence. Dr Chan told MPs: ‘We’ve heard from
‘We need to find out so we can stop next pandemic’
many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin of this virus is reasonable. So they say that it’s worth investigating.
‘And this includes virologists who have themselves made similar genetic modifications in the first SARS virus.’
Neither of the experts indicated that they thought the virus could have been released intentionally, suggesting it would instead have escaped during experiments.
In 2004, an outbreak of SARS was linked to two graduate students working at a lab in the National Institute of Virology in Beijing, where experiments using live coronavirus were conducted. One of nine patients, a 53-year-old doctor, died after being infected by her 26year-old daughter, who had been doing research at the institute.
On the source of the current outbreak, Lord Ridley said: ‘We need to find out so we can prevent the next pandemic.
‘We need to know whether or not we should be tightening up work in laboratories or whether we should be tightening up regulations relating to wildlife markets.
‘At the moment we are really not doing either. We also need to know to deter bad actors who are watching this episode and thinking that unleashing a pandemic is something they could get away with.’