No one believed the lab leak theory ... then the world changed its tune
Fear of upsetting China led to many being happy to dismiss evidence linking the outbreak to virus experiments
When Covid-19 first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, many pointed out that the outbreak was close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Of all the cities, in all the world, a deadly coronavirus had popped up just eight miles from labs where scientists were importing, and tinkering with, deadly bat coronaviruses. Even
Wuhan scientists themselves were concerned. Dr Shi Zhengli, a WIV virologist, said she remembered thinking that if coronaviruses were behind the outbreak: “Could they have come from our lab?”
It should not have been so controversial. Laboratory leaks are fairly common, with smallpox, swine flu, anthrax and foot and mouth disease all known to have escaped from facilities in recent decades. In 2004, the Sars virus leaked from a high-containment research laboratory in Beijing at least three times, causing local outbreaks.
Behind the scenes, international scientists were also worried. An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, in February 2020 said “a likely explanation” was that Covid evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.
The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.
Sir Jeremy warned that research in Wuhan was like the “Wild West” with experiments carried out at worrying biosecurity levels. But Dr Collins argued that further debate on the subject could damage “international harmony”. That comment would come to typify why it has been so difficult to get to the bottom of the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.
As Matt Hancock’s original biography drafts show, the world was terrified of upsetting China.
Over the next few months, scientists did whatever they could to steer investigations away from a lab leak.
Only in the United States, where Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, argued that there was “enormous evidence” the virus had leaked from Wuhan, was the possibility being seriously considered. However, the political gulf between the Donald Trump administration and most scientists led to the allegations being disparaged as anti-chinese racism.
When an investigation by the World Health Organisation (WHO) concluded that the virus had most probably jumped from animals to humans in a “zoonotic spillover” event, the case seemed closed. In fact, it was not until Mr Trump left office in 2021 that the tide began to turn.
In a letter to the journal Science in May 2021, 18 of the world’s top epidemiologists and geneticists called for an independent inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. By that time a collective of virologists and hackers had also dug up evidence showing that Wuhan scientists had been tweaking bat coronaviruses to make them more deadly – and doing so with funding from the US government.
In 2010, WIV had embarked on “gain of function experiments” to increase the infectiousness of Sars coronavirus in humans, and by 2015, they had created a highly infectious chimeric virus which targeted the human upper respiratory tract.
However, to date, Beijing has failed to disclose much of the work that was being done, and removed a database of viral sequences shortly before the pandemic erupted. By the summer of 2021, US intelligence had discovered three researchers at WIV had sought treatment at a hospital after falling ill in November 2019 – weeks before China told the world about Covid.
Then, in August 2021, the head of the WHO’S pandemic origins investigation admitted he had been pressured into ruling out a lab leak to avoid a clash with China. Dr Peter Embarek said it was actually a “likely hypothesis” that a lab employee could have picked up the virus while working in the field, and brought it back to Wuhan.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, was forced to admit a lab leak had been ruled out prematurely and set up a new inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. More than 18 months on, that inquiry has gone nowhere, with members complaining that China has stonewalled.
Last October, a Senate committee concluded that the Covid-19 pandemic was “more likely than not” the result of a laboratory accident, and told China they would need to prove otherwise.
And last week, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, said that the bureau believes Covid-19 probably originated in a Chinese lab. A US energy department report in February also came to the same conclusion.
A House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on the pandemic origins opened yesterday in the latest attempt to get to the truth.
Yet China continues to dig in its heels, and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, believes that any evidence, if it existed, has probably been destroyed by now.
If the Cabinet Office notes are to be believed, the Government appears to view links to the Wuhan laboratory as entirely coincidental.
But with each passing day a lab leak becomes more plausible. When scientists hunted for the source of the original Sars, a small team had found it within six months.
It is now more than three years since the start of the pandemic and, despite an unprecedented search, no animal host for Covid-19 has ever been found. Perhaps because it never existed in the wild.