Don’t blame nature if COVID-19 leaked from a lab
Revelations that the US Department of Energy and the FBI believe that the COVID-19 pandemic likely started in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, have put the prospect of a lab leak back in the news. And now that the possible origins of the virus are being discussed widely again, some scientists are trying to redefine “lab leak” and shrink the possible range of scenarios it would describe, in hopes of limiting any potential backlash against research on dangerous pathogens.
For example, Anthony Fauci recently told CNN’s Jim Acosta that if a virus collected in the wild and stored in a lab happened to leak from that lab “that still is a natural occurrence.” Fauci made a similar comment back in May 2020. Asked about the possibility that scientists had found a virus in a bat and brought it back to a lab, he told National Geographic that it would be a “circular argument” to blame the emergence on science because “it was in the wild to begin with.”
One of the most vocal proponents of the idea that the pandemic had a natural origin, virologist Angela Rasmussen, evidently agrees. On Twitter, Rasmussen highlighted a report from CNN suggesting that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, located just a few hundred meters from the Huanan Seafood Market, was “studying a coronavirus variant around the time of the outbreak.” Unlike the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long been under scrutiny, the Wuhan CDC, according to Rasmussen, doesn’t genetically manipulate the viruses it stores. Accordingly, that would mean that any virus that happened to escape the center was, to use her words, “a natural virus” and those “blaming virology for the pandemic” would be wrong.
Back in the early days of the pandemic a similar claim was made by the authors of what became known as the “proximal origin” paper, which has since shaped so much of the public discussion on this issue. Its authors argued from “comparative analysis of genomic data” that “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.” But how could genomic data exclude the possibility of the leak from a lab of a virus that had been collected in nature? Though it might appear the same as one that showed up in an animal, it would in fact be the outcome of scientists venturing to faraway caves and bringing dangerous pathogens back to a densely populated city.
Columnist Josh Rogin made that point in The Washington Post in April 2020. He wrote that the fact that the virus that causes COVID-19 may not be engineered “is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab.” Meanwhile, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers who advocates for greater oversight of research on human pathogens, pointed out over 18 months ago that “lab origins is not one hypothesis. It’s multiple.” Similarly, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Alina Chan, told Science magazine’s Jon Cohen: “A lab-related incident can span a wide range of activities” from fieldwork to genetic modification. At the end of the day, virtually any possible laboratory scenario involves natural elements because it is nature that scientists study in laboratories.
No one should claim certainty when the evidence remains non-definitive. However, if this all began with researchers swabbing bats in a cave or scientists synthesizing wholly new pathogens with cutting-edge biotechnologies, either way scientists — not raccoon dogs, pangolins, or wildlife traders — would ultimately bear responsibility for the pandemic. After three years in which the lab leak hypothesis has been called everything from a racist conspiracy theory to a plausible scenario, it is time we took more seriously the broad range of laboratory incidents that may have produced the pandemic — and may put us at risk of another one.