If lab leak led to COVID, we simply can't ignore it

Since 2019 when COVID-19 emerged in China, scientists worldwide have been trying to ascertain the origin of the virus.

The two major theories are a natural spillover from bats to an animal source and then to humans or a laboratory accident. A related question is whether the virus emerged from nature or was the result of genetic manipulation.

Until recently, although no animal intermediary between virus-carrying bats and humans has been identified, Chinese scientists and many of their Western counterparts, including prominent American researchers, argued that animals transmitted the virus to humans. They downplayed the lab leak theory and essentially dismissed the possibility that the virus was engineered rather than a creation of nature.

In the past year, the theory of an animal vector has been met with increasing skepticism. Many in the scientific community, as well as some in U.S. intelligence circles, do not buy the remarkable coincidence that the first COVID-19 cases just happened to appear in Wuhan, China, the site of the Chinese government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology. FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that the bureau believes COVID-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.

Now out is a comprehensive investigation of the virus origin by the Sunday Times of London, compiled with sourcing including interviews with U.S. State Department special investigator.

The conclusion of Times reporters was startling. “Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world's most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began. Investigators who scrutinized top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the COVID-19 outbreak. The U.S. investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.”

While the Times does not claim the virus was intended to be a bioweapon, the findings bolster the lab leak theory by noting the first cases of COVID-19 likely occurred in Chinese researchers involved in the early lab work at Wuhan. Journalists from other news outlets also have reported that the virology institute scientists were the first humans to be infected.

If the Times investigation is substantially true, there are at least three disturbing conclusions:

First, if the Chinese cannot be trusted to provide reliable information and their military is actively working on bioweapons, that's ominous. We are still involved in global rivalries that hark back to the Cold War, and an emerging battlefield is the scientific laboratory. Washington shouldn't be providing research funds for China or any other country if U.S. officials cannot tell how the money is being used.

Second, this episode dispels the notion that scientists are an apolitical community that can work without regard to international borders — a lesson we must continuously relearn in the face of the profession's protestations to the contrary.

Third, the politicized WHO cannot guarantee biosecurity — these organizations are necessary but not sufficient. The U.S. should explore independent alliances to create a distant early warning system that includes real-time international genomic, case and wastewater surveillance for dangerous biological agents.

Hard truths. But unless we acknowledge and respond to these truths, as bad as COVID-19 was, the inevitable next pandemic could be much worse.