G7 leaders consider whether to press China on Covid-19 ‘lab leak’

The ‘lab leak’ theory of the Covid pandemic’s origins — once dismissed as a Trump conspiracy — has received its greatest boost at the G7 in England.

The “lab leak” theory of the Covid pandemic’s origins received its greatest boost on Saturday, when world leaders meeting at the G7 in England discussed pressing China on what may be the question of the century: Did the coronavirus that has killed millions around the world escape from the notorious Wuhan Institute of Virology?

Once dismissed as a Trumpian conspiracy theory, the idea has gained increasing credibility in recent weeks as the most likely explanation, with experts suggesting that only politics and propaganda have managed to keep it under wraps for so long.

The news out of England comes as reports filter out of the US suggesting that a high-ranking Chinese defector has confirmed that China’s People’s Liberation Army was in control of the lab at Wuhan and that SARS-CoV-2, the technical name for the coronavirus, was indeed engineered there.

Members of the World Health Organisation arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China's central Hubei province. Picture: AFP

These reports would seem to confirm what another Chinese defector, Dr Li-Meng Yan, told authorities last year about the Army’s involvement in the lab and the work that was being done there.

But to understand how the world has had a change of heart on the lab leak theory, it helps to recall what “expert” opinion said of the coronavirus when it first started spreading around the world.

In early 2020, speculation was that the pandemic kicked off when a customer or worker in one of Wuhan’s notorious “wet markets” picked up the mutated virus from a bat.

But while that theory shot around the world, spawning countless bad jokes and “bat soup” memes, others started to notice a number of problems with the story.

How The Daily Telegraph broke the story.

World Health Organisation Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Picture: AFP

For one thing, the sort of bats that were originally blamed for the pandemic don’t appear to be local to Wuhan, with the bats who host a virus most similar to SARS-CoV-2 living more than 1500km away.

Not only that, as weird and grisly as many Chinese wildlife wet markets might be, there was no evidence that bats were actually sold in Wuhan.

Oxford University conservation fellow Professor David Macdonald, who has extensively studied China’s wildlife trade, reported that in fact “bats are rarely consumed in central China.”

And there were other strange happenings, too.

In May, 2020, a private analysis of mobile phone data from Wuhan showed a sudden and unexplained halt to all activity around a high security section of the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a three-week period in October, 2019 – just weeks before reports started to emerge of a strange new illness taking hold in the region – suggesting that there may have been a “hazardous event” of some sort.

Despite this, the lab theory was discounted as a disreputable idea.

World Health Organisation director general Tedros Adhanom shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on January 28, 2020. Picture: AFP

Prestigious medical journals such as the Lancet published open letters stating unequivocally that the virus emerged spontaneously, in nature – though many of the signatories, it would turn out, had connections to a group funded by the US government which in turn was funding its own research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Social media outlets immediately began clamping down of talk that the virus might have escaped from a lab, with Facebook only lifting their ban on posts endorsing the theory a few weeks ago.

Perhaps because of the association with Mr Trump, after The Daily Telegraph reported that the possibility of a leak had been flagged in a Five Eyes intelligence dossier, the ABC’s Media Watch devoted several episodes to tearing down the theory.

But with Mr Trump now gone, so too is the wild opposition to everything he said – even if what he said had merits.

And it wasn’t just the media, but also supposedly objective scientists, who were blinded by politics.

US President Donald Trump addresses the media at the height of the pandemic. Picture: AFP

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health Dr Anthony Fauci. Picture: AFP

“Most scientists turned a blind eye to the facts, as the political environment at the time was toxic with anti-Trump rhetoric and Trump had set himself up as the Kung-Flu king, who espoused the view that this was clearly a China-made virus,” vaccine researcher and Flinders University director of endocrinology Prof Nikolai Petrovsky said.

“This resulted in a politicisation of science like never before with scientists as a body deciding that to question the origins of the virus, was to be a supporter of Trump.

“Of course nothing could be further from the truth as many if not all the scientists questioning the origins are clearly not Trump supporters.

“Now, many scientists are slowly opening their eyes and realising that they might have been duped by a combination their own colleagues who had authored the Lancet and Nature.” Medicine commentaries, together with a mass of Chinese propaganda and of course their own prejudices that anything Mr Trump said could not be true,” he said.

But politics did not blind everyone.

China watcher, author, and Charles Sturt University professor Clive Hamilton was one of the few lone voices in favour of the lab leak theory.

“From day one I believed the lab leak hypothesis was the most plausible. Too many facts did not fit the seafood market idea. And until they were shut down by the Chinese government, Chinese scientists were saying the same,” said Prof Hamilton, whose most recent book Hidden Hand examines the various ways that the Chinese Communist Party influences political and media debates.

“In the end, facts matter and I don’t allow myself to be bullied out of saying what the facts indicate. Even some of the world’s top virologists refused to accept the evidence because Donald Trump talked about the lab leak. It was disgraceful and set back the search for months.”

Fast-forward a year, and the lab leak theory has stopped being something not discussed in polite company and is instead rapidly moving up the likely suspects list.

And it turns out that even as Dr Fauci publicly led the charge against the lab leak theory for over a year, from the very start of the pandemic he was hearing alarm bells that something else may have been afoot.

All the way back on 1 February 2020, Scripps Research Institute scientist Dr Kristian Andersen warned Dr Fauci that there was every possibility the virus came from a lab.

“The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” he wrote, in an email revealed as part of a massive dump of communications obtained by Buzzfeed through a Freedom of Information request.

A leaked email from Anthony Fauci.

Those unusual features include a rare genomic sequence never before seen in a natural coronavirus known as “CGG-CGG” that can make a virus more infectious and dangerous.

Now, even those who were previously sceptical of the lab leak theory appear to be coming around — or at least keeping an open mind.

Dr Fauci, contradicting countless interviews and answers given in press conferences where he dismissed the idea as nonsense, said on June 4: “I keep an absolutely open mind that if there may be other origins of that, there may be another reason, it could have been a lab leak.”

Even World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who in the early days of the pandemic was accused of turning his UN agency into a mouthpiece for Beijing’s spin on the virus, seems to have changed his tune.

In March, Dr Tedros opened the door to the theory, claiming after a carefully stage-managed WHO investigation in Wuhan: “although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation.”

For even this mild statement, he was pilloried by the Chinese press, with one anonymous “expert” telling the Hubei Daily he was “surprised and unsatisfied” by Dr Tedros’ comment, which he called “irresponsible.”

Indeed that has been the tone of the Chinese press as well as its infamous wolf warrior diplomats every time someone suggests that the pandemic did, indeed, emerge out of a Wuhan lab.

The editor of the Global Times, Beijing’s international propaganda sheet, even posted a bellicose rant on WeChat all but threatening nuclear war with the West for pushing the theory.

All of which suggests that whatever the G7 or international intelligence agencies decide about the plausibility of the lab leak theory, doing something about China’s responsibility will be far tougher.