Not just because this newspaper’s investigations writer Sharri Markson has been leading the world on reporting of a possible leak that could have already killed close to four million people. It takes a bit of hard reading – not something today’s journalists, spoonfed by an army of PR specialists, are cut out for – to understand how seriously the leak theory is now being taken in scientific circles.
And it requires journalists to ignore the false narrative absorbed by the media culture: in the US, largely because former US president Trump supported the lab leak story, and in Australia, thanks to last year’s two Media Watch programs slamming Markson on the basis of material published in The Lancet and Nature Medicine.
New evidence from deeper scientific research on the Sars-CoV-2 genome, and revelations about the involvement of US chief medical adviser to the president, Anthony Fauci, in funding Wuhan bat virus laboratory studies suggests some of the scientists who signed at least one of those two articles had a conflict of interest.
A good place to start is a piece by former science writer for The New York Times, Nicholas Wade, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on May 5. I suggest this piece because a lot of Australian journalists see anything published by a right of centre media organisation as “culture war” material. Yet they seem happy to believe anything from the NYT, even though that paper got the whole Trump-Russiagate conspiracy narrative wrong for four years.
Journalists more open to a range of sources should read a less complex but powerful piece in The Wall Street Journal on June 7 by Steven Quay, founder of Atossa Therapeutics, and emeritus professor of physics at Berkeley, Richard Muller.
These two pieces, and evidence from other scientists published over the past few months that President Biden’s administration is now investigating, make it clear that because of a certain feature of the Sars-CoV-2 gene responsible for Covid-19 — specifically the double CGG sequence spliced at the furin cleavage site — the chances of such a mutation emerging in nature are about one billion to one.
But such mutations have been genetically engineered in laboratories in so-called “gain of function” (GOF) research 11 times since 1992, and are specifically designed so a coronavirus can more easily infect human cells in a laboratory.
The Sars-CoV-2 spike protein is particularly infectious to humans but does not easily infect bats or other animals, as Flinders University professor Nikolai Petrovsky first discovered in May last year. That’s the point of GOF research, which scientists have been using to help develop vaccine strategies to combat possible future virus outbreaks following the SARS and MERS pandemics.
Where this gets politically tricky is the admission Dr Fauci’s National Institutes of Health has been helping to fund this research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Dr Shi Zhengli, the so-called “bat woman” at the centre of lab leak theories, has been working with US researchers on the project. One of the main authors of a piece in Nature Medicine on March 17 last year debunking the lab leak theory, Kristian Andersen, privately wrote to Dr Fauci the previous month saying the virus looked “unusual” and had features suggesting it could be engineered.
This may be the only thing in Dr Fauci’s emails released to BuzzFeed and The Washington Post last month that does undermine his former insistence on natural cause. In interviews on US television two weeks ago Dr Fauci, justifying his decision to fund WIV research, implied such research would not be acceptable on US soil. In fact GOF research was banned by President Obama but the Trump administration allowed it to resume in 2017 under Dr Fauci.
Dr Fauci himself has spoken previously about the dangers of this kind of research. But like others involved he says the possible benefits of getting ahead of an outbreak outweigh the risks. After Wuhan many others disagree.
One of the most controversial figures in the entire debate is British zoologist Peter Daszak, of EcoHealth Alliance, who has worked with Dr Zhengli for 15 years, and is a co-author on many of her research papers. He has contributed funding to the WIV; organised, drafted and was a signatory to last year’s May 7 letter to The Lancet; and was part of the WHO team investigating the origins of the pandemic. Dr Daszak was even picked to brief the FBI and US intelligence agencies on the lab leak theory in February 2020.
Wrote Markson in The Australian on Monday: “Also invited (to that briefing) was University of North Carolina researcher Ralph Baric, who conducted a highly controversial GOF experiment with Dr Zhengli in 2015.’’ Kristian Andersen was also invited to the briefing.
Still, scientists change their minds in good faith and Dr Fauci now says more work is needed to pin down the origin of the virus – as do a group of 18 prominent researchers who wrote to Science magazine on May 14, saying “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable”.
Dr Zhengli’s co-researcher Ralph Baric, mentioned above, signed this letter. Its last paragraph gets to the heart of media and scientific incuriosity about the lab leak theory. “Finally, in this time of unfortunate anti-Asian sentiment in some countries, we note that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus – often at great personal cost,’’ the letter to Science states.
This column back in March last year wrote about the Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, arrested in Wuhan for alerting the world to the virus. He died of it on February 7, 2020. An academic, law professor Xu Zhangrun, was arrested for posting about the virus. Journalists Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi both disappeared in early 2020 after social media posts that were critical of the Chinese government’s attempts to cover up the virus.
Not being a scientist, this column last May mentioned the 2002 and 2004 SARS outbreaks – the first from a wet market in Beijing and the second from a virus laboratory leak. It’s why I have been puzzled so few journalists have been curious about the Wuhan lab: a Chinese lab has leaked a virus before. You can find detail on the UK National Health Service website.
An early patent for a Covid-19 treatment filed by the WIV on January 19 last year raises the possibility it was working on treatments before China alerted the world to the outbreak. We have no evidence this was part of a military strategy to develop bio-weapons to which Chinese citizens would be immune. But we do know the Institute of Military Medicine, a branch of the People’s Liberation Army, filed a separate vaccine patent on February 24, 2020. And Markson reported last Saturday week on a paper by the PLA’s decorated military scientist Zhou Yusen and Dr Zhengli, published in November 2019 with funding by Dr Fauci’s NIH.
Given Chinese sanctions against Australia over calls by Prime Minister Scott Morrison for a World Health Organisation investigation into the origins of the pandemic, inquisitive journalists should be doing what Markson is.
Memo Four Corners: this is the real “story of the century”.
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Newspaper editors and electronic current affairs producers need to look harder at the Wuhan Covid-19 laboratory leak story.