Coronavirus source: Wuhan lab leak dismissal was driven by politics

The idea of ‘natural emergence’ of Covid-19 was always a leap of faith but there was a lot of vested interest in sticking to it.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, left, inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan. Picture: AFP

It took four months to find the civet cat that caused SARS-CoV-1, a virus that spread to 29 countries in 2002 and killed more than 900 people.

It took about nine months to find the camel responsible for MERS, a coronavirus that emerged in the Middle East in 2012, so far killing about 850 people globally.

Yet 18 months since SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, an unprecedented search by health officials across 31 Chinese prov­inces has not found a single case of the virus in any animals.

This is the big problem for the “natural emergence” explanation of Covid-19: there isn’t any evidence for it.

But there is plenty of evidence for a rival explanation – that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And it’s not only the lack of animal host, physician and scientist Steven Quay explained in his presentation at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC last week that demolished the natural emergence theory.

After the SARS and MERS epidemics, researchers went back and found traces of those viruses in samples from sick patients, illustrating how the viruses had been spreading and mutating randomly before becoming more infectious. But no trace of an early SARS-CoV-2 has been found in anyone, suggesting the virus emerged suddenly.

“Running the math on this, the probability (of SARS-CoV-2 emerging naturally) and having this result is literally less than one in a million,” Quay said.

Don’t trust his word for it, though. The Chinese scientist who oversaw the Wuhan lab, Shi Zhengli, often pictured in a hazmat suit, wrote in January last year that the new coronavirus was “probably a recent introduction into humans”. But, strangely, that sentence was removed from the final paper published a few months later.

SARS-CoV-2 is no ordinary virus either, being “highly adapted for infection of humans from the start”, Quay noted. It has a “double uniqueness” in its genetic material, an “immaculate insertion”.

The truth can be shockingly inconvenient. “Ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is,” Winston Churchill once quipped.

The list of people and institutions who don’t want the lab leak theory to be true is a long and powerful one: the Chinese government, parts of the US government, virologists, people who dislike Donald Trump and most of the mainstream media.

The natural emergency explanation was a leap of faith from the start. The bat cave allegedly responsible for the virus is 1500km away from the first infection but only 3.5km away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “It’s like someone walking down the street in Manhattan and getting infected with a virus from the Everglades in Florida,” Quay said.

Moreover, leaks do happen. A Russian research lab accidentally leaked anthrax in 1979, killing dozens of people. A year earlier smallpox leaked in Britain, claiming its final victim in that country. And the original SARS leaked accidentally, twice, in 2004 from a Beijing virology lab, also killing someone, according to the World Health Organisation.

Yet the idea of natural emergence gained so much currency so quickly. Facts may determine scientific progress in the long run, but in the short run it’s politics.

The “proof” still cited by most scientists in favour of the natural emergence theory boils down to a couple of letters, not peer reviewed, published in Nature and The Lancet early last year, written by scientists who had a vested interest in dismissing the idea of a lab leak.

More than a year on and “we haven’t seen scientific evidence for natural emergence”, David Asher, a former US State Department official who was investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2, tells The Australian. “And it befuddles the brain to try to understand why the Chinese government would not readily provide such evidence if it existed,” he says.

To be sure, a few weeks ago Shi dismissed the idea as baseless, in a telephone call with The New York Times, but she’s hardly impartial.

University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist Richard Muller, speaking on the same panel as Quay, said even the most senior scientists in the US, those near or of Nobel prize rank, were too fearful to work on the lab leak theory in case they were associated with Trump or upset China, which is a big fish in virology research. “I’m not going to do anything that will help Trump get re-elected,” Muller recounted a senior colleague telling him.

If anything is a conspiracy in these Covid times, it’s not the idea of a lab leak, it’s how such an obvious possibility was trenchantly dismissed for so long. Mainstream journalists, with honourable exceptions, were too beholden to mainstream scientists to question their assertions and motives.

The reality is that groupthink is pervasive. Experts will parrot whatever they see other experts saying, given the potentially high career and even personal costs of flouting the “consensus”.

Indeed, it’s precisely this phenomenon that makes scientists such as Quay, 69, a successful chief executive of a Nasdaq-listed company, Muller, 77, a retired astrophysicist, and the growing group of aficionados who agree with them so valuable. They’re brilliant scientists but not virologists; they’re not in the early or mid stages of their careers. It’s about being right, not getting promoted to professor or picking up another research grant from the US or Chinese governments.

Few think the leak was deliberate; it would be a bizarre strategy to leak a virus, especially one that killed the frail almost exclusively, in your own country next to the virology lab that created it.

But the pandemic has illustrated the potential for deadlier manufactured viruses to wreak havoc, and not just from China, given similar virus research facilities in the US and Europe. Science isn’t always a force for good. If we’re going to thank science for the vaccines, we may have to condemn it for Covid-19, too.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Picture: AFP