How irrational politics muted plausible Covid leak theory

The secrets of Wuhan have been hidden by the firm hand of Xi Jinping — and the determined denial of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

A resident receives the China National Biotec Group (CNBG) coronavirus vaccine in Shenyang, in China's northeastern Liaoning province. Picture: AFP

Two things are responsible for the statewide lockdown in Victoria, the fourth lockdown in the state in just over a year. One is the incompetence and cowardice of its state government; the other is a coronavirus, invisible to the naked eye and of uncertain origins, first noticed in humans 18 months ago.

The illness caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was first notified to the World Health Organisation by China on New Year’s Eve 2019. Known the world over now as Covid-19, the disease had been identified in the city of Wuhan, in Hubei Province, in the preceding weeks or months and, to the time of writing, had infected more than 170 million people worldwide, causing more than 3.5 million deaths and inducing a global upheaval and recession.

This trauma raises many difficult questions about current dilemmas and future challenges, but the answers hinge largely on one crucial question about the past. How did it start?

We have seen far too little progress on solving this scientific riddle for two reasons that stem from either side of a growing global schism, the cold war of our time. Transparency has been stifled both by the authoritarian opaqueness of Chinese communism, and a jaundiced incuriosity stemming from the hyper-partisan politics of western liberal democracies.

In short, the secrets of Wuhan have been hidden by the firm hand of Xi Jinping, and the determined denial of the Trump Derangement Syndrome. Only now that Trump is off the stage have the US political, intelligence and media establishments committed to openly pursuing the truth.

Let us hope the trail has not gone cold because we cannot expect Beijing to co-operate. Most likely China knows the origins of the virus; hence its ludicrous distracting claims that Covid-19 might have been imported with frozen food from North America.

The two plausible scenarios put forward to explain the Wuhan virus so far involve “zoonotic spillover” (transfer from animals) or an accidental release from a laboratory. This city of more than 10 million people hosts the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is a leading Chinese microbiology facility and a global leader in coronavirus research.

If Chinese authorities or organisations, such as the WIV, had any conclusive evidence that the virus had come from bats or pangolin in a wet market we would have seen it by now. Their failure to trace the origin, speaks volumes.

Virologist Shi Zheng-li, left, works with her colleague in the P4 lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province in 2017. Picture: Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Considerable evidence has been in the public arena for at least a year pointing to the laboratory leak scenario. It was a matter of public record that the closest known virus to Covid-19 was taken to the Wuhan institute after it was sampled from bats in Yunnan province in 2013, where it is thought to have infected and killed three men exploring in a mineshaft.

What a coincidence then that Covid-19 should pop up nowhere else in the almost 2000km between these two locations, but only emerge in the very city where a virology lab is tinkering with this virus in work designed, among other things, to help tackle future SARS epidemics. The fact the WIV has also been involved in military or biological weapons research only compounds the intrigue and the disposition for secrecy.

Reports based on US intelligence have also confirmed mobile phone signals from the institute fell silent for a couple of weeks in October/November 2019 – perhaps indicating an extended shut down – and that a number of the laboratory staff became ill, with three requiring hospitalisation, around the same time. This all coincides exactly with when the virus emerged in Wuhan. Curiouser and curiouser.

Remember, the first doctors to identify the new infections among the public in Wuhan were silenced. The late Dr Wi Wenliang (we should know him as a contemporary hero) was initially threatened by police for attempting to alert other medicos about the emergence of a new virus, and he died two months later, reportedly after contracting Covid-19 from patients.

The WIV has closed previously accessible data bases over the past year, refused to share records, and been resistant and uncooperative with World Health Organisation efforts to probe the virus. The Chinese government has reacted with staggering aggression to Australia for daring to suggest there should be an open, independent, and international investigation.

Scientific evidence has played into the laboratory leak narrative too. A full year ago, Flinders University Director of Endocrinology, Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, told Sharri Markson on Sky News that aside from animal transfer, the other likely possibility was an “accidental release of the virus from a laboratory” and he argued that its highly contagious nature supported the lab research theory. “It was like it was designed to infect humans,” he said.

Peter Daszak (R), Thea Fischer (L) and other members of the World Health Organisation team investigating the origins of coronavirus arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on March 31. Picture: AFP

This reasoning has now been supported publicly by the virologist who headed the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention at the time the pandemic began. Dr Robert Redfield told CNN in March that he believed the “most likely” origin of “this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know escaped”.

Redfield acknowledged that others held different views but that “science will eventually figure that out” and he noted “it is not unusual for laboratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker”. Like Petrovsky, he said the rapid transmission among humans indicated the virus might have been altered in research, where virologists often try to improve virus efficiency.

Covid-19 emerged immediately as one of the most highly infectious human-to-human viruses. “Normally when a pathogen goes from an (animal) to humans it takes a while to figure out how to become more and more efficient in human-to-human transmission,” Redfield explained. “I just don’t think this makes biological sense.”

If the emergence of the virus did not intrigue you before you knew any of this, surely your interest would now have been piqued. Truth is, we have known most of this for a year, with evidence and certainty about the main aspects simply building over that time, yet much of the world, from Joe Biden to CNN, and from the WHO to our own ABC, has not wanted to know.

Why? In a word, Trump. Or, in a phrase, Trump Derangement Syndrome. When the former US President was flailing around trying to deal with the emerging pandemic crisis during an election year, his attempts to blame China were delivered with his signature subtlety. It was the “China virus”, the “Wuhan flu”, and even “Kung flu”.

So, when the President shared early analysis raising the prospect of a laboratory genesis, two important things occurred. His own lack of credibility on a scientific approach to the crisis undermined the authority of his claims; and the anti-Trump obsession of his political opponents and large swathes of the media meant they were determined to ridicule or smother any angle that might limit his culpability. For a year, the most important story in the world was ignored by most. Stymied by the impenetrable communist defiance of Beijing (supported by an obsequious WHO), and the anti-Trump derangement of the western media.

Markson, as mentioned earlier, was reporting these issues in detail here in Australia a year ago. Her exclusive reports made news in the US, but only in the pro-Trump media, while they were ignored or derided elsewhere.

Such was the informal media conspiracy that readers of The Daily Telegraph and The Australian, and viewers of Sky News Australia, are some of the only people in the world who have been given a consistently informed account of the lab leak theory over the past year.

In the US, The Wall Street Journal has been assiduous, but most other media have been either incurious or in denial. Markson has been repeatedly attacked by the ABC’s Media Watch program for a year.

Not content with attempting to discredit Markson’s journalism, the ABC has misled the public, telling them the lab leak theory was wrong, a “conspiracy theory” and that it was debunked by all leading scientists. The ABC’s self-appointed national coronavirus expert, Norman Swan, also said the lab leak theory was a dud.

Now, in the blinking of an eye, it has all changed. Pretending away all they have ignored or attacked over the past year, Media Watch’s Paul Barry and Swan now admit the laboratory leak is a plausible theory worthy of investigation. Like many leading media organisations, including the Nine Media newspapers and liberal publications in the US, they are attempting to pin their backflips on claims of new evidence.

Yet The Sydney Morning Herald published a detailed attempt to undermine Markson’s reporting just two weeks ago. Along with the ABC they have had the key facts available to them for a year but they chose to denounce rather than inquire – anti-journalism masquerading as journalism.

So, if most of the evidence has been in the public domain for a year, what has changed? The answer is sad and obvious – politics.

The Biden administration has realised it cannot hold back the tide but must pursue this issue and demand accountability from China. The President has reinstated US intelligence investigations and publicly endorsed the plausibility of the laboratory leak theory. Now the media has followed suit.

The incurious are suddenly interviewing the experts. The denunciators of Markson are parroting her work (without attribution). The echoers of the Beijing denials are now asking questions. The Wuhan apologists now are forced to admit the possibility that China might be culpable. Even Facebook has lifted a ban on claims about human intervention in the virus – quite an insight into thought control in the digital age.

All the while the virus continues to infect, the elderly get sick and die, communities and economies are sabotaged, vaccine rollouts continue, and the leaders in China sit back, watch and guard their secrets. They must marvel, above all else, how in western liberal democracies a disease that attacks our respiratory system can do so much damage to rational thought as well, and how hatred for a political opponent can triumph over concerns for the lives of others.