By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, May 18,
2021
Some of us are COVID-origin hipsters, I
guess; we were into the lab-leak theory before it went mainstream.
I’m glad Donald G. McNeil Jr., the
prize-winning former science reporter for the New York Times, has
concluded that, “the argument
that [SARS-CoV-2] could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a
sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious
discussion.”
I’m glad that 18 scientists have written
to Science magazine that, “We must take hypotheses about both
natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.”
I’m glad that the Washington Post editorial
board declared yesterday, “If the
laboratory leak theory is wrong, China could easily clarify the situation by being more open and
transparent. Instead, it acts as if there is something to hide.”
I’m even sort of glad that Matt Yglesias
saluted New York magazine, declaring that publication “brought the
lab leak hypothesis into the mainstream,” because he acknowledges “the insta-consensus on Twitter and among
media fact-check columnists never reflected a real consensus among practicing
scientists who seem to me to mostly just really not know.”
Back when this pandemic began, I was like
most people; I thought the virus most likely jumped from an animal at a
wet market, because virologists had been warning about this sort of scenario
for years.
Back on April 3, National Review published what turned into one of the
most-read articles I’ve ever written, “The Trail
Leading Back to the Wuhan Labs.” It started as a simple project: going through all of the claims one
of the YouTube videos alleging the pandemic was the result of a lab accident,
and seeing what could be independently verified. As it turned out, quite a bit
could be verified:
·
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was indeed
studying novel coronaviruses found in bats, as was the Wuhan Centers for
Disease Control.
·
Wuhan is indeed a great distance away from
the natural habitat of bats who are most likely to carry viruses like this one,
well beyond their natural migration patterns.
·
Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist
nicknamed “Bat Woman” for her work with that species, told Scientific
American that when she heard about the outbreak, her first thought
was, “Could they have come from our lab?”
·
The never-quite-definitively-proven
contention that the virus required an intermediate species such as pangolins
was complicated by the fact that no one had yet found evidence that pangolins
were at the Huanan Seafood Market, or even that venders at that market
trafficked pangolins.
·
Botao Xiao, a doctor who had been a postdoctoral
research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, had published a paper arguing that the “bat soup” theory was unlikely
and contending the virus was more likely to be an accident at one of the city’s
two labs working on these kinds of viruses. But after a few days, Xiao withdrew
his paper and declined to elaborate why.
·
Virologist Tian Junhua, who worked at the
Wuhan Centers for Disease Control, indeed traveled into caves to collect virus
samples from bats, and in past interviews, he had described self-quarantining
because he had come in contact with bat blood, urine, etc.
·
The Chinese government lies as easily as
it breathes; it had spent three to six weeks telling the world that the virus
was not contagious.
That wasn’t a definitive case, but the
circumstantial evidence kept piling up. What were the odds that a novel
coronavirus that originated in bats would spontaneously and independently cause
an outbreak in the middle of a city that housed not one but two laboratories
researching novel coronaviruses that originated in bats? If about 40 percent of
those infected with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic, would a lab technician or
other employee even know they had been infected?
I think what was most bothersome in the
response to that very early look at the evidence were the knee-jerk, non-thinking
dismissals of the concept. Start with the insistence that the Wuhan scientists
were too careful to make such a consequential mistake. The history of lab
accidents says otherwise. I made this point, again and again,
with more and more examples of comparable lab accidents involving dangerous
pathogens, and yet there was this brick wall of disbelief, an insistence that
these scientists in these labs were just too careful and too diligent to ever
have one screw-up, ever. That is a contention on par with “car accidents never
happen” or “plane crashes never happen.”
At that point, we hadn’t even known about
the U.S. State Department memos warning about a lack of trained
personnel at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Or the claim that
cell-phone use in part of the WIV stopped for three weeks in October 17,
suggesting a potential evacuation or decontamination. Or the World
Health Organization investigation concluding that some Wuhan Institute of
Virology staffers got sick with flu-like symptoms in autumn of 2019, but that it’s “not a big thing,” because the Chinese government said
they tested negative for COVID-19. Or Chinese state-run media running
articles about “chronic inadequate management issues” at laboratories,
including problems with biological disposal, or Chinese lab employees illegally
selling off lab animals on the black market. Or even the use of “gutter oil”
in wet markets!
Then some people would cling to rejected
scenarios. Long after the Chinese government publicly declared that the
evidence did not support the theory that the Huanan Seafood Market was the
source of the outbreak, idiots at
other publications sneered at what I wrote because the virus had to have come
from the market.
Until I
started working on the book, I didn’t
know just how much
evidence there was that China’s government never stopped its dual-use research
into potential biological weapons. (One scenario that I think has gotten almost no attention is that the
Chinese government’s secrecy surrounding the Wuhan Institute of Virology could
be entirely separate from the origin of the virus, but because that lab is
doing dual-use
research that would violate treaties on biological weapons.)
We’ve got the lab-leak theory that has a
lot of circumstantial evidence but no definitive proof. And we’ve got the
naturally-jumped-to-someone-outside-of-the-lab theory, which . . . doesn’t
really have any definitive proof, either. As the Post editorial
notes, “already, more than 80,000 wildlife, livestock and poultry samples
were collected from 31 areas in China, and none tested positive for the virus
before or after the outbreak.” This virus spreads like wildfire in human
beings; why is it so hard to find it in other animals?
If this was a lab accident, it would rank
among the most consequential mistakes in human history. As of this morning, the
virus has spread to 164 million cases and caused 3.4 million deaths worldwide.
Now look at these from the perspective of a scientific, government, diplomatic,
or media leader. What are the consequences if this is just a farmer stepping in
the wrong guano? What are the consequences if this is just a small-time animal
smugger grabbing the wrong bat or pangolin?
And what are the consequences if this is
the direct result of the Chinese government’s reckless research into dangerous
viruses, including how to make them more virulent and contagious?
Finally, let’s observe how conventional
wisdom gets stealth-edited. Back on April
6, 2020, I noticed that Vox assured
us, “The emergence
of the virus in the same city as China’s only level 4 biosafety lab, it turns
out, is pure coincidence.”
Sometime in the past year, that sentence
was changed to “The emergence of the virus in the same city as China’s only
level 4 biosafety lab, it turns out, appears to be pure
coincidence.”
Someone’s hedging their bets.
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