By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, September 07, 2022
According to the official numbers, Covid-19 has killed
more than 6.5 million people and infected 611 million people around the world.
Those numbers are undercounts; the estimate at The Economist calculates that since
the start of the pandemic, humanity collectively experienced between 15.8 and
26.2 million more deaths than it ordinarily would. The team at The
Economist explains the difficulty in nailing down a more precise
figure:
Among the world’s 156 countries
with at least 1 million people, we managed to obtain data on total mortality
from just 84. Some of these places update their figures regularly; others have
published them only once.
As we approach the autumn of 2022, Covid-19 is a
nonentity in American daily life, with most Americans giving the virus little
thought since the end of the Omicron wave. That’s not the case over in China, where “more than 70
Chinese cities have been placed under full or partial Covid lockdowns since
late August, impacting more than 300 million people.” With daily life returning
to normal in North America, Europe, and much of non-China Asia, very few people
are still asking the question of what started the worst global pandemic since
the Great Influenza of 1918. We have collectively moved on.
A bit more than a year ago, the U.S. government issued its summary statement about
its investigation, infuriatingly shrugging and declaring that, “The
[intelligence community] remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19.
All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an
infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” This was akin to
declaring that the coin could have landed heads up or tails up.
If the intelligence community is continuing to investigate
the origin of Covid-19, it’s being awfully quiet about it; the past year has
brought no significant new updates. And it seems as if most of America’s
leaders have effectively decided that they don’t want to know.
In the past month or so, Dr. David Gorski, writing under the pen name Orac, has argued that, “Two new
studies published last month strongly support a natural zoonotic origin for
COVID-19 centered at the wet market in Wuhan, China,” and lamented that “the
conspiracy mongers” haven’t changed their tune a bit.
Over at UnHerd, Thomas Fazi argued that the lab-leak theory was not dead,
but in fact was very much alive:
Two and half years on, we are still
very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its
appearance. This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery
have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been
systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America
and China.
One of the new studies Gorski refers to contends that the
virus actually jumped from an animal into humans at two different points in
Wuhan in the autumn of 2019:
If SARS-CoV-2 was already able to
infect humans, it shouldn’t be surprising that more than one introduction
occurred. In any case, this study is robust evidence that the most likely
origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in an animal reservoir and that it very likely it
first made the jump to humans in the wet market at Wuhan in November 2019. The
study did not successfully identify the intermediary animal and is
observational. It is, however, powerful.
Gorski also writes that, “There were claims that workers
at WIV were infected with SARS-COV-2 in November 2019, but exhaustive contact tracing failed to find these cases.”
A lot of this comes down to whether you think the Chinese
government is making a genuine, good-faith effort to find the origin of the
virus. The Chinese government has certainly been secretive and obscurant at
many times: silencing Li Wenliang and other doctors who tried to warn about the virus, passing
along inaccurate information about human-to-human spread to the World
Health Organization to share with the world, refused to cooperate with international inquiries, and
contended that the whole pandemic can be traced back to Maine lobsters. As the New York Times reported: “To push
the idea that the virus didn’t come from China, the government has
misrepresented experts’ remarks and given dubious theories the veneer of
science.”
Many scientists, who think of themselves as reflexively
honest and adamantly dedicated to telling the truth, do not like the idea that
other scientists could be dishonest or complicit in a cover-up.
I am open to the argument that the Chinese government’s
secrecy could reflect something besides an attempt to hide a lab leak. The
Wuhan Institute of Virology likely houses some Chinese biological-research
secrets that are unrelated to the Covid-19 pandemic; the U.S. State Department
contended in January 2021 that, “The United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated
on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has
engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on
behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
I cannot concur with the assessment of Angela
Rasmussen, who contended that, “For the Chinese government, it’s
actually worse if Covid-19 came from the market.” (Really? Really? A
zoonotic origin is worse than the world learning that Chinese scientists are
recklessly conducting dangerous research?) But let’s concede that the concept
of a global pandemic that kills 10 to 20 million people starting in a wet
market would still be a great embarrassment for the Chinese government. But the
wet markets in China are still open — “Authorities said half of the cases could be traced to wet
markets and 20 per cent of the infections might have occurred on public
transport” — and there are reports that recently killed animals are hanging
out to dry at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. If Covid-19 started at
this or some other wet market, the Chinese and Wuhan authorities are not acting
like they are particularly worried about a repeat.
I think the Chinese government would prefer that the
origin of the virus remain a mystery; that way, it doesn’t have to admit any
fault, permanently shut down any wet markets, or allow international inspectors
into its biological-research labs. Our current confusion, division, and waning
interest is exactly the outcome that works out best for China.
Richard Ebright summarized the state of the lab-leak hypothesis in a series of
tweets on Monday, laying out all the ways in which the virus that emerged
just down the road from the WIV is similar to what was being researched inside the
WIV.
The bats that carry the virus most similar to SARS-CoV-2
don’t live anywhere near Wuhan. During the period from 2015 to 2017, scientists
and science-policy specialists expressed concern that the Wuhan Institute of
Virology was conducting and contemplating research that posed an unacceptable
risk of lab accident and pandemic. In 2017 and 2018, the WIV constructed a
novel chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate in
human airway cells. In 2018, in an NIH grant proposal, WIV and its
collaborators proposed constructing more novel chimeric SARS-like
coronaviruses, “targeting chimeras that replace natural spike gene with novel
spike genes encoding spikes that have higher binding affinities to human cells”
— in other words, viruses that are even more infectious and contagious among
human beings. “In 2017-2019, WIV constructed and characterized novel SARS-like
coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a biosafety level patently inadequate for
work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and patently inadequate to
contain a virus having transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.” Finally, since
the start of the pandemic, we have repeatedly learned that initial sweeping
statements and denials from the likes of Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance
were misleading and inaccurate.
If all of that was going on inside the Wuhan Institute of
Virology, and then in autumn 2019, a completely separate bat virus — so
genetically similar to the ones being studied and altered inside the institute
that just happened to be so spectacularly effective at infecting human beings —
happened to jump from a bat, or a pangolin into the respiratory system of a
human being . . . it is just a mind-boggling, astronomical-odds astounding
coincidence. It is akin to Jon Stewart’s metaphor of an outbreak
of “chocolatey goodness” just down the road from the Hershey factory in
Pennsylvania.
But if smoking-gun evidence ever existed, it was likely
destroyed long ago. Separately, a WIV worker could well have absent-mindedly
forgotten or ignored a safety precaution, inhaled the virus, remained
asymptomatic, and went about his day, not even realizing that he was Patient
Zero.
Finding the origin of Covid-19 does not appear to be a
priority of the Biden administration. Even among China hawks, the Chinese
government’s refusal to cooperate on solving the mystery takes a back seat to
concerns over Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, the genocide of the Uyghurs,
the crackdown in Hong Kong, etc.
There is occasional talk of Republicans’ holding more
hearings on the subject if they win control of the House, but the typical
Republican is probably more interested in holding hearings on the subject of Hunter Biden. From early
on, certain Democrats concluded that even discussing the lab-leak
theory was dangerous: “This conspiracy theory — promoted by former
President Donald Trump — is extremely dangerous. If the American public were to
believe that China caused 600,000 Americans to die, more than the World War II,
Korea and Vietnam wars combined, there may well be demands for war.” The
responsible thing, in their minds, was to refuse to even consider the
possibility.
(By the way, would the U.S. really jump into a shooting
war with China if we determined it was responsible for a global pandemic? Does
that path really get us where we want to go? Wouldn’t it be more useful to use
the revelation to diplomatically isolate China or to destroy its reputation for
competence all across the globe?)
We don’t know how the Covid-19 pandemic started, and a
lot of people are just fine with that mystery remaining unsolved.
No comments:
Post a Comment