Interesting how Biden is drumming up investigations into the origins of COVID-19. Particularly as it seems like many people including myself have flip flopped going from discounting the lab leak hypothesis to giving it a real platform of debate again.
In the early days, I thought the lab leak hypothesis was unlikely, but more importantly, it was just a distraction from the utter failure of government to come up with a strategy for fighting COVID-19.
However, I now believe the lab leak hypothesis is more likely than I did a year ago, perhaps 50% at this point.
Here's a couple things that changed:
Despite over a year of effort and testing thousands of animals, scientists have not found wild or domesticated animals that carried a proximal version of SARS-CoV-2 that could have plausibly been a recent ancestor of the human version. In contrast, investigations into SARS and MERS did find the intermediate animal hosts within a few months. While this evidence doesn’t directly make the lab leak hypothesis more likely, it makes indirect or direct natural transmission from bats less likely, which raises the probability of all other hypotheses.
All the evidence in favor of the lab leak hypothesis is still circumstantial as opposed to direct, but there’s more of it now, and it’s better than no evidence at all. Furthermore, all the prior circumstantial evidence in favor of the lab leak hypothesis from a year ago (the fact that there’s a lab in Wuhan that performed gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses, and that this lab had numerous security issues) still stands.
There’s an intelligence report of unknown origin claiming that three Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) workers were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019. The reporters sharing this story did not disclose the source, but the source was sufficiently impressive to convince the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream media sources to take it seriously. These hospitalizations could of course be from any of the other coronaviruses they were studying, or something else entirely.
I learned (from the WHO report, of all places!) that the Wuhan CDC relocated on at the beginning of December 2020 to a new location near the wet market. Obviously moving a BSL4 (highly secure) laboratory that studies deadly viruses is a delicate operation, and it’s not hard to imagine something getting loose during the move, especially given the security concerns mentioned.
I have relatively little faith in the WHO report that says the lab leak hypothesis is very unlikely. Peter Daszak, the only US-based investigator on the WHO team, was a close collaborator of Shi Zhengli and managed a US NIH project that funded WIV. This is an obvious conflict of interest, and his answers to questions about the lab leak hypothesis seem flippant. Eg: “ “We were allowed to ask whatever questions we wanted, and we got answers,” says Daszak, who collaborates with researchers at the Wuhan institute. “The only evidence that people have for a lab leak is that there is a lab in Wuhan,” he adds. “ Daszak has also been behind other vigorous exonerations of the WIV while declaring no competing interests. This inclines me to discount Daszak as a source.
Where does that leave us?
The world would definitely benefit from a deeper investigation into the origins of COVID. It’s unlikely to happen, as China has restricted access to the WIV lab, but, it’s still worth pushing for.
In general, the virology scientific community needs to figure out how to improve security techniques around the world. Usually scientific communities that do high risk research come up with plans to self-regulate, but in this case it seems that existing norms have failed, and the community needs to develop higher standards or have them imposed by an external party.
We need to vastly improve our defensive disease surveillance networks, as well as ensure a rapid process for the approval of new vaccines in the future. The world needs the equivalent of a global immune system that has vast capacity to catch, track, and sequence the pathogens in our midst.
