‘The world deserves answers.’
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN
On 27 August 2021, the US government’s intelligence agencies published a brief, declassified summary of the results of their inquiry into the origin of the virus. The agencies were agreed that the virus was not a bioweapon and they thought with ‘low confidence’ that it was ‘probably’ not the product of genetic engineering. They also thought that Chinese officials had no foreknowledge of the pandemic but complained that China ‘continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries’. Beyond that they could not reach agreement. Four ‘elements’ of the intelligence community concluded with ‘low confidence’ that the source of the pandemic was natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus. Three could not decide. Only one agency had reached a conclusion with ‘moderate confidence’ and that was that the first infection came about as a result of ‘a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology’. The inquiry had therefore solved nothing, added little but reinforced the need to take both natural and lab-origin hypotheses seriously, to investigate them properly and to act as if both could happen again. A year before it would have been cataclysmic news that the US government thought that there was a fairly level playing field between a natural spillover and a laboratory leak. However, by August 2021, much of the American public and the international media had already shifted to regard both hypotheses as plausible – a laboratory origin was no longer extremely unlikely or the conspiracy theory it had been condemned as by numerous scientists and experts in 2020.
Remember that for the first year of the pandemic, as the death toll mounted, the debate about the origin of the virus had stayed on a single track. With rare exceptions, the natural spillover hypothesis was assumed by scientists, governments, officials, broadcasters and journalists to be by far the most likely explanation of how the virus first infected a human being. Taking their cue from Dr Peter Daszak’s Lancet letter in February 2020 and Dr Kristian Andersen’s Nature Medicine article in March that year, many public figures of influence in the west assumed that the idea of a laboratory leak was a fantasy of a few far-right politicians. Chinese sources were even more emphatic. The scientific establishment barely wavered, repeatedly telling journalists that the laboratory-leak hypothesis was a conspiracy theory. Few reporters or politicians knew enough biology to come to a different conclusion and most were content to take it on trust. Science journalists, unlike political or business journalists, are generally not in the habit of challenging their sources.
True, there were uncomfortable gaps in the story and they were growing wider, not narrower. For anybody following closely, the anomalies were piling up, as was the evidence that quite a lot of information was being held back.
Yet few of these stories broke through into the mainstream media, which showed magnificent incuriosity – with some notable exceptions. Within the World Health Organization and its advisors, only Jamie Metzl publicly expressed scepticism. Yuri Deigin’s essay in Medium in April 2020, ‘Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research’, caught the attention of plenty of online readers, but was otherwise ignored. Milton Leitenberg’s essay in June 2020 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ‘Did the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Arise from a Bat Coronavirus Research Program in a Chinese Laboratory? Very Possibly’, had limited impact. Rowan Jacobsen’s profile of Alina in Boston Magazine in September 2020, ‘Could Covid-19 Have Escaped from a Lab?’ led to few follow-ups. Nicholson Baker’s long essay in New York Magazine in January 2021, ‘The Lab-Leak Hypothesis’, made only a few more waves. Our own articles in the Wall Street Journal in January and the Telegraph in March caused barely a ripple. Essays exploring gain-of-function research, the leakiness of laboratories or the bat virus-hunting expeditions of the EcoHealth Alliance appeared, but mostly in obscure, low-traffic outlets. Their authors were mostly unpaid mavericks who cared little for their own reputations. So the ‘scientific consensus’ held.
Only on Twitter did a lively debate continue. The Drastic group not only explored every angle, but their numbers grew, and a handful of senior scientists joined their conversations – especially in France, where the ‘Paris group’ crystallised thanks to the dedicated efforts of Dr Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo of the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris. The farcical WHO press conference in Beijing in February convinced almost nobody that frozen food was a more likely source of the pandemic than a laboratory experiment. Indeed, the press conference was almost certainly counterproductive for the Chinese regime, as the responses from western governments showed. Yet still the western media and scientific leadership largely steered clear of giving the laboratory-leak hypothesis any oxygen.
Part of the problem was the confusion of two different hypotheses: that the virus was deliberately engineered as a bioweapon or vaccine; or that it was a natural (or at least mostly natural) virus that accidentally escaped by infecting somebody during fieldwork or an experiment. Neither Dr Daszak nor Dr Andersen made such a clear distinction in their publications, using arguments mostly against the first idea, but implying that this ruled out both types of laboratory-leak scenarios. Certainly, that was the way many journalists read them. Moreover, many of the essays on the other side of the debate fell into the same trap, focusing mainly on the evidence for deliberate manipulation of the virus, rather than accidental release. Deigin’s argument focused on the furin cleavage site. Steven Quay’s lengthy manuscript on zenodo in January 2021, ‘A Bayesian Analysis Concludes Beyond a Reasonable Doubt that SARS-CoV-2 Is Not a Natural Zoonosis But Instead Is Laboratory Derived’, suggested a vaccine trial that went wrong. Two independent scientists, Angus Dalgleish and Birger Sorensen, struggled to get scientific journals to publish their analysis that the virus was certainly human-made.
Thus it was easy to polarise the debate and refract it through a political lens. The Washington Post accused Senator Tom Cotton of ‘fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts’, when he called for an open-minded investigation of all possibilities; the New York Times said the Wuhan laboratory had been ‘the focus of unfounded conspiracy theories promoted by the Trump administration’, as if an accident could be a conspiracy; and National Public Radio reported that ‘scientists debunk lab accident theory’ when actually they had (barely) rebutted the genetically engineered theory.
Quite suddenly in May 2021, the dam crumbled. It is not clear what the trigger was. There were already rumblings and cracks in the concrete before the letter in Science that eighteen scientists signed in mid-May. Nicholas Wade’s long essay in Medium, ‘Origin of Covid – Following the Clues’, went more viral than Deigin’s or Baker’s had. The Wall Street Journal detailed an intelligence report describing three WIV researchers needing hospital treatment in November 2019. By the start of June, just as we were completing this book, the world had changed. Dr Anthony Fauci altered his stance, conceding that he was ‘not convinced’ of a natural origin. A flood of coverage of the laboratory-leak hypothesis ensued in newspapers, on television, on the radio and online. We found ourselves in constant demand to comment, with even outlets such as National Public Radio for this first time showing an interest in the origin of the virus. Suddenly every aspect of the story came under scrutiny in the media. The gain-of-function controversies, and whether Dr Fauci and the NIH had knowingly funded such research in Wuhan, took centre stage in America.
The censorship that had marked the coverage now unravelled – rapidly. Facebook reversed its policy of censoring or labelling as misinformation any post that discussed a laboratory origin of Covid-19. Vox quietly edited past articles that had dismissed a lab origin out of hand. Fact checkers used by the media re-edited their articles or retracted their claims: ‘We are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review,’ wrote PolitiFact concerning its criticism of Li Meng Yan’s work. Ian Birrell of the Mail on Sunday wrote an excoriating article detailing the role of the media in refusing to consider, let alone publish, anything that cast doubt on the natural spillover hypothesis: ‘The failures of both new and traditional media, coalescing around the comfort blanket of the scientific establishment and their loathing of Trump, should provoke serious reflection.’ Even the New York Times finally caved in and published a deep dive into the possibility of a laboratory-based origin of Covid-19 by Zeynep Tufekci. She wrote: ‘Now, for the second time in 50 years, there are questions about whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific research.’ (The first pandemic refers to the 1977 H1N1 influenza outbreak that was deemed to be the result of flawed vaccine trials.)
By August, even the Chinese state-controlled media appeared to have given up trying to persuade the world of a natural spillover explanation and started to claim that a laboratory leak was indeed likely, only that it happened at the University of North Carolina. On 9 August 2021, Global Times published an article arguing that ‘frequent accidents, attributed to lax safety procedures’ at Dr Ralph Baric’s lab in Chapel Hill pointed to that location as the likely source of the pandemic: ‘With a mixed record on safety, the US’ ambiguous, double-standard attitude toward the Covid-19 lab leak theory has led many in the public to become increasingly suspicious: it keeps smearing Chinese labs for “leaking the virus,” while attempting to cover up its domestic situation.’ How a leak in North Carolina might have caused a pandemic in China it did not explain.
The attempts by the Chinese government to deflect blame had by now descended into farce. On 10 August the Swiss embassy in Beijing took to Twitter to point out that a scientist named Wilson Edwards, supposedly based in Switzerland and widely amplified in Chinese state media since 24 July when he had joined Facebook to post a complaint about the origin tracing of Covid-19 and American pressure on the WHO, did not exist. Thus rumbled, ‘Wilson Edwards’ disappeared from Facebook soon afterwards.
At home in China, the actions of the Chinese state were far from farcical for brave whistleblowers who had tried to bring light to the nature of the virus as it had just emerged in Wuhan. Two young activists, Chen Mai and Cai Wei, were found guilty by the Chaoyang District People’s Court on 13 August of ‘picking quarrels and stirring up trouble’. They were sentenced to prison for a year and three months each, though released for time served. Their crime? Creating a repository on the website GitHub of articles that had appeared online in China and which included reports, interviews and personal stories about the early weeks of the pandemic in Wuhan.
A citizen journalist, Zhang Zhan, was sentenced to four years in prison for daring to report on the Chinese government’s shortcomings in handling the Wuhan outbreak. Hearing of her hunger strike and rapidly declining health, human rights activists warned that she might die in prison, following in the footsteps of so many other Chinese dissidents. Chinese reporters who spoke to Peter Hessler from the New Yorker remarked that the Chinese government-run media preferred success stories rather than the suffering of Wuhan residents. Scientists and officials were tight-lipped for good reason. One admitted that ‘he knew that he would be judged by history’ and would consider sharing his story if the climate were to change years later. A worker at a research institution wept and would not answer questions from the reporter but confessed that he had been recording details in his diary. As Hessler speculated hopefully, ‘nowadays there are so many ways to preserve information. In time, we will learn more, but the delay is important to the Communist Party. It handles history the same way that it handles the pandemic – a period of isolation is crucial.’
It was therefore unsurprising when President Biden commented in August: ‘Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it.’ This confirmation of a cover-up by the Chinese government alongside a lack of new information surrounding the origin of Covid-19 was far from satisfying. The New York Times reported that ‘current and former officials said the FBI believed that the virus was created in the lab’. The Wall Street Journal remarked that ‘This might be a moment when quietly leaking the IC report’s classified details can help public knowledge and keep the pressure on China.’ Behind the inconclusive summary of the inquiry rumours continue to circulate. The three WIV workers who fell ill in November 2019 were said to have worked in the bat coronavirus laboratory and to have symptoms that suggested Covid-19: ground-glass opacities in the lungs and a loss of smell.
More voices are calling for a systematic and transparent review of the crucial information that exists outside of China. The EcoHealth Alliance, proud of having closely collaborated with the WIV on the surveillance of bat viruses for many years, must possess some data or correspondence that could be helpful in evaluating the likelihood of a laboratory origin. Assertions such as those by the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, Dr Daszak, that he had seen the WIV’s pathogen database and that it contained no information of relevance are simply not acceptable in light of the extreme stakes. As late as September 2021, new and potentially concerning information from parties inside the US continued to be released to the public without any sense of urgency. At the end of July, the NIH had written a letter in response to a senator, revealing that during the time it had funded the EcoHealth Alliance, more chimeric coronavirus work had been proposed – this time involving MERS-CoV and related novel bat coronaviruses – to evaluate their behaviour in cells and animal infection models at the WIV.
The latest clues have indeed emerged outside China. On 6 September 2021, Labor Day in the United States, the Intercept published more than nine hundred pages of freshly released documents describing the NIH-funded research proposals and project updates by the EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV. The Intercept had to litigate to get these documents, which they had requested one year before under the Freedom of Information Act. The contents would undoubtedly have alarmed the public if released in early 2020. Yet by September 2021, many of the key pieces of information had already been scavenged by internet sleuths and scientists carefully poring over the dozens of research publications by the WIV. The documents confirmed: that the work on SARS-like coronaviruses had been conducted at BSL-2 and -3; that the WIV had at their fingertips a wide variety of boutique cell lines obtained from bats, primates, humans and other animals, which were used for the isolation and study of novel viruses that other virology laboratories do not possess; that they had purposefully sampled thousands of animals and human beings in rural China and in live animal markets that they expected to be at high risk of exposure to SARS-like viruses; that there were protocols for sampling bats, civets, raccoon dogs and other potential intermediate hosts of SARS-like CoVs, with a focus on avoiding being bitten by the animals while collecting samples; that the WIV brought these samples from spillover hotspots in southern China – places where ‘wildlife trade, hunting, and bat guano collection is common’ – back to Wuhan for in-depth study and the attempted isolation or synthesis of novel viruses. The scientists acknowledged that ‘fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled. There is also some risk of exposure to pathogens or physical injury while handling bats, civets, rodents or other animals, their blood samples or their excreta.’ One important revelation was that the WIV had kept records of people who tested positive for signs of infection by animal viruses, and also tracked research-related incidents such as being bitten by bats or market animals. Does the EcoHealth Alliance have access to these medical records and data on animal bites suffered by researchers?
In addition, the documents showed that the WIV had shared with their US collaborators that by mid-2018, they had obtained results from testing chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses in humanised mice at BSL-3, potentially on the Wuhan University campus instead of at the WIV. In one case, a chimeric SARS-like virus, not previously disclosed, was found to replicate more efficiently, by two to three orders of magnitude, in the lungs of humanised mice than the non-chimeric version of the virus, and without causing observable weight loss (a way to gauge the severity of disease in mice). Other chimeric SARS-like viruses were also shown to grow much better in humanised mouse lungs compared to the non-chimeric virus, while retaining the ability to sicken the mice – causing up to 20 per cent body weight loss by the sixth day post-infection.
These preliminary findings from 2018 spoke to how unpredictable the results of generating chimeric viruses could be. You might get a virus that is less deadly but more transmissible, or a virus that is both more deadly and more transmissible. It is unclear if more humanised mouse experiments had been conducted after these striking findings and if other naturally isolated or chimeric SARS-like viruses had been tested in this animal model and perhaps later in civets. To make things worse, the WIV is known to have conducted classified research and has an institutional policy on protecting the confidentiality of work relating to state secrets and research secrets.
Just one week later, what purported to be another relevant research proposal by Dr Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was shared with Drastic by an anonymous source. This proposal requesting $14.2 million in funding was submitted in March 2018 to the US Department of Defense’s R&D agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its subcontractors included Drs Ralph Baric, Linfa Wang and Shi Zhengli. The application was ultimately unsuccessful, but its contents laid bare their extensive roadmap for collecting and experimenting with SARS-like viruses with pandemic potential. One of the criticisms of the proposal by the DARPA programme manager was that, although the approach potentially involved gain-of-function research, it did ‘not mention or assess potential risks of Gain of Function (GoF) research and DURC [Dual Use Research of Concern]’.
The proposal was to test the spillover potential of viruses that it described as ‘a clear-and-present danger to our military and to global health security’ using a range of infection experiments including in captive bats in the lab, humanised mice and ‘batenized’ mice, that is, mice with bat immune cells. The early 2018 document described plans for a point that Dr Daszak had denied in 2020, namely that wild-caught Rhinolophus bats were to be kept and experimented with at the WIV. Further, it was revealed that by that time, the EcoHealth Alliance and its collaborators had already found more than 180 unique SARS-like viruses across approximately ten thousand samples.
Most importantly, the proposal contained the first written statements by the EcoHealth Alliance that it and its collaborators had plans to insert cleavage sites into engineered sarbecoviruses: ‘We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites . . . we will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero [monkey kidney] cells and HAE [human airway epithelial] cultures.’ If functional cleavage sites were discovered in rare SARS-like viruses detected in their sequencing data, they planned to introduce these into virus strains in the lab. In other words, this early 2018 proposal told us that the EcoHealth Alliance and WIV were in possession of a growing semi-private collection of SARS-like viruses; they had intended to expand their recombinant virus infection experiments across a range of cells and animals; they had also delineated a workflow for identifying novel cleavage sites and inserting these into novel spikes and novel SARS-like viruses in the lab.
These revelations show that all is still to play for. Yet this is not a game. Our preference throughout was for a balanced debate that led to the truth, not for a victory for one side or the other. The world now faces the strong possibility that scientific research, intended to avert a pandemic, instead started one; that all that collecting of viruses and sampling of bats in remote caves – and then hiding the specimens in secret databases – had put humanity in harm’s way. That two decades of research on the genomes of sarbecoviruses had not produced a vaccine but a plague. And that from the start there had been an active campaign by Chinese scientists and government officials, aided and abetted by far too many scientists, scientific journal editors and journalists in the west, to prevent the world finding out what happened.
If another pandemic of ambiguous origin occurs in the next decade – call it SARS-CoV-3, MERS-CoV-2, influenza, Nipah – then unless we learn key lessons from this pandemic, we will make the same mistakes. The world shows little sign yet of either finally shutting down the wildlife trade or addressing the risks of the burgeoning pathogen research worldwide, let alone both. There is little progress, if any, of governments designing a better system to encourage whistleblowing or transparency in science, public health and global pathogen surveillance. Rather the reverse: honest discussions among leaders and scientists appear to be happening increasingly on burner phones and in secure email channels. We can but hope like Shakespeare’s Launcelot in The Merchant of Venice, that ‘at the length truth will out’.