US President Joe Biden wants to know if the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a laboratory. He ordered US intelligence agencies on Thursday last week to “redouble” their efforts to find exactly when and how the virus jumped into humans, and the two scenarios he suggested were an infected animal or a laboratory accident.
Just last year, that second utterance would have had a person dismissed as a kook and a conspiracist. Today, an increasing number of mainstream figures, from those in the press to influential scientists and government officials such as US Chief Medical Advisor to the President Anthony Fauci, are at least open to the idea that the pandemic might have started with a containment failure in China, or a souped-up virus experiment gone wrong.
If you are just tuning in, bleary-eyed and wondering how yet another thing you were told could not possibly happen appears to be on the verge of becoming reality, you are not alone.
Illustration: Yusha
However, there is a straightforward way to see what the possibilities are, what scientists think and what information might resolve the dispute once and for all.
First, in the early days of the pandemic, nearly every scientist and media figure with any sort of platform assured the world that the pandemic had a natural origin. A coronavirus that naturally infected bats had gained the ability to infect humans through normal evolution in the wild or farmed captivity, they said.
This had a historical precedent. The SARS virus in 2003 and the MERS outbreak in 2012 arose in this way. The viral genome, shared by Chinese scientists early in the pandemic, and since sequenced around the world thousands of times, did not show any obvious signs of manipulation. It did not have any well-known viruses as a basic framework, or have the genetic equivalent of bore holes and cut marks.
This is a decent argument, but not overwhelming. A matter of low attention bandwidth at the height of the first wave, an overall deference to authority and a general wariness about conspiratorial-sounding theories led the animal-leap case to be presented and repeated with airtight surety. This also left it open to attack.
Something that should have been widely acknowledged back then is that scientists often do research with viruses, which includes manipulating them to become more effective or to infect other species — even humans. The justification for this is to learn about viral behavior and track how a pandemic threat might evolve. This is called “gain-of-function” research, and large numbers of people think it is a bad idea.
What is also known for sure is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located near the first recorded outbreaks, is the world’s premier collector of wild bat coronaviruses. Its laboratories have grown them before, and have the expertise to conduct gain-of-function experiments. If you wanted to create a pandemic coronavirus in a lab, the WIV would be a prime place to do it.
There are now several theories about the pandemic strain coming out of the WIV, including one of their on-file natural coronaviruses infecting a lab member, a gain-of-function strain doing the same, or a purposely human-targeted bioweapon strain being accidentally or intentionally unleashed. Given the lab’s capabilities, that is the full range of careless, reckless or purely evil possibilities. This means that some version of a lab-leak scenario was always circumstantially and scientifically plausible.
The nature-made and human-made theories neatly appeal to a certain sort of person, what you might call the fringes of both sides. If you are the radically credulous mainstream sort, the natural origin story fits the bill. A naturally emerging viral pandemic is a complex process that the experts say is likely to happen.
It is the way things have happened before. People in positions of authority — say, running a biohazardous laboratory — are highly competent and probably trustworthy. Mystery solved by association.
If you thrive on contingency and conspiracy, the lab-leak theory is catnip. It describes a single, discrete event, perpetrated by individuals, and then covered up. Whether you think it was an accident or a doomsday device, access to the lab offers the possibility of a smoking gun, if only you could investigate.
Given what we know, both sides are deadlocked. The WIV had what armchair detectives would call motive, method and opportunity, but there is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was ever in the lab.
On the circumstantial side, the hole is as deep as you want to go — people have dug into irregularities in the institute’s virus catalog, and there is an “anonymous intelligence report” about WIV members becoming sick with an illness similar to pneumonia in November 2019. Do your own research, as they say.
However, parsing Cold War-style intrigue from a desk chair a world away rarely makes anything clearer.
When it comes to the science, there is not a knockout blow either way. Viruses have multiple evolutionary avenues in front of them, from simple mutations to swapping entire genetic regions with closely related pathogens. Some of these can be worked around or reconstituted in a lab with little trace.
Given that the major changes SARS-CoV-2 acquired to become pandemic-ready do not mirror those in any closely related coronavirus, its emergence was either a rare event or we simply do not know very much about wild coronaviruses. The first is possible and the second is surely true.
At the same time, if the virus was created in a laboratory, the creators took a circuitous route, not using known strains or structures, and not always optimizing the virus in obvious ways. Reflecting this, scientific arguments are deep in the weeds at the moment, arguing over the likelihood of one RNA sequence or another arising by natural or artificial means. So far, they have served only to keep the window open on both sides.
Where did the virus that started the pandemic come from? For the natural-emergence side, finding a coronavirus in a bat or intermediate animal that is more genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2 than those on record would demonstrate a clear, plausible evolutionary path. The closer the better, and bonus points if it had a physical path to the outbreak as well.
This would never amount to an airtight case — meaning some version of the lab-leak theory will always be with us on the fringes — but it would placate the majority of scientists. Efforts are ongoing, but could take years.
For the lab-leak side, it is all about the source and getting access to the WIV strain archive, the lab notebooks, regulatory filings and access to researchers. Again, if these turned out to be squeaky-clean, there would always be a fringe alleging a cover-up.
Yet if it is a case of research having gone wrong, there would probably be evidence in the institute. The greater problem is that access to the WIV is not likely to happen soon. Scientists, the US government and the WHO have asked for openness and cooperation from the Chinese state. They have been predictably stonewalled.
As with many other times over the past year, we are stuck without a clear answer. The point has been made that, epidemiologically, none of this really matters. Lab or not, the pandemic happened and is still going.
However, finding its origin would be hugely consequential. A natural origin would absolve any one person, but would also further confirm that our nature-encircling world is incubating pandemic diseases at an unprecedented rate.
A lab leak would tarnish the job of scientific research for a lifetime and prove some of the worst people in the culture war partially right.
I think I would prefer the first case, but even more than that, I would like to know the truth.
Stephen Buranyi is a writer specializing in science and the environment.
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