ORIGIN STORY — The hypothesis that Covid-19 was leaked from a Wuhan lab has leaped from its original host — Trump administration officials and people dismissed as conspiracy theorists — into the body of mainstream debate. Last week, 18 leading scientists published a letter in the academic journal Science calling for further investigation to determine the origin of the pandemic that has killed 3.4 million people worldwide. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” the scientists wrote.
The letter echoes a similar call from WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. During a Senate hearing last week on the U.S. response to the pandemic, Anthony Fauci said he was “fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China” after sparring with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about the origins of the virus. And this month, the former New York Times science reporters Nicholas Wade and Donald G. McNeil Jr. have written long essays on Medium outlining why they take the lab leak hypothesis seriously.
Nightly reached out to experts, two of whom signed the letter as well as others who have taken the opposite side in the public debate, to ask how credible they find the lab leak theory. Their edited responses are below.
IT’S POSSIBLE
“Much of the currently available information suggests that a lab-based origin of Covid-19 is plausible. There remains no sign of an intermediate animal host that could have passed the virus to humans in 2019. There is no evidence that live mammals were sold at the Wuhan seafood market in 2019, and none of hundreds of animal samples collected from that market had any trace of the virus. In other words, there is zero evidence that supports a zoonotic origin of the virus that excludes the involvement of research activity.
“There are copious precedents of pathogens leaking from labs — the original 2003 SARS virus leaked up to six times from labs across three countries. Consider that the SARS research and animal infection experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for more than 10 years, were all performed at relatively low biosafety levels. It is currently not possible to tell from the genetic evidence whether the virus ever passed through a laboratory or a lab personnel.
“The question is: How did a virus, whose lineage is found only in southern China, make its way into humans in the metropolitan city of Wuhan, more than a thousand miles away? We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had possibly the greatest collection of SARS viruses from numerous trips across China. We know that they were working with a batch of viruses very closely related to SARS-CoV-2. Details of these viruses and the experiments performed with them have not been shared in a timely manner.” — Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
“It is worthy of a careful, rigorous, unbiased, objective examination, based on relevant, verifiable data. There are a number of plausible scenarios embedded in this label, ‘lab leak,’ and importantly, they include an unrecognized infection of a well-intentioned lab worker attempting to recover or study new coronaviruses from bats. It does not imply malice or even necessarily awareness (of the accident). Lab accidents are much more common than any of us know, or would like to admit, and they occur worldwide and even in the most safe and secure labs. U.S. biosafety labs are by no means strangers to accidents; leaks of some of the most dangerous infectious agents have occurred at CDC and other U.S. government labs.” — David A. Relman, microbiologist at Stanford University
“The following lines of circumstantial evidence are noteworthy:
“The outbreak occurred in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people that does not contain horseshoe-bat colonies, and that is tens of kilometers from, and outside the flight range of, the nearest known horseshoe-bat colonies. Furthermore, the outbreak occurred at a time of year when horseshoe bats are in hibernation.
“The outbreak occurred in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the laboratory that conducts the world’s largest research project on horseshoe bat viruses and worked with the world’s closest sequenced relative of the outbreak virus. The laboratory actively searched for new horseshoe-bat viruses in horseshoe-bat colonies in caves in remote rural areas in Yunnan province, brought those new horseshoe-bat viruses to Wuhan, and then mass-produced, manipulated, and studied those new horseshoe-bat viruses, year-round, inside Wuhan.
“Documentary evidence establishes that the bat-SARS-related-coronavirus projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology used personal protective equipment (usually just gloves; sometimes not even gloves) and biosafety standards that would pose high risk of infection of field-collection, field-survey, or laboratory staff upon contact with a virus having the transmission properties of SARS-CoV-2.” — Richard Ebright, molecular biologist at Rutgers University
IT’S VERY UNLIKELY
“Coronaviruses in nature are immensely diverse and certainly capable of causing epidemics without human manipulation, for example SARS, OC34, and MERS viruses. Lab-manipulated viruses tend to be constructed using pieces from known viruses. SARS-CoV-2 does not closely resemble any previously characterized virus. When viruses have been in the freezer for many years, scientists can see the missing years of evolution in the viral genome. When viruses escaped from labs, they looked like viruses that had been kept in labs. When H1N1 reemerged in 1977, it was missing 27 years of evolution due its time in the deep freeze. The most probable origin scenario remains a natural zoonosis from bats or an intermediate animal host.” — Joel Wertheim, evolutionary biologist at the University of California San Diego
“Lab leak scenarios are obviously inconsistent with several established facts regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, including the fact that the majority of early cases were linked to different markets that sold wildlife or wildlife products in Wuhan. Theories on SARS-CoV-2 must also account for the fact that two distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 (lineage A and lineage B) were distributed at different Wuhan wildlife markets.
“The original SARS-CoV outbreaks in 2002-2004 were linked to the wildlife trade. Several independent sources indicate that wildlife species susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, including civets and raccoon dogs, were sold at the Huanan market and other wildlife markets in Wuhan. Linkage of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to wildlife or the wildlife trade fully accounts for the fact that the majority of early Wuhan Covid-19 cases were linked to different wildlife markets in a straightforward manner. It provides simple explanations for the fact that two different genetic lineages of SARS-CoV-2 were linked to different markets.” — Robert Garry, virologist at Tulane Medical School
“The lab leak hypotheses remain speculative and unsupported — unlike the hypothesis of natural emergence, which is supported directly by epidemiological, serological and genomic data, and indirectly supported by precedence and ecological data. There are no examples of lab escapes of novel, previously unknown, viruses having led to outbreaks, let alone pandemics. Famous examples of SARS, H1N1 and Ebola were all caused by known viruses — which have already been ‘selected’ for their ability to infect humans — the same is not true for a virus randomly sampled by a researcher from a bat. We have a myriad of examples of natural zoonotic emergence events leading to human outbreaks — that include the emergence of SARS in November 2002 in China and the first detection of HKU-1 in January 2004, also in China. Note the timing of these coronavirus emergence events — all happened over the winter months, with both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 happening in the month of November.” — Kristian Andersen, virologist at Scripps Research Institute
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/po ... sis-492915
It's beyond conspiracy status, it's being debated in the scientific community.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan