In the past
month, we’ve seen a second wave of interest in the theory that the Covid-19
pandemic began with a lab leak. Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific
consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus that
probably evolved much the same way as the last two deadly human coronaviruses,
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-COV) and Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome (MERS-COV): namely, from bats, probably by way of an intermediate
species like a raccoon dog, a ferret badger, or even a feral cat. Ever since
the SARS outbreak of 2002–03, after all, paper after paper and countless popular pieces have warned that, sooner or later,
nature would produce the next big SARS.
Now some—latching on to new reporting, researchers’ open letter to Science magazine calling for greater investigation into the virus’s origins, and the Biden administration’s willingness to use the possibility of a lab leak to demand more transparency from China—argue media outlets were too quick to dismiss the lab leak theory. Substacker Matt Yglesias even called the media’s deeply skeptical coverage of lab leak theories a “fiasco” and “a huge fuckup.”
Despite the allure of this contrarianism, though, 20 years of post-SARS research into the origins and spread of bat coronaviruses
point to a natural origin for Covid-19. Upon closer inspection, the
so-called “new” evidence that has entranced pundits is neither new
nor compelling. Lab leak theory proponents are also glossing over serious flaws in their proposed narratives of Covid-19’s origin. And loose talk about a lab leak elevates tensions between
China and the United States, undermining the collaborative research we need to
understand this pandemic and prevent the next one.
There
are two major variants of the “lab leak” theory in circulation: (1) Covid
evolved naturally and leaked pure and uncut from the Wuhan Institute of
Virology when researchers were archiving wild bat coronaviruses for study, and (2) scientists at the WIV engineered or altered Covid from a natural virus or
viruses, either through benevolent gain-of-function research, in which scientists make a virus
more dangerous in order to understand it better, or through bioweapons
research. (Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas entertained a particularly
fringe version of this last variation, speculating that China might even have attacked Wuhan with a biological weapon.)
On
May 23, The Wall Street Journal reported
that three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care
for respiratory symptoms in mid-November. This could have been an early cluster
of Covid cases, even though the symptoms were also consistent with seasonal
flu.
The
story was taken by many as fresh evidence in favor of
the lab leak theory. Pundit Nate Silver
confidently tweeted that, in light of this revelation, he
now considered a lab leak more likely than a natural origin for Covid-19.
In
fact, the Journal’s reporting actually made the case for a lab leak weaker,
relative to what the State Department had previously claimed. On January 15,
the department published a “fact sheet” asserting that “several researchers” at
the Wuhan Institute of Virology “became sick” with respiratory symptoms in “autumn”
of 2019, “before the first identified case of the outbreak.” The Journal clarified that the number of allegedly sick researchers was just three
people and established that they sought treatment in mid-November, i.e., the
beginning of flu season—rather than earlier in the fall. The Journal
didn’t say that anyone was hospitalized and instead noted that it is common in
China to seek minor medical care at a hospital instead of going to a family
doctor. So we’re left with a story of three people going to the doctor with
flu-like symptoms during flu season.
WIV
leadership told World Health Organization investigators probing the origins of
Covid that they had a normal amount of seasonal illness among their staff in the fall of 2019.
But like other biosafety labs, the WIV collects and freezes yearly serum
samples from the people who work there, and WIV officials told the investigators
that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently
tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because
the lab hasn’t been independently audited, but if that’s true, it’s a
devastating blow to the lab leak theory—since, if Covid-19 escaped a lab, by
far the easiest way for it to do so would be in the body of an infected staffer. Even if the Wuhan Institute of Virology is lying and some of its people had Covid in
mid-November, that wouldn’t prove they caught it at work because the best
available evidence suggests, by then, Covid was already circulating in Wuhan.
The
problems with the lab leak theorists’ case, however, extend well beyond their
overreliance on the ambiguous stories of WIV staffer sickness. Put simply,
their narratives of viral sampling, evolution, and transmission don’t add up.
Dr.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has published
extensively on emerging viruses, including Covid, MERS, and Ebola, has taken
considerable heat on Twitter for arguing that Covid is likely of natural origin.* She first takes aim at the popular version of the lab leak theory that posits
that Covid was taken from nature and escaped in its wild form. The problem with that
scenario, she told me, is that a swab from a bat contains very little
infectious virus. Each bat weighs less than half an ounce, and each sample is
basically a Q-tip swiped briefly over a bat’s mouth or anus. These samples are
stored in vials in the freezer; they’re not likely to spill or leak, the way
disaster movies have primed us to suppose.
“These samples are not like huge vials
of blood,” Rasmussen said. “It’s not like a big Erlenmeyer flask of green
liquid.” Researchers would have to grow the virus in cells in order to stand a
real chance of infecting people, she added, and it’s difficult to grow viruses
from these swabbed samples even if you try to. There’s not much virus in them,
and what you get tends to be contaminated with virus-killing detritus. “Technically it’s very challenging to directly isolate
virus from field samples from wild animals. So that makes it unlikely that just
handling those samples would result in some kind of infection.” Finally,
Rasmussen added, the chemical solution that’s used to stabilize the viral RNA
for sequencing is a very potent disinfectant its own right.
Then
there are those who find it deeply suspicious that virus hunters haven’t
produced any wild Covid-19 yet. Chinese scientists have already tested over 80,000
samples from animals, according to the first report of the WHO-China
Joint Inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, but have yet to find Covid or a
plausible direct ancestor in the wild. Lab leak proponents often bring this up
as an argument against a natural origin. If, after all these months,
investigators still can’t find Covid in nature, the reasoning goes, then maybe
it’s not natural after all. “80,000 animals have been sampled since, with not one shred of connection to Covid found,”
author James
Surowecki scoffed on Twitter.
Similar
reasoning led Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, to suggest on Face
the Nation last month that the case for a natural origin of Covid has
weakened.
Eighty thousand samples sounds like a lot, but it’s nothing in a country like China, which boasts
over 7,500 native species of vertebrates.
Besides, many of the animals tested in the first wave were pigs, chickens, and
cows from farms across China, exotic farmed animals, and zoo animals. And since scientists often sample multiple bodily fluids per animal, 80,000 samples
doesn’t even mean 80,000 individual animals. Critically, these samples appear
to have been taken without any known or suspected link to early human cases of
Covid. The secret to viral detective work is shoe-leather epidemiology: You’re
most likely to find the earlier hosts if you start with early human cases of
the mystery virus and take samples from their pets, their
livestock, etc.—not from random populations.
Tracking a virus to its source can take years, and there’s no guarantee of success. It took 15 years to trace SARS definitively to bats. Failure to find a natural reservoir for a disease is not evidence of a nonnatural origin: Ebola has been around for over 40 years, and scientists are pretty confident that bats are its natural reservoir, but nobody has ever been able to culture Ebola from a bat.
If you can’t follow the path from
early sick people to the sick animals in their lives, the search becomes less
like detective work and more like playing the lottery: Even if a species is a viral reservoir,
the virus might only be found in a tiny subpopulation. An isolated bat roost may have brewed a viral vintage found nowhere else in the world. Scientists had an edge in
finding the intermediate host for MERS because the seroprevalence—the
percentage of camels that carry MERS—is unusually high. Up to 100 percent of
some camel cohorts tested positive for the virus. Once scientists heard stories
about MERS patients having contact with camels, all they had to do was dip into
various camel populations and pull up some MERS.
The
Covid-19 case is much trickier. Any detective will have a better shot at
cracking a case if they start with a fresh crime scene. That’s what SARS
investigators had to work from, given that two of the earliest cases were a waitress and a customer at a civet restaurant, and all the
restaurant’s remaining civets tested positive. The civets were still at the
scene of the crime, so to speak. With Covid-19, we don’t have a crime scene.
The virus first made headlines because of an outbreak at the Huanan Wholesale
Seafood Market, but it turned out that there were earlier cases with no known ties to the market. In
fact, there’s no reason to assume that the spillover to humans happened
anywhere near Wuhan. The first human case of Covid could have been infected
hundreds of miles away, perhaps closer to the horseshoe bat caves of southern
China.
And
it’s not as if bat coronavirus hunters are coming up empty. New SARS-like bat coronaviruses are being found all the time, in
addition to the hundreds of similar viruses that were already known to science. Experts
have been warning us for years that any one of these common, natural bat
viruses could mutate and start a pandemic, since bat colonies are constantly
producing new SARS-type coronaviruses. One four-year study of wild Chinese
horseshoe bats found that just over 9 percent of the animals carried a SARS-type
coronavirus. The adorable flying mammals who give us tequila are perfect viral incubators: They
like to roost with other species of bats, and their relatively long lives give
viruses plenty of time to mix and match. Interspecies jumps—even between kinds
of bats—are a great way to select for new mutations.
China’s economy has grown explosively over the past 25 years. Development is bringing people closer to bats and other wildlife through deforestation, mining, construction, and even bat cave tourism. The $80 billion wild animal trade incentivizes trappers to spelunk around in remote areas where they may encounter bats or animals infected by bats. Moreover, demand for wild animals as luxury items brought a steady stream of animals from the rural south to major cities, including Wuhan. So it’s not that surprising that the first major outbreak of Covid-19 happened in Wuhan, a city of 11 million spread over 3,200 square miles, which is known as the Chicago of China because it so accessible by air, rail, road, and water. You can get on the fast train in Wuhan and be in Guandong Province, the home of the original SARS outbreak, in under four hours.
While
we can’t rule out the possibility that Covid-19 was genetically engineered, even leading lab-leakers agree that it bears no apparent signs of genetic manipulation. It looks
like a perfectly natural virus. And to alter a virus in a way that leaves no
traces, you have to start with a virus that’s extremely similar to the virus
you end up with.
“Even if you’re
doing the most sophisticated gain-of-function research you could possibly be
doing, you have to start with a virus that’s at least close. We would estimate 99 percent, [or] even higher
than that, 99.9,” Dr. Robert F. Garry, an expert on the molecular mechanisms of
viral pathogenesis at the Tulane University School of Medicine and a co-author
of an influential paper arguing for the natural origins of Covid, told the podcast This Week In Virology.
Furthermore,
he told me by email, there’s no way to use laboratory tricks to overcome this
need for a close source virus. Even if researchers were to cut and paste different
natural viruses together, each component virus would have to be in the 99
percent similarity range.
There
is no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or anyone else, ever had any
strain that similar to Covid-19. Lab leak boosters argue that the WIV is highly
suspect because it was doing risky gain-of-function research with bat
coronaviruses. But if it didn’t have wild viruses almost exactly like Covid-19,
it couldn’t have engineered it, period.
As
far as anybody knows, the closest strain the WIV had is a bat virus called RaTG13
that’s 96 percent similar to Covid-19, but the gulf between 96
percent and >99 percent is vast. The two viruses
probably shared a common ancestor between 25 and 65 years ago, which is practically geological time
for fast-mutating viruses.
If
RaTG13 were used as a backbone for Covid-19, Rasmussen told me, you’d expect to see big chunks of exact
similarity with coherent chunks of new information added in—like a student
cutting and pasting a few original paragraphs into a plagiarized essay.
Instead, she explains, Covid-19 differs from RaTG13 by over 1,000 point
mutations spread through the virus like raisins in a pudding. Nobody knows what
any of these little mutations do; most of them probably don’t do anything. They
look like the genetic noise that accumulates in 50 years of viral evolution. They’d
be a nightmare to clone in by hand, and there would be no reason to do so.
Rasmussen notes another major piece of new evidence
against a lab origin: If Covid-19 were invented as part of a benevolent gain-of-function experiment, the goal would be to make it more transmissible, or more
lethal to people, in order to study that strain in the lab. But when current
strains of Covid-19 are cultured in cells in the laboratory, the virus tends to
mutate fast and become less contagious to humans.
“When you work with this particular virus in the lab, it becomes less capable of being a human pathogen and becomes more of a cell culture adapted virus,” Rasmussen says. “So that suggests, again, that it’s unlikely that this virus, if it were being passaged extensively in cell culture, would jump out of cell culture into people and start a pandemic.”
What
we’re left with is this: If the WIV had a secret strain (or strains) at least 99
percent similar to Covid-19, it got that raw material from the wild. That
would mean there’s at least one wild virus that’s at least 99 percent similar
to Covid-19 somewhere in nature, where humans had contact with it at least
once. So far, it hasn’t been found, but it’s got to be out there, whether Covid
is 100 percent natural or human-tweaked. So, given that Covid (or its direct ancestor)
must exist in nature, it’s more likely that it got out naturally (like SARS and
MERS) than that it took an undetectable detour through a secure biolab.
If
Covid-19 were bioengineered, that would mean the WIV lab found the now-untraceable Covid-19 precursor strain(s), and even though its main job is
publishing about the cool viruses it finds, it never published it or talked
about it, not even to the small army of American and international scientists
it collaborates with. Then it embarked on a painstaking process of undetectably
tweaking the Secret Ancestor into Covid-19, its manipulation succeeded, and
then multiple layers of biosecurity failed, and Covid-19
escaped.
It’s
not impossible. But it involves a number of exceptions to rules—a number of
carefully designed systems failing. Meanwhile, the natural origin theory just
involves countless bat roosts with millions of bats doing what they do best:
generating new viruses like the world’s most chaotic supercomputer.
All theories of the origins of Covid-19 should be investigated, including lab origin theories. We should go wherever the science takes us. In mid-May, 18 respected scientists with relevant expertise published an open letter in the journal Science arguing that both zoonotic and laboratory origin hypotheses “remain viable.” This letter was seized upon as additional grounds to support the lab leak theory, seemingly by people who hadn’t read it very carefully. The authors didn’t offer any new evidence, or even an argument, for why the lab leak theory deserves to be taken more seriously. Their focus was criticizing China’s stranglehold over the raw data on the origins of the pandemic and calling for a more transparent investigation.
These are entirely valid criticisms, but on their own, they don’t
move the needle on the likelihood of a lab leak. The fact that China is being
secretive about Covid-19 isn’t evidence for any particular theory. China is a
totalitarian regime that is notoriously secretive about everything. It should
be noted that the origins of both SARS and MERS were shrouded in troubling official secrecy before they were confirmed to be
natural phenomena.
Maybe
it’s comforting to think that Covid-19 was carelessly released or even
deliberately engineered by a handful of hubristic scientists. That seems like a
relatively easy problem to control. We could ban risky research or tighten up
biosecurity protocols and the problem would be solved.
By contrast, in order to deal with the ongoing natural virus threat from bats and other animals, we have to deal with much tougher problems. We have to deal with deforestation, climate change, and the international wildlife trade. We’ll need to address agricultural practices, including at home (which, after all, is where swine flu began). All this will require massive scientific and social cooperation, domestically and internationally. In the absence of hard evidence, careless lab leak speculation or overstating the case for a lab leak relative to other origin stories amounts to the casual slander of distinguished Chinese scientists. Reckless allegations undermine the research, the international relationships, and the policymaking we need to fight this pandemic and future pandemics effectively.
*This sentence has been updated to reflect Dr. Rasmussen’s current position at the University of Saskatchewan.
