Lab Leak and China - Truncated

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https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/27/the-case-for-the-lab-leak-theory/

I have covered genomic research for years and written several books on the topic. I have a reputation as a strong supporter of biotechnology. But I had not realized just how risky some of the experiments being done on viruses have become in recent years, let alone that they are happening in the centre of a large city.

I have covered genomic research for years and written several books on the topic. I have a reputation as a strong supporter of biotechnology. But I had not realised just how risky some of the experiments being done on viruses have become in recent years, let alone that they are happening in the centre of a large city.

In recent years in the city of Wuhan, in China, scientists were combining the genomes of coronaviruses taken from bats and making chimera (hybrid viruses) that grew up to 10,000 times more quickly than their parent viruses and were more than three times as lethal to ‘humanised’ mice. Whether similar experiments resulted in the Covid-19 pandemic is still unknown, but they could have done.

In researching our book Viral, updated and newly released in paperback, on the origin of Covid-19, the scientist Alina Chan and I concluded that it is highly likely the outbreak began in Wuhan. The earliest Covid cases in other parts of China, and other countries, link straight back to this modern and prosperous city on the banks of the Yangtze. For instance, a case in Beijing who fell ill as early as 17 December 2019 turns out to have travelled that day from Wuhan.

There is no longer much doubt that the first cases in Wuhan were in November or possibly October 2019. This fits with a leaked Chinese government document in 2020, which said an early case had been retrospectively identified on 17 November. Yet official Chinese sources still say the first known case was in December.

Nor is there much doubt that the virus came originally from a horseshoe bat living a long way south of Wuhan. The closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in the wild were found in horseshoe bats in a mineshaft in Yunnan, in a limestone cave in Laos and in a cave in Mengla county on the Yunnan-Laos border. The central question is, and always has been, who or what brought a bat virus more than a thousand miles north in the autumn of 2019 to the middle of a modern city?

This is where a paper that came out in the last month is unintentionally revealing. Written by nine scientists affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, it spends several paragraphs lambasting a group of American scientists for ‘obfuscating the epidemic outbreak place… and the origin (ie, spillover) place’ and for ‘overstating conclusions based on limited data and unrealistic simulations’.

The objects of their ire are not the people who speculate that the virus might have come from a lab, but those who say it got to Wuhan through the wildlife trade and point to a concentration of early human cases in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. This is nonsense, say the Beijing scientists: no animals for sale in the market tested positive. The lab-leak theory they dismiss even more cursorily: ‘The debate on natural and laboratory-leak origin has just subsided (though conspiracy theories continue to distract attention from scientific evidence).’

So if it did not come from a lab and did not come from the market, how did the virus get to Wuhan? The scientists point the finger firmly at ‘Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and neighbouring countries’, but come up with no evidence on who or what might have brought it to the middle of China before it infected anybody in those other countries. They dare not quite reheat the old, discredited dish they served last year, that the virus reached China on frozen fish from abroad. (Think about it: why fish? Why was no one infected at the start of the journey or along the way? Why only Wuhan?)

In effect, the new paper reveals that the Chinese government (which approves all publications on the topic of Covid’s origins within China) is in a dilemma. It cannot concede that the virus started in its legal or illegal wildlife trade without huge embarrassment to the Xi Jinping regime, which has encouraged the first and tried to eliminate the second. But nor can it admit that the virus escaped from one of its labs without even greater humiliation. Yet it still cannot think of a remotely plausible alternative.