Tag: Wuhan Institute

Once again, the ‘lab leak’ theory of COVID’s origin has returned to the headlines. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that a US Department of Energy report had determined that the origin of COVID was ” most likely” an accidental release from a laboratory, according to those who had read the report, though the assessment was with “low confidence”.

Ambassador Nicholas Burns told a US Chamber of Commerce event on Monday that China needs to “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the Covid-19 crisis”.

China’s foreign ministry countered that COVID’s origin “was about science and should not be politicised”.

The FBI assigned “moderate confidence” to a laboratory origin for the virus, while four other US agencies assigned a “low confidence” to a natural origin. Two others, including the CIA, remained undecided. An update on their views has been provided, apparently due to new information, but has not been made public.

To many scientists, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has been settled as it has been traced to outbreaks in the Wuhan meat market two weeks before its first detection. A literature analysis published in PNAS concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly favoured a natural origin.

Many other scientists are not convinced by the zoonotic hypothesis. Virologist Jesse Bloom, at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said the PNAS review’s literature analysis was a good idea – but the zoonosis proponents haven’t provided much new data. “What we’ve seen is mostly reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing evidence.”

The PNAS review started out as a Lancet commission led by Jeffrey Sachs, who disbanded the task force due to a number of members with vested interests against the lab leak hypothesis. Their aim was to gather lessons learnt from the pandemic. The Lancet eventually published its own review, which concluded that there was equal probability for a laboratory or natural origin.

Even so, a continued lack of cooperation from China with international investigators has made it virtually impossible to definitively pinpoint the virus’s emergence. Ultimately, the lesson of past pandemics is that outbreaks can result from either zoonotic origins or from laboratory accidents, both of which are factors which need to be safeguarded against by humans.

A recent article by The Telegraph revealed documents on grant applications by US and Wuhan scientists to conduct coronavirus research in 2018. However, it is important to note that these grants were not funded, and are not direct evidence of a ‘lab leak’ or research-related origin for the coronavirus. 

The documents, obtained by a scientist-activist group calling itself DRASTIC and confirmed as authentic by a member of the Trump administration, detail grant requests for antigen-bearing nanoparticles and aerosols to be released into bat caves to immunise bat populations. Note that “coronavirus particles” as The Telegraph describes them would be immunising nanoparticles which could describe coronavirus vaccines. Another proposal involved adding “human-specific cleavage sites” to bat coronaviruses to facilitate entry into human cells. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) however, refused to fund the work, saying it would have “put local communities at risk.”

What is perhaps more concerning were details of an effort for gain of function research in MERS-CoV, which has a 30% fatality rate, something which an anonymous World Health Organization COVID researcher suggests could have resulted in a pandemic that was “nearly apocalyptic.”

Scientists, however, urge continued impartiality and examining all possibilities, even controversial ones. In an article published on Friday, 24 September in The Lancet, authors point out that there is neither solid evidence for either a natural origin or a for a research origin. In the nineteen months since the beginning of the pandemic, no natural origin has been found despite extensive searching, and independent international researchers do not have access to the investigation sites in China, raw data or samples. However, it took several years for the natural origins of SARS-CoV-1 to be discovered.

They also point out that a research origin for the virus cannot be excluded. Optimisation of the receptor binding domain for human ACE2 could occur through selection or cell cultures, without requiring knowledge of it in advance. Although certain genetic engineering techniques leave signatures in the genome, so-called ‘seamless’ techniques exist. 

“On the basis of the current scientific literature, complemented by our own analyses of coronavirus genomes and proteins, we hold that there is currently no compelling evidence to choose between a natural origin (ie, a virus that has evolved and been transmitted to humans solely via contact with wild or farmed animals) and a research-related origin (which might have occurred at sampling sites, during transportation or within the laboratory, and might have involved natural, selected, or engineered viruses).”

Sources: The Telegraph (paywall), The Lancet