What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 21
The co-organiser of the letter, Jamie Metzl, said any examination of the origins needs to include all hypotheses. “It cannot be credible to say we’re only going to look at zoonotic jump, and we won’t even lift a finger to examine the lab-leak hypothesis,” he said. “It’s just outrageous to try to rank which possibility is more likely than others when some of them have been examined and other lab-leak hypotheses simply have not.”
Then a second powerful letter was published in Science magazine on May 14, 2021, signed by 18 prominent virologists, biologists and immunologists from the US, Canada, the UK and Switzerland. They were major names in the world of virology, including Harvard’s Professor David Relman and Nick Patterson, Pamela Bjorkman from Caltech and Stanford University’s Tim Stearns. One signatory to the letter was more fascinating than any other. The University of North Carolina’s Ralph Baric had closely collaborated with Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on coronavirus research. If he thought it was possible the virus had leaked from a laboratory, it was extremely telling.
The Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center’s Associate Professor Jesse Bloom, who is also an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Genome Sciences and Microbiology Department at the University of Washington, signed the letter. “Central to being a good scientist is keeping an open mind when evidence is sparse, and as a ‘virus expert’ who has followed this topic closely: it’s clear in any objective assessment that both natural origins and accidental lab leak are plausible,” he said in March 2021. “We should all be able to agree as scientists that there is a need for greater transparency about the SARS-related coronaviruses being studied in Wuhan prior to the pandemic.”
Many people felt a certain level of frustration that these scientists had taken 15 months to speak publicly, allowing the Chinese disinformation that a natural origin was the only possibility to take hold. I asked one of the signatories, Director of the Harvard University Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics and Professor of Epidemiology Marc Lipsitch, why he had not spoken out earlier. He replied that he had avoided reopening the gain-of-function (GOF) issue because he was focused on pressing research related to dealing with the pandemic, and he knew he could not simultaneously do both pandemic response and the origins issue. “Second, I believe it is critical for scientists to work together right now for the good of solving the pandemic in front of us, and reopening a controversial debate that some take very personally did not seem conducive to that project,” he said.
Professor Lipsitch said he had followed the origins discussion closely enough to “conclude that the group of hypotheses involving a lab accident – which include not only GOF but also more ordinary infections with a strain that had been isolated from an animal host in the lab – have some plausibility, and that they need to be investigated alongside the other hypotheses that many consider more likely.”
Professor Lipsitch said the politicisation of the origins question makes it harder to investigate. “Once it is politicized, and sides are drawn, then the interest of each ‘side’ in winning becomes greater (to avoid embarrassment) and incentives to selectively pursue evidence grow,” he said. “Having said that, it is hard to imagine that a subject of this importance and consequence would not become political.”
Without knowing the origins of the virus, Professor Lipsitch said, we can’t take evidence-based measures to prevent future catastrophes. “Regardless of whether this pandemic came from zoonosis or a lab, strengthening surveillance for spillover events and strengthening lab safety for potential pandemic pathogens are key efforts,” he said. “But surely knowing which of these two pathways caused this catastrophe would help us prioritize and perhaps reveal countermeasures that we haven’t thought of.”
It is clearly incorrect for anyone to claim there is a scientific consensus that Covid-19 has a natural, zoonotic origin. World-leading virologists – the most eminent people in their fields – have stated that it could have inadvertently leaked from a laboratory, where it may have been the result of gain-of-function research.
Back on April 30, 2020, US intelligence agencies confirmed in a statement that a laboratory leak was being examined. “The Intelligence Community will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” it said. But the statement categorically ruled out that Covid-19 may be the result of laboratory experimentation. “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in the rare statement.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence comprises US Defence, Justice, Homeland Security and other government agencies. The statement was far too hasty, and its claim of a “wide scientific consensus” is now demonstrably false. It was an inaccurate statement and has since been contradicted by prominent, world-leading scientists.
“That statement to me was despicable,” says Former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs David Stilwell, who was at that time America’s top diplomat for East Asia. “As soon as they issued that statement we were all shaking our heads saying, ‘Why would they say that?’ The intelligence community needs to be subject to an Inspector General review for putting that statement out. It was wrong and it was really unhelpful.”
The intelligence community had released inaccurate, misleading information into the world that supported the Chinese narrative that the virus had a natural origin. What the Australian intelligence agencies feared had come to pass – but in precisely the reverse. Australian and British agencies worried about lending support to Trump’s unverified theories, but in actual fact they were lending support to the CCP’s disinformation that the virus couldn’t possibly have been manipulated in a laboratory. The US statement was incredibly damaging, and there has been no retraction or apology from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. At the time of writing, no one has held the intelligence agencies to account for their role in suppressing scientific facts about the origin of the virus.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Scientists Who Knew
Shi Zhengli was well known in the close-knit scientific community that studied bat coronaviruses. She had become a scientific celebrity after discovering the closest virus to SARS in bats. As the Director for the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, she became known as the “Batwoman” for her sampling of thousands of bats in remote caves.
It was nothing compared to the global fame she’d attract after the pandemic outbreak. Her institute’s research, with all its risks, would be exposed for the world to judge. When questions arose in China about whether her laboratory was the source of the outbreak at the start of February 2020 – three months before Trump raised the prospect – Shi Zhengli snapped. “Those who believe and spread rumours, shut your dirty mouth,” she posted on WeChat on February 6, 2020. Instead, she said, Covid-19 “is nature’s punishment for uncivilized living habits of human beings. I, Shi Zhengli, use my life to guarantee that it has nothing to do with our lab.”
Just how dangerous was the research she was conducting, often without the watchful eyes of international partners, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? What were Shi and her colleagues up to, and who was funding it?
Of particular focus would be her “gain-of-function” experiments. Gain-of-function research aims to make viruses more infectious and deadlier or more virulent, often to humans. The technical definition is research that “involves experimentation that is expected to increase the transmissibility and/or virulence of pathogens”. It can result in a pathogen acquiring new abilities; for example, a bat virus becoming able to infect humans or a virus that wasn’t airborne having the ability to become so.
It takes separate natural viruses and, as science writer Nicholson Baker aptly put it, “hot-wires” their genomes, genetically manipulating, splicing and artificially recombining genetic sequences, then passaging them – subculturing them in a series of cell cultures and/or animals – to encourage them to mutate into brand-new viruses that never existed before in nature, which could turn out to be highly infectious and lethal to humans. This research, which has been carried out in the US and other Western countries as well as China, has been justified by scientists who claim it could help predict pandemics by discovering which viruses are capable of becoming infectious to humans. They say this allows them to pre-emptively develop vaccines and therapeutics. But only two laboratories globally were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses prior to the pandemic, according to Dr Ebright.
Other research projects may not strictly fall into the gain-of-function category but are equally dangerous. They include bringing back to life very old viruses and manipulating them in a laboratory. This type of research deals with what are referred to as “potential pandemic pathogens”.
To many outside of the scientific community, this type of experimentation sounds absurd. How is it even legal, given the astronomical risks? Debate has raged about the grave dangers of allowing gain-of-function research to take place. There are two main concerns. Firstly, it is a subset of dual-use research. In other words, it can be misused for malevolent military purposes such as bioweapons. Secondly, it can accidentally cause a pandemic.
In a 2016 paper on the ethics of creating new, potentially deadly viruses, Michael Selgelid, Director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Bioethics at Monash University’s Bioethics Centre in Melbourne, wrote that this has been “one of the most hotly debated science policy issues during the 21st century, with controversy surrounding a series of published experiments with potential implications for biological weapons-making”.
“Such research (when conducted by responsible scientists) usually aims to improve understanding of disease-causing agents, their interaction with human hosts, and/or their potential to cause pandemics,” he continued. “Despite these important potential benefits, GOF research can pose risks regarding biosecurity and biosafety.”
Selgelid wrote that even if the scientists who were creating these new infectious viruses were responsible, there was concern that publishing the research would provide “‘recipes’ for especially dangerous potential biological weapons agents to would-be bioterrorists . . . Of particular concern in the context of life science research is that advances in biotechnology may enable development and use of a new generation of biological weapons of mass destruction.” Gain-of-function research allows scientists to create new lethal viruses that didn’t exist in nature before. There was the “genetic engineering of a superstrain of the mousepox virus in 2001, the artificial synthesis of a ‘live’ polio virus from chemical components in 2002, and the reconstruction of the 1918 ‘Spanish Flu’ virus in 2005,” Selgelid wrote.
Global controversy around this type of research ignited in 2012, when scientists wanted to see if it would be possible for bird flu (H5N1) to evolve naturally into a virus that was capable of human-to-human transmission, and thus cause a pandemic. Their stated intention was to be able to predict which viruses could turn into a pandemic.
The scientists, Professor Ron Fouchier from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who holds a professorship in virology in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and at the University of Tokyo, Japan, created a deadly new flu virus. It was a highly pathogenic influenza virus strain of H5N1 that was transmissible by air between ferrets, indicating it could infect humans in a similar way. Fouchier said the ferret-transmissible strain he created was “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make”. But “critics questioned the validity of claims about such benefits – and argued that the studies might facilitate creation of biological weapons agents that could kill millions, or possibly even billions, of people,” Selgelid wrote in his 2016 paper.
He was ahead of his time.
When the debate was raging, Harvard University Professor of Epidemiology Marc Lipsitch campaigned against the type of research that creates new “potential pandemic pathogens” that would be transmissible to humans. He specifically warned against the risk of creating a pandemic. “Experiments that create the possibility of initiating a pandemic should be subject to a rigorous quantitative risk assessment and a search for safer alternatives before they are approved or performed,” he and co-author Thomas Inglesby wrote in the American Society for Microbiology’s mBio journal in 2014. They raised concerns about BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories operating in countries with “less stringent standards than those in the United States”, warning that “the rate of accidents” may be higher.
Three years later, in 2018, Professor Lipsitch’s warnings became more grave when he wrote about the possibility of an accidental laboratory leak leading to a pandemic on a scale we’ve never seen before. “Experiments to create potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs) are nearly unique in that they present biosafety risks that extend well beyond the experimenter or laboratory performing them,” he wrote. “An accidental release could, as the name suggests, lead to global spread of a virulent virus, a biosafety incident on a scale never before seen.”
In potentially prophetic comments, Senior Science Fellow at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Lynn Klotz had also warned this type of research could cause a pandemic. In a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece co-authored with science writer Edward Sylvester, Klotz said there are three “potential pandemic pathogens” – smallpox, the 1918 flu virus and SARS – that “are all extremely deadly, highly contagious in humans and not currently present in human populations, meaning it would be a disaster to reintroduce them into the population.”
Writing in 2012, they said smallpox posed the least threat as it was, at the time, researched in only two facilities in the world by international agreement, where lab workers have been vaccinated to prevent infections to themselves. “In stark contrast to the strict controls on smallpox research, however, SARS, the 1918 flu virus, and potentially human-contagious H5N1 bird flu are studied in laboratories throughout the world, using less than the highest biocontainment, known as Biosafety Level 4, or BSL-4, and there is no approved and stockpiled vaccine for any of them,” they wrote.
“It is SARS that now presents the greatest risk,” they went on. “The worry is less about recurrence of a natural SARS outbreak than of yet another escape from a laboratory researching it to help protect against a natural outbreak. SARS already has escaped from laboratories three times since 2003, and one escape resulted in several secondary infections and one death. What is the likelihood that the virus’s escape could lead to a pandemic? Too high,” they warned, predicting that 15 per cent of the world’s population could be infected by a pandemic flu virus.
They specifically called for research on live SARS coronaviruses to stop. “As noted, about 30 labs now are working with live SARS virus worldwide. The probability of escape from at least one laboratory is high; the probability of an escape that leads to a major outbreak or pandemic is, on the other hand, likely low. Would one in 10 escapes lead to a major outbreak or pandemic? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? No one knows. But for any of these probabilities, the likelihood-weighted number of victims and deaths would be intolerably high. Research on live SARS should be curtailed – perhaps even discontinued – until biological containment measures beyond BSL-3 and even BSL-4 can be put in place.”
Klotz and Sylvester also called for the WHO to convene a meeting about research on pathogens with pandemic potential. “The goal should be nothing less than the elimination of the possibility that scientific research might cause a pandemic,” they wrote.
Quite extraordinary comments. If only world health authorities and political leaders had listened to Klotz and his ilk.
Scientists fiercely opposed to gain-of-function research formed a body called the Cambridge Working Group in 2014. There were 200 esteemed signatories. They released a letter specifically warning that accidents while scientists were experimenting with these dangerous viruses could cause “an accidental pandemic” that could infect a quarter of the world’s population. “Accident risks with newly created ‘potential pandemic pathogens’ raise grave new concerns,” their letter said. “Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks. An accidental infection in such a setting could trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control. Historically, new strains of influenza, once they establish transmission in the human population, have infected a quarter or more of the world’s population within two years.”
Steven Salzberg, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s Center for Computational Biology, said in a 2015 letter that the benefits of gain-of-function research were “minimal at best” and they could “far more safely be obtained through other avenues of research”. “I am very concerned that the continuing gain-of-function research on influenza viruses, and more recently on other viruses, presents extremely serious risks to the public health,” he wrote. “It seems clear that some of the scientists leading the GOF research on influenza are doing it primarily for the publicity and acclaim while downplaying the risks.” He added that there was no evidence to support their claim that lab-created viruses would teach us how to avoid or pre-empt future pandemics.
Associate Professor Carlos Moreno, from the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in Emory University’s School of Medicine, said he was “deeply concerned” by the “potential fatalities that could result from accidental laboratory infections that might occur in a laboratory conducting gain-of-function research on influenza and other infectious diseases”. “The number of accidental releases of potentially fatal pathogens in recent years has demonstrated unequivocally that human error is inevitable and impossible to completely eliminate from experiments with deadly pathogens,” he said.
