Lab leak: "I had no need for that hypothesis"
September 22, 2021
A REPORT in the Telegraph says “Wuhan scientists” were planning to release “enhanced airborne coronaviruses into Chinese bat populations”, which is supposed to prove that they were involved in dangerous scientific experiments that, er, obviously prove that they must have caused COVID-19.
François Balloux at UCL says the claims are untrue. “The grant proposed to vaccinate bats against Sarvecoviruses, not to release ‘airborne coronaviruses’,” he wrote on Twitter today.
The lab leak theorists have hundreds of pages of documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, but still seem to have no smoking gun. Currently, the line of thinking seems to be: China and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were so devious that they started suppressing information even before the pandemic began, just in case their dangerous research aimed at preventing millions of deaths inadvertantly led to millions of deaths.
French scientists from the Pasteur Institute have recently published a paper about a bunch of new SARS-like coronaviruses detected in bats in Laos, including one with a 96.8% match to SARS-CoV-2. In a conversation with one of the authors, Professeur Marc Eloit, I cycle through my various clichés about the complexities of viral recombination and how hard it would be to trace the origins of anything that began among a multitude of intermingling bat communities in the remote cave systems of southeast Asia.
Imperiously, Eloit says that all the components of SARS-CoV-2 - including the heavily scrutinised furin cleavage site - are present in nature, and there is simply no need to postulate the involvement of the Wuhan laboratory. A theory of natural origins remains sufficient to explain everything, he says.
This, of course, reminds me of Napoleon asking Laplace to explain why there was no room for God in his descriptions of the properties of the solar system. “I had no need for that hypothesis,” Laplace is said to have replied.
If there were no lab in Wuhan, would the world still presume that China was covering up the truth about COVID-19? Would the sceptics - who always seem to be a “growing number” - still be urging China to release decades of serological samples, or the records of old cave investigations?
During the original SARS outbreak in 2002, most people seemed to be reasonably satisfied with the idea that China was an overpopulated, backward nation that ate almost every kind of animal and was bound to be exposed to zoonotic diseases now and again.
Now - perhaps because SARS-2 has proven much more deadly - we seem desperate for something more sinister, something that above all else has an easily identifiable agent. This isn’t just ordinary people getting infected by bats. This is something that needs somehow to be attributed to a malign state.
Still, the question remains: how did that game-changing furin cleavage site get into the virus that came to be known as SARS-CoV-2? Given the numbers of bats involved, natural recombination seems more than capable of creating the permutations required to do the job, and if there are 400,000 animal-to-human transmissions a year, one is bound to hit the sweet spot sooner or later. We know, too, that it is present in coronaviruses that cause the common cold, and there is also evidence to suggest that it has evolved naturally on multiple occasions.
In a universe with trillions of moving parts, improbable one-in-a-billion events happen all the time, and are mostly so insigificant that they have no need for grand narratives. But sometimes, as with COVID-19, they turn cataclysmic, and that’s when we are tempted to imagine that it couldn’t possibly have been caused by dumb luck. And so, multitudes of Twitterers remain convinced that the FCS must have been inserted during “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Evidence remains circumstantial, but unsettling nevertheless. Why, for example, did we have to wait for hundreds of pages of documents to be leaked before we discovered that Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the WIV had applied to DARPA for funding to insert “human cleavage sites” into SARS-like bat coronaviruses?
And what should we make of the claims that the location of the FCS on the SARS-CoV-2 genome is exactly the same as the location of a manually inserted FCS in at least two previous studies? Are they even true? Does this turn the argument decisively in favour of a leak? If so, what makes Edward Holmes and Wang Linfa, among others, so confident still that this emerged naturally? Is this a matter of sunk costs? Are they too invested in the idea of zoonosis?
The more we scrutinise an event, the more ambiguities and anomalies emerge. We overwhelm ourselves with detail. Life consists of a near-infinite amount of low-probability events that we struggle - as purpose-seeking humans - to attribute to chance.
