Since 2019 when COVID-19 emerged in China, scientists worldwide have been trying to ascertain the origin of the virus.
The two major theories are a natural spillover from bats to an animal source and then to humans or a laboratory accident. A related question is whether the virus emerged from nature or was the result of human-made genetic manipulation.
Until recently, although no animal intermediary between virus-carrying bats and humans has been identified, Chinese scientists and many of their Western counterparts, including prominent American researchers, argued that animals transmitted the virus to humans. They downplayed the lab leak theory and essentially dismissed the possibility that the virus was engineered rather than a creation of nature.
Particularly notable was a report on the pandemic’s origin released in March 2021 by the World Health Organization, which failed to identify the source of the virus but claimed an animal source was “likely to very likely.” Only a few pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident, and a lab leak was deemed so unlikely that the virus having been carried into China on frozen food packages was posed as a more probable explanation.
This scenario strained credulity but was a convenient way of shifting the blame away from China, which had a say in determining which facts outsiders could investigate. Not incidentally, the natural-origin theory also protected Chinese scientists and their foreign sources of funding from inconvenient questions about safety protocols and the wisdom or foolishness of dangerous research projects.
In the past year as the pandemic wound down, the “very likely” theory of an animal vector has been met with increasing skepticism. Many in the scientific community, as well as some in U.S. intelligence circles, do not buy the remarkable coincidence that the first COVID-19 cases just happened to appear in Wuhan, China, the site of the Chinese government-run Wuhan Institute of Virology. FBI Director Christopher Wray has said that the bureau believes COVID-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab.
Now out is a comprehensive investigation of the virus origin by the Sunday Times of London, compiled with extensive sourcing including interviews with U.S. State Department special investigators who have been studying the origin of COVID-19 and have amassed secret intelligence on events in China before COVID-19 emerged.
The conclusion of Times reporters was startling. “Scientists in Wuhan working alongside the Chinese military were combining the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutant virus just as the pandemic began. Investigators who scrutinized top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the COVID-19 outbreak. The U.S. investigators say one of the reasons there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military, which was funding it and which, they say, was pursuing bioweapons.”
While the Times does not claim the virus was intended to be a bioweapon, the findings bolster the lab leak theory and support it by noting the first cases of COVID-19 likely occurred in Chinese researchers involved in the early lab work at Wuhan. Journalists from other news outlets also have reported that the virology institute scientists were the first humans to be infected.
Moreover, scientists from the Chinese military working at the Wuhan institute were coincidentally involved in vaccine development just before the international outbreak. The Times also fleshes out unsettling details previously reported. The U.S. government gave more than $1 million in research funding to the virology institute through an intermediary organization, and an American virus expert provided critical research to the Chinese by exploring the potential for a vaccine while being well aware of the dangers of his research.
Now that the pandemic is over, what difference does it make how it started? This is a significant moment. If the Times investigation is substantially true, there are at least three disturbing conclusions:
First, if the Chinese cannot be trusted to provide reliable information and their military is actively working on bioweapons, that’s ominous. We are still involved in global rivalries that hark back to the Cold War, and an emerging battlefield is the scientific laboratory. The potential exists for the proliferation of weapons as deadly as nuclear ones — but harder to detect. Washington shouldn’t be providing research funds for China or any other country if U.S. officials cannot tell how the money is being used.
Second, this episode dispels the notion that scientists are an apolitical community that can work without regard to international borders — a lesson we must continuously relearn in the face of the profession’s protestations to the contrary. During World War II, many of the nuclear physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project were committed pacifists and internationalists. But they subordinated their beliefs, knowing what the Nazis would do if German physicists delivered the atomic bomb to Adolf Hitler first.
Third, just as a politicized United Nations cannot guarantee world peace, the politicized WHO cannot guarantee biosecurity — these organizations are necessary but not sufficient. The U.S. should explore NATO-type independent alliances to create a distant early warning system that includes real-time international genomic, case and wastewater surveillance for dangerous biological agents. Presidential candidates from both parties should describe their plans for forming such an alliance.
Hard truths, to be sure. But unless we acknowledge and respond to these truths, as bad as COVID-19 was, the inevitable next pandemic could be much worse.
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ABOUT THE WRITERS
Dr. Cory Franklin is a retired intensive care physician. Dr. Robert Weinstein is an infectious disease specialist at Rush University Medical Center.
