It later turned out that The Lancet letter had been organised and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand.
Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, calling on readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.Ĭontrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in The Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.įrom early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favour of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. So the possibility that SARS2 had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world centre for research on coronaviruses. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly. The wet market connection was soon broken – Chinese researchers reported earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. When Chinese authorities announced that the first cases of Covid had occurred at the wet market in Wuhan in December 2019, it was an easy assumption that the new virus, SARS-CoV2 or SARS2 for short, had followed the same route as SARS1 to becoming a human pathogen. A second virus set off the MERS epidemic of 2012 by infecting camels and then people. One member of this family caused the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 by jumping first from bats to civets, an animal sold for meat in Chinese wet markets, and from civets to people. The decoding of its genome in January 2020 showed it belonged to a well known family of bat viruses called beta-coronaviruses. Right from the start, there were two plausible explanations for where the Covid virus might have come from. For the first time since the pandemic began, the natural emergence scenario began to look a little shaky. Strangely, the SARS2 virus has left not a single such trace.
The SARS1 epidemic left copious traces in the environment, including the bat population that harboured the virus, the animal species to which it first jumped, and the 20 or so mutational changes made as it adapted to humans. What became clear in the wake of the WHO team’s conclusions was that the Chinese, after a year of presumably intensive search, had been unable to provide a single scrap of evidence that the virus had emerged naturally. The team, which the Chinese government hand-picked and led around by the nose, reported that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had escaped from a lab and “likely to very likely” that it had emerged naturally.īut this was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese may have hoped for. The stage for the sudden shift in views had been set three months earlier when the World Health Organization sent a team to Beijing to explore the origin of the virus. The dam-burst dissolution of this long prevailing mindset was precipitated by a May 14 letter in the journal Science, in which 18 leading scientists declared that lab escape was a viable theory and should be taken seriously. Yet for the past year mainstream media around the world have ignored this common sense possibility in favour of the scenario that the virus jumped naturally to people from some animal host. Given that the pandemic started in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which is home to China’s leading laboratory of bat virus research, the possibility of lab escape was obvious from the start. Where did the Covid virus come from? President Biden this week asked the US intelligence community to inquire into the origin of the pandemic, including in particular the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab in China.
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