Why it's not impossible that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan
Everything Should Be Better: A dangerous coronavirus just happened to show up near a lab holding one of the world's largest collections of dangerous coronaviruses
This week, World Health Organization researchers investigating the origins of COVID-19 made their first visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security Chinese lab that has been the subject of speculation that it may have accidentally precipitated the current pandemic. While there is no basis to conspiracy theories of COVID-19 as a Chinese bioweapon, even top epidemiologists have begun to entertain theories that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab.
In the latest episode of Everything Should Be Better, Tristin Hopper explains why this whole pandemic might be due to one of history’s worst instances of human error. Watch the video below, or read the transcript.
If you ask the average person where COVID-19 comes from, they’ll probably say something along the lines of “well, someone in China ate a bat and now people in Wal-Marts are screaming at each other about face masks.”
Catching a disease from something like a bat is probably true of SARS, the other Chinese respiratory coronavirus disease which reached pandemic levels in 2003. Epidemiologists generally attribute that disease to the practice of eating wild-caught meats such as civets, bats, and pangolins. A deadly new disease formed in nature, somebody decides to eat that nature; yadda, yadda, yadda … pandemic. That’s probably where we got AIDS too.
But there is compelling reason to believe that this whole pandemic is not natural, and is actually due to an accidental lab escape. Basically, some research tech didn’t observe proper laboratory hygiene and now two million people are dead – which would make it one of the worst single mistakes in history.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is literally a 30 minute drive from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of the first major recorded outbreak of COVID-19. It has the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses on file, and had been engaged in so-called “gain of function” experiments. That’s where you take an existing virus, artificially make it super deadly, and then study that super-deadly virus to predict the course of future epidemics.
- Pictured: Reasonable grounds for suspicion.
China has gotten into trouble for this kind of work before. In 2013, when it emerged that China’s Harbin Veterinary Research Institute was trying to create a new bird flu, it attracted accusations of “appalling irresponsibility” from top European virologists. In 2018, a US Embassy delegation to the Wuhan Institute of Virology was so freaked out by lax safety standards that they registered their concerns in an official cable to Washington.
To do gain-of-function work, the Wuhan Institute is what’s called a BSL-4 lab, meaning it has the highest level of laboratory security in the entire planet. That means airlocks, positive-pressure suits, crazy levels of air filtration and the decontamination of absolutely every piece of matter that leaves the facility. Oh, and it just so happens that the city where a novel coronavirus sprang out of nowhere is one of only two cities in China with a BSL-4 laboratory.
And to be clear, there is absolutely no evidence for the lab escape theory whatsoever. Despite what you might have read, there’s nothing about the COVID-19 virus that has struck virologists as being particularly manmade.
But you know what? There’s also not a lot of evidence for the theory that it came from nature. It’s the more plausible theory, for the simple reason that nature is where almost all diseases come from, but it’s not like there’s a smoking gun saying that this absolutely came from some wild bat.
But here’s something else to consider: Laboratories release deadly pathogens all the time. Microbiologists, after all, are just like us: They cut corners, they show up to work hungover and every once in a while they put viruses where viruses aren’t supposed to be.
History’s last recorded fatality from smallpox, British woman Janet Parker, was killed to a lab screw-up. In 1978 a Birmingham University lab was studying some particularly deadly strains of smallpox when one of these strains accidentally infected Parker, who worked there as a photographer.
Incidentally, the most famous instance of a disease outbreak caused by a lab escape occurred right around the same time. In 1977, a relatively mild flu emerged in China and the Soviet Union largely targeting children. When researchers took a look at it, they realized the virus was basically a 50s-era flu strain that had apparently not evolved in the interim two decades. So, their best explanation was that this was a kind of viral Austin Powers that had spent 20 years in a freezer.
Hey, speaking of lab security, did you know that Canada’s own National Microbiology Lab, a facility where they work on super-dangerous viruses like Ebola recently had a security breach serious enough to warrant an RCMP investigation?
Now, we may never find out the truth because, well … China. Remember when Australia called for an international inquiry into COVID-19’s origins? Seems like a pretty reasonable thing to ask for, but China absolutely flipped out and imposed immediate sanctions on Australian beef and barley exports. And, oh look, here’s Chinese state media trumpeting the claim that the virus actually came from a US biological weapons lab in Maryland.
This is a country that is busy building a network of 21st century gulags in its northwest, so it’s a fair bet that if one of their virology labs accidentally demolished the world economy, that’s something they will work very, very hard to cover up.
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