In Galveston, a cautious perspective on lab leak theories

GALVESTON

For weeks, national newspaper pages and websites and cable news reports have been filled with similar stories.

The headlines report there’s growing concern COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and escaped through a mistake. The theory conflicts with another that the virus emerged in nature and was passed from an animal, like a bat, into human populations.

Both theories lack crucial pieces of direct evidence. No bats have been found in the wild infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus; but there have been no confirmed reports of a leak at the Wuhan lab. The origins still are unknown.

Calls for an investigation into the origins of a pandemic that has contributed to the deaths of millions, brought much of the world to a halt, smothered economies and consumed many billions of dollars are growing, however, and even some lab theory skeptics have joined the push.

VETTING THE POSSIBLE

For one of the most prominent names in viral research, the flood of news coverage isn’t necessarily backed up by new scientific discoveries.

“I’m not aware of anything new,” said Dr. James LeDuc, recently retired president of the Galveston National Laboratory, the island’s world-renowned infectious disease research center. “That’s the same answer I would have given you six months ago.”

Last year, LeDuc told The Daily News that he, like many, leaned toward the theory that coronavirus originated in nature. But, he acknowledged at the time that “sometimes accidents happen.”

LeDuc is among a group of prominent experts who say governments and scientists should commit to studying and trying to identify the origin of the virus. Many of those calls came after a failed World Health Organization attempt to identify the origin and somewhat contradictory statements from WHO officials.

“I think we need to keep looking at the facts, follow the science and keep pushing to identify it,” LeDuc said in a recent interview.

The big news about COVID-19 these days is its ability to transform into new variants, which has allowed the virus to keep spreading more efficiently and remain dangerous, he said.

The Galveston National Lab is on the cutting edge of research to combat the variants, LeDuc said.

WHAT CHANGED

Theories about a lab leak origin of the COVID-19 virus have existed since the virus first emerged in China in December 2019. Initially, any talk that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as fringe conspiracy theory. But the theory took on new life earlier this year and gained even more traction in the past month.

The inciting incident was the highly anticipated release of a WHO report made after a field investigation in Wuhan, China, that aimed to discover the true origin of the virus.

The WHO report declared “the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain introduction of the virus into the human population.”

Two days after the release of that report, however, WHO officials started walking back the report’s strongly worded conclusion, noting Chinese officials had not been fully forthcoming with WHO investigators.

The gist of the reaction to the WHO report was that it didn’t rule out the lab leak theory. Investigative reports following the WHO report also yielded more questions and more speculation.

For instance, in March, an Australian newspaper reported three Wuhan researchers “were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in November 2019.” That reporting was repeated by NBC News in March and a May article in the Wall Street Journal.

At least one former State Department official has speculated that group was the first cluster of COVID-19 in the world.

LeDuc said he had doubts whether the sick lab workers meant anything at all.

“November in Wuhan’s temperate zone, they get some pretty strong winters there,” LeDuc said. “It’s respiratory season. Who knows what they got.

“The fact that three people went to the hospital or contracted a respiratory disease in respiratory disease season, it’s intriguing, but it’s certainly not a smoking gun.”

Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist, made a similar observation to NBC News, saying seasonal sickness in China was “certainly not a big, big thing.” Koopmans’ opinion on the sick researchers was the only opinion shared by the Journal, which also noted it wasn’t “unusual for people in China to go directly to a hospital for treatment.”

Reports like the sick lab workers, and the speculation that followed, are among reasons there should be more investigation into the virus’ origins, and why China should cooperate more with the probes, LeDuc said.

“The challenge is going to be getting good transparency from the Chinese government,” he said.

“That’s absolutely critical. But you look at the world, and there’s the scientists, who have been collaborating throughout history and have continued to do so, and there are the politicians, and they’ve got an agenda.

“I’m absolutely convinced the Chinese have looked closely at the laboratories and the natural origin. The problem is they just haven’t shared the information.”

Days after the Wall Street Journal report, President Joe Biden said he had asked the U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about the origins of COVID-19 and report back to him by the middle of August.

RETRACTIONS AND LETTERS

A mass reset of public opinion about the possible origins of the virus came after Biden’s call for redoubled investigation.

There have been other public reckonings. In one case, The Washington Post corrected a February 2020 report that referred to the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy theory.” The Post amended its report to read “fringe theory” that had been “disputed” rather than “debunked.”

Elsewhere, the medical journal The Lancet added an addendum to a widely shared March 2020 open letter that also appeared to dismiss the lab leak theory outright. In the letter, 27 prominent public health experts condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The addendum noted one of the letter’s signers, zoologist Peter Daszak, had a potential conflict of interest that wasn’t stated initially. Daszak’s nonprofit organization, EcoHealth Alliance, directs U.S. grants to international researchers, including some in China.

More recently, a group of prominent scientists took a different stance in a letter to the journal Science about the WHO report on COVID’s origins.

“We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the letter stated.

The letter cites no new direct evidence, and The Washington Post noted this week the letter had been criticized for giving equal weight to the lab leak hypothesis. Most scientists still say the virus most likely came to humans from nature, The Post argued.

Meanwhile, a June 15 letter in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine called for peace among researchers until the work of science was completed.

“… [M]isinformation, unsubstantiated claims, and personal attacks on scientists surrounding the different theories of how the virus emerged are unacceptable, and are sowing public confusion and risk undermining the public’s trust in science and scientists, including those still leading efforts to bring the pandemic under control,” the letter stated.

WHAT OF THE GALVESTON LAB?

Despite its prominence in viral research, the Galveston National Laboratory has stayed out of the public discourse about COVID-19’s origin. No lab employees appeared on the Science letter or other, similar open letters calling for more investigations.

Dr. Randall Urban, the interim director of the Galveston National Lab, said the lab isn’t directly involved in any of the investigations about the origins of the virus.

“I think it’s important that we understand that from a perspective that it has been a very devastating virus, and it’s important to know how it came about now that we’re all focusing on pandemic preparedness and how we get ready for the next virus,” Urban said.

“At the GNL, we’re not into investigation,” he said. “We don’t do investigations. We’re not part of those investigations. So, I can’t really comment on that. We’re focusing on treating and coming up with better diagnostic tests and getting ready for the variants.”

Still, the Galveston lab is frequently mentioned in articles about COVID because its research is similar and because the Galveston lab has helped train some Chinese researchers associated with the Wuhan lab.

The renewed discussion about lab leak theories haven’t prompted any widespread discussion about the wisdom or safety of the Galveston facility. The lab hasn’t reported any leaks or serious incidents since it opened in 2008.

When the lab was created in 2008, it formed a community liaison committee, made of up people who live in Galveston, to communicate local concerns about lab safety to the medical branch and communicate updates about the lab’s work to the community.

Two members of the liaison committee who spoke to The Daily News said its meetings with medical branch officials have been curtailed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But they said China’s problems, whatever they might be, hadn’t seemed to sow distrust in Galveston.

“They’re doing an investigation and until then we can’t go by their hearsay,” said Steven Marsh, a member of the nine-person committee, of the talk about lab leaks.

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