COVID-19 lab leak theory ends with a whimper, not a bang
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US intelligence services – the CIA, the FBI and other spooky types – released a summary of the intelligence they had collected about the origins of COVID-19 this week.
Read some of the news coverage and you’d think it entirely vindicated those who had spent the past few years loudly demonising science and scientists in service of a narrative of lab leak and cover-up.
In this January 27, 2020, photo, workers in protective gear catch a giant salamander that was reported to have escaped from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, a centre of the early COVID-19 outbreak. Credit: AP
The story goes that the intelligence report, as lab leak advocates had long predicted, revealed scientists in Wuhan were working with the military on some sort of clandestine engineered bioweapon, and then accidentally – or deliberately – let it out. Or something.
If you read the actual report summary – it is just a few short pages – you’ll discover it says nothing of the sort.
Instead, it ends the lab leak case – and not with a bang, but with a whimper. The emperor was wearing no clothes all along.
The combined powers of the world’s most expansive intelligence apparatus could turn up no evidence the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had SARS-CoV-2, nor its progenitor, nor a backbone on which it could have been engineered, before the pandemic broke out. Nor could they find any evidence of a biosafety incident.
So underwhelming is this report that lab leak advocates are now complaining US intelligence are either Chinese co-conspirators (!!!) or incompetent (OK, this does seem possible). Other lab leakers have taken to the media to try to spin the report as though it supports their claims.
It does not.
Yes, the institute worked with coronaviruses, but these strains “were too distantly related to have led to the creation of SARS CoV-2,” the spooks concluded.
“We continue to have no indication the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS CoV-2 or a close progenitor,” they write.
The CIA and other leading intelligence agencies could find no evidence that COVID-19 was developed by scientists in Wuhan. Credit: AP
RaTG13, a virus collected in 2013 which is at the centre of speculation as a possible ancestor, was far too genetically distant to be a direct relative.
The institute did conduct genetic engineering of coronaviruses. But the intelligence community has “no information” indicating they were working on SARS-CoV-2, nor on a virus close to it. Nor were they working on a virus that could have been genetically manipulated to become SARS-CoV-2.
No evidence of a lab leak
The intelligence community also has no direct evidence of a “research-related incident” – a lab leak – that could have caused COVID-19.
The WIV’s research was not always done with adequate biosecurity – and the institute had been working to fix that, training researchers and improving facilities. But, “We do not know of a specific biosafety incident at the WIV that spurred the pandemic,” the spooks note.
That brings us to the researchers who fell ill in 2019, before the pandemic, who are mentioned in the intelligence agencies’ summary. The three researchers had symptoms that were consistent with COVID-19 – but also with a range of other viruses.
Some reading between the lines here suggests they likely had a respiratory illness, perhaps the flu – it was flu season – which presents with similar symptoms to COVID-19.
People do get sick: How many from your office are off sick right now? The intelligence community note their symptoms were not “diagnostic” of COVID-19; there’s no evidence any of the three were hospitalised due to COVID-19 related symptoms.
The report does conclude that WIV staff collaborated with the Chinese military. But this is a much less exciting finding than other breathless reports would have you believe. All agencies agree SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a bioweapon, and they agree it wasn’t genetically engineered.
If the virus is not a weapon or tool developed by the military, then collaboration with the military does not seem relevant to the origins of the pandemic.
And … that’s it. That’s the entire thing.
The whimper
What’s left for the lab leakers now? Essentially, nothing.
Pile the ashes of the intelligence community’s investigation against the research for a zoonotic origin, which now spans a large number of published, peer-reviewed studies in leading scientific journals.
The 155 known human cases of SARS CoV-2 in December 2019 were strongly clustered in the suburbs around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, not the WIV. The market is an extremely unlikely superspreader site, but – due to the presence of wild animals – an extremely likely site for a virus to jump from animals to humans.
We now know Chinese investigators found DNA evidence of racoon dogs and SARS-CoV-2 in the same stalls at the market. Racoon dogs are known to be able to carry the virus.
Viral detections were strongest in the stalls that sold wild animals, and racoon dogs were supplied to the market from farms that operate near caves filled with bats known to carry coronaviruses extremely similar to SARS-CoV-2.
When the virus was first detected, two separate variants were spotted – both at the market. Either two lab staff separately took two different variants of the virus to the market, or the virus had been circulating in animals for long enough to mutate.
The scientists who have consistently been making the case for a zoonotic origin have a location, a time, an animal. The lab leak theorists have nothing.
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This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Sydney Morning Herald can be found here.
