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Geng Shuang, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said. “China has mentioned many times that the origin of the virus is a scientific question, which should be evaluated by scientists and medical experts, and should not be politicized.”41 Essentially the same position on the possibility that a lab leak originated the pandemic was expressed by Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “I don’t think it is a conspiracy theory. I think it’s a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered. To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future.”42
But Chinese officials reacted angrily in April when Australian officials suggested that the World Health Organization should be able to quickly investigate a disease outbreak that could lead to a pandemic, retaliating by instituting trade restrictions on several Australian agricultural exports to China. In early May, the World Health Organization’s representative in China, Gauden Galea, publicly complained that China had refused repeated requests to permit the WHO to participate in whatever investigations the Chinese government was undertaking itself. He said that the WHO had not been given access to laboratory logs at the WIV or the Wuhan Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.43
On May 18, prior to a meeting of the WHO governing board, the European Union submitted a draft resolution supported by 100 nations that asked the WHO “to work with other United Nations agencies to ‘identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts. … The document does not propose a review to identify missteps in how countries handled the outbreak and is instead forward-looking. It calls on the WHO to potentially arrange ‘scientific and collaborative field missions’ to help prevent similar future outbreaks. It also appears to rule out the possibility that the virus was man-made or experimented upon.”44
The draft resolution did not mention Wuhan or China.45
On May 18, China’s President Xi addressed the meeting of the governing body of the WHO via video. Ironically, Xi asked that countries “step up information sharing” but declared that China would support a review of the pandemic led by the WHO as long as it was “objective and impartial” and held after the pandemic was under control or over. The operative WHO resolution focuses on identifying “the zoonotic source of the virus” and says nothing about any forensic investigation.46 The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian declared that “China supported an international inquiry all along,” and China’s Global Times asked: “Will China oppose scientific research into the virus’ origin? No, because it is a necessary move to fight COVID-19 in a scientific way and conducive to prevention measures and development of vaccines and medicine,” but added “Not only China-related factors but also those related to the US and other countries need to be included. Earlier confirmed cases than the previously known first infected case have continuously been found in the US. Among those diagnosed as having flu last winter, how many were coronavirus infections? All these clues shouldn’t be missed.”47
What does this all mean at the present time? We have in China:
• a record of laboratory escape of the SARS virus in 2004 from a premier Chinese research institute.
• a record of poor biosafety in some of its high-containment facilities, including in the Wuhan institutes.
• a record of suppression of information in general, and in the case of SARS-CoV-2 in particular.
• the initiation of a disinformation campaign in regard to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, targeting US biological laboratories.
• a record of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including passage of a bat coronavirus construct through experimental animals.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists before the WHO governing board was convened, Filippa Lentzos advocated for a forensic investigation and described what it would entail:
Investigating the range of possible spillover sites—from the wet market, to an accidental lab or fieldwork infection, or an unnoticed lab leak—requires a forensic investigation. Obtaining case histories, epidemiological data, and viral samples from different times and places, including the earliest possible samples from infected individuals and samples from wildlife, is paramount… A forensic investigation would additionally involve auditing and sampling viral collections at relevant labs that had been studying coronaviruses, examining the types of experiments carried out and the viruses used, and reviewing the safety and security practices in place. Key data would also come from documents, including standard operating procedures at the labs and during fieldwork, risk assessments of individual experiments, experiment logs and fieldwork notebooks, training records, waste management logs, accident and infection records, facility maintenance and automated systems records, access logs, security camera footage and communications logs. …A COVID-19 origins investigation will need to be negotiated and begun rapidly before relevant data diminishes or disappears entirely as time passes.48
There is no semblance of any of this in the WHO resolution, and one can scarcely imagine that any of it would be permitted by the current administration in China. An investigation held after the pandemic “is under control” cannot possibly be carried out “rapidly,” and is in fact postponed into the indefinite future. Unfortunately, if there were any documentation in either of the two Wuhan virology institutes that recorded the infection of a laboratory researcher or an escape, or that either had a virus sample that was extremely similar to SARS-CoV-2, one has to assume that such information has already been removed or destroyed.
Others have suggested that an international “commission, independent of the WHO, needs to be set up with the broad objective of how to ameliorate the next pandemic. Its mandate should go well beyond that of the WHO and part of its work could be to look at how COVID-19 started.”49 Unfortunately it is equally difficult to envision such a commission coming to pass.
At present, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown. The pros and cons regarding the two alternative possibilities—first, that it arose in the field as a natural evolution, as many virologists maintain, or second, that it may have been the consequence of bat coronavirus research in one of the two virology research institutes located in Wuhan that led to the infection of a laboratory researcher and subsequent escape—are equally based on inference and conjecture. The points gathered in this paper can be no more than suggestive. There is no hard scientific evidence to support either position. Both are inferences from circumstantial evidence. The US administration’s political hectoring only assures that it will be very difficult if not impossible to ever find out which is true.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank several colleagues with far-better computer skills than he has for supplying many of the electronic references. I would also like to thank several colleagues for reading and commenting on the paper. This manuscript was submitted for publication on May 27, 2020.
Notes
1 ↑ Shane Harris et al, “Intelligence officials’ early alarms about possible pandemic went unheeded,” Washington Post, March 21, 2020; Eric Lipton et al, “Despite timely alerts, Trump was slow to act,” New York Times, April 12, 2020; Philip Rucker et al, “As deaths mounted, Trump fixated on stalled economy,” Washington Post, May 3, 2020; Edward Luce, “Inside Trump’s Corona Virus Meltdown,” Financial Times Magazine, May 14, 2020; Fintan O’Toole, “Vector in Chief,” New York Review of Books, 67:8, May 14, 2020; and Fintan O’Toole, “Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again,” Irish Times, April 25, 2020.
2 ↑ See www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050754/xi-jinping-calls-overhaul-chinas-health-crisis-response-system; www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-04/xi-warns-virus-may-impact-china-s-stability-at-rare-meeting.
3 ↑ Liu Caiyu and Leng Shumai, “Biosafety guidelines issued to fix chronic management loopholes at virus labs,” Global Times, February 16, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1179747.shtml.
4 ↑ Liu Caiyu and Leng Shumai, “Biosafety guidelines issued to fix chronic management loopholes at virus labs,” Global Times, February 16, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1179747.shtml, and Yuan Zhiming, “Current status and future challenges of high-level biosafety laboratories in China, Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity, Volume 1, Issue 2, September 2019, pp. 123-127. Accessed at: doi.org/10.1016/j.jobb.2019.09.005.
5 ↑ Shing Hei Zhan, Benjamin E. Deverman and Yujia Alina Chan, “SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?” BioRxiv, posted May 2, 2020 on: doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262.
6 ↑ Chaolin Huang Yeming Wang, Xingwang Li, Lili Ren, Jianping Zhao, Yi Hu, Li Zhang et al, “Clinical Features of Patients Infected with 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” The Lancet, Vol. 395, no. 10223 (February 15, 2020): 497-506, doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30183-5.
7 ↑ James T. Areddy, “China rules out Animal Market and Lab as Coronavirus origin,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-and-lab-as-coronavirus-origin-11590517508.
8 ↑ “Wuhan’s seafood market a victim of COVID-19: CDC director,” Global Times [China], May 26, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189506.shtml.
9 ↑ Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, “The possible origins of 2091-nCoV coronavirus,” img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/114720192-5eb8307f-017c-4075-a697-348628da0204.pdf.
10 ↑ Jon Cohen, “Chinese researchers reveal draft genome of virus implicated in Wuhan pneumonia outbreak,” Science, January 11, 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/chinese-researchers-reveal-draft-genome-virus-implicated-wuhan-pneumonia-outbreak.
11 ↑ Christian Shepherd and Don Weinland, “China Rounds up Wuhan’s Citizen Journalists for ‘Provoking Quarrels’,” Financial Times, May 28, 2020, www.ft.com/content/3fd5c031-2152-4cab-8bd7-f7871f6ecf64; Aylin Woodward, “At least 5 people in China have disappeared, gotten arrested, or been silenced after speaking out about the coronavirus — here’s what we know about them,” Business Insider, February 20, 2020, businessinsider.com/china-coronavirus-whistleblowers-speak-out-vanish-2020-2; “Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor speaks out against authorities,” The Guardian, March 11, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wuhan-doctor-ai-fen-speaks-out-against-authorities; Scott Neuman, Emily Feng and Huojingnan, “China To Investigate After Whistleblower Doctor Dies From Coronavirus,” February 7, 2020, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/07/803680463/china-to-investigate-after-whistleblower-doctor-dies-from-coronavirus; Verna Yu, “’Hero who told the truth’: Chinese rage over coronavirus death of whistleblower doctor,” The Guardian, February 7, 2020, wwwthe.guardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-chinese-rage-death-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang.
12 ↑ “A 4th Chinese citizen journalist was reportedly detained after livestreaming what life was like in Wuhan at the height of its coronavirus outbreak,” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/zhang-zhan-fourth-chinese-journalist-arrested-for-livestreaming-in-wuhan-2020-5. This paper does not attempt to resolve allegations that have been published claiming that a former graduate student at the WIV, Huang Yan Ling, was the index case and subsequently died or disappeared. The allegations have been denied by the Chinese government as well as by members of the WIV staff. Jun Mai, “Chinese research lab denies rumours of links to first coronavirus patient,” South China Morning Post, February 16, 2020, www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050872/chinese-research-lab-denies-rumours-links-first-coronavirus.
13 ↑ Keoni Everington, “Chinese Media Estimates 500,000 Coronavirus Cases in Wuhan, Quickly deletes News,” Taiwan News, May 19, 2020, www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3936718.
14 ↑ Elise Thomas, “Chinese diplomats and Western fringe media outlets push the same coronavirus conspiracies,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, March 24, 2020, www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinese-diplomats-and-western-fringe-media-outlets-push-the-same-coronavirus-conspiracies/. The “Western fringe media” were reposting earlier Russian disinformation posts.
15 ↑ Matt Schrader, “Analyzing China’s Coronavirus Propaganda Messaging in Europe,” securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/analyzing-chinas-coronavirus-propaganda-messaging-in-europe/.
16 ↑ CGTN, “US operates over 200 military biological laboratories worldwide,” 21 May 2020, news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-21/U-S-deployed-over-200-military-biological-laboratories-worldwide-QFtLkqhuVy/index.html.
17 ↑ Milton Leitenberg, “ Russian Disinformation Campaigns re Biological Weapons in the Putin Era,” cissm.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2020-05/Russian%20Disinformation%20on%20Biological%20Weapons%20in%20the%20Putin%20PPT
%2011%20Dec%202019_Rev%208%20May%202020.pdf.
18 ↑ Lynn Klotz, “Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 25, 2019.
19 ↑ Lynn Klotz, “The risk of lab-created potential pandemic influenza,” March 2020, armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Quantifying-the-risk-9-17-Supplementary-material-at-end.pdf.
20 ↑ Martin Furmanski, “Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes: Self-fulfilling prophecies,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 31, 2014 and Martin Furmanski, personal communication, May 29, 2020.
21 ↑ Robert Walgate, “SARS escaped Beijing lab twice: Laboratory safety at the Chinese Institute of Virology under close scrutiny,” The Scientist, April 24, 2004, www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-beijing-lab-twice-50137.
22 ↑ Rosie McCall, “Almost 100 Lab Workers in China Infected With Potentially Deadly Pathogen,” Newsweek, December 17, 2019, www.newsweek.com/almost-100-lab-workers-china-infected-potentially-deadly-pathogen-1477652.
23 ↑ Lei-Ping Zeng et al, “Bat SARS-like coronavirus WIV1 encodes an extra accessory protein ORFX involved in modulation of host immune response,” Journal of Virology 2016 May 11:JVI-03079, jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/early/2016/05/05/JVI.03079-15.full.pdf.
24 ↑ Laboratory biorisk management for laboratories handling human specimens suspected or confirmed to contain novel coronavirus: Interim recommendations, www.who.int/csr/disease/coronavirus_infections/Biosafety_InterimRecommendations_
NovelCoronavirus_19Feb13.pdf; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Appendix F5— Laboratory Biosafety Guidelines for Handling and Processing Specimens Associated with SARS-CoV. Supplement F: Laboratory Guidance. Public Health Guidance for Community-Level Preparedness and Response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Version 2/3,” www.cdc.gov/sars/guidance/f-lab/app5.html.
25 ↑ John Xie, “Chinese Lab with Checkered Safety Record Draws Scrutiny over Covid-19,” VOA News, April 21, 2020, www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/chinese-lab-checkered-safety-record-draws-scrutiny-over-covid-19.
26 ↑ Josh Rogin, “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses,” Washington Post, April 14, 2020.
27 ↑ Josh Rogin, “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.” A press item reported that an alleged 15-page “Five Eyes” intelligence report shared among the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand validated many of the charges against the WIV. Dave Makichuk, “Dossier an indictment of China’s virus response,” The Saturday Telegraph [UK], May 3, 2020. However, the Australian government announced that the “report” had been prepared from open source materials by the US alone, was not an agreed intelligence report, and was leaked by the US embassy to a Rupert Murdoch publication. Anthony Galloway and Eryk Bagshaw, “Australian intelligence knocks back US government’s Wuhan lab virus claim,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 4, 2020, www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intelligence-knocks-back-us-government-s-wuhan-lab-virus-claim-20200504-p54pk3.html; Anthony Galloway and Eryk Bagshaw, “Australian concern over US spreading unfounded claims about Wuhan lab,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 7, 2020, www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-concern-over-us-spreading-unfounded-claims-about-wuhan-lab-20200506-p54qhp.html.
28 ↑ See projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421&ddparam=&ddvalue=&ddsub=&cr=1&csb=default&cs=ASC&pball=
29 ↑ Fred Guteri et al, “The Controversial Experiments and Wuhan Lab suspected of Starting Pandemic,” Newsweek, April 30, 2020.
30 ↑ Vineet D. Menachery et al, “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence,” Nat Med. 2015 Dec; 21(12):1508-13. doi: 10.1038/nm.3985. Epub 2015 Nov 9, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/.
31 ↑ LP Zeng et al, “Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus WIV1 Encodes an Extra Accessory Protein, ORFX, Involved in Modulation of the Host Immune Response,” J Virol. 2016 Jun 24;90(14):6573-6582. doi: 10.1128/JVI.03079-15. Print 2016 Jul 15, (methods for construction of chimeric coronaviruses, pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27170748.
32 ↑ B. Hu et al, “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus,” PLoS Pathog. 2017 Nov 30;13(11):e1006698. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698. eCollection 2017 Nov, (construction of chimeric coronaviruses encoding different S proteins), pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29190287.
33 ↑ Yuri Deigin, “Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research, April 22, 2020, medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 and Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson, “The Case is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin,” Independent Science News, June 2, 2020, www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/.
34 ↑ Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS, “Take a look at the largest virus bank in Asia,” 2018, english.whiov.cas.cn/ne/201806/t20180604_193863.html.
35 ↑ Jane Qiu, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus,” Scientific American, June 2020, www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
36 ↑ Jon Cohen and Kai Kupferschmidt, “NIH-halted study unveils ist massive analysis of bat coronaviruses,” Science, June 2, 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nih-halted-study-unveils-its-massive-analysis-bat-coronaviruses.
37 ↑ Agence France Presse, “Wuhan lab had three live bat coronaviruses: Chinese state media,” May 24, 2020, au.news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-had-three-live-bat-coronaviruses-chinese-033127925–spt.html.
38 ↑ Personal communication, May 24, 2020.
39 ↑ Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson, “The Case is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin,” Independent Science News, June 2, 2020, www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/.
40 ↑ Press Release, Flinders University, “Origins of COVID-19 still a mystery”, May 14, 2020; Sakshi Piplani et al, “In Silico Comparison of Spike Protein-ACE2 Binding Affinities across Species: Significance for the Possible Origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus,” ArXiv:2005.06199 [q-Bio], May 13, 2020, arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199. See also, Jeremy Andre, “Origine du coronavirus: ‘L’Infection d’un employé de laboratoire de Wuhan est plus probable’,” Le Point International, April 18, 2020 and Jef Akst, “Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate,” The Scientist, November 16, 2015 (updated March 11, 2020), www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502.
41 ↑ John Xie, “Chinese Lab with Checkered Safety Record Draws Scrutiny over COVID-19,” VOA News, April 21, 2020, www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/chinese-lab-checkered-safety-record-draws-scrutiny-over-covid-19.
42 ↑ Kenneth Rapoza, “China Lab in Focus of Corona Virus Outbreak,” Forbes, April 14, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/04/14/the-washington-post-goes-rogue-china-lab-in-focus-of-coronavirus-outbreak/.
43 ↑ Patrick Smith, “WHO official says agency not invited to take part in China’s coronavirus investigation,” NBC News, May 1, 2020, nbcnews.com/news/world/who-official-says-agency-not-invited-take-part-china-s-n1197516.
44 ↑ Gerry Shih, “China’s Xi backs WHO-led review of covid-19 outbreak, proposes aid for developing world,” Washington Post, May 18, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-xi-backs-who-led-review-of-covid-19-outbreak-proposes-aid-for-developing-world/2020/05/18/911a1544-98df-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html.
45 ↑ Gerry Shih, “China’s Xi backs WHO-led review of covid-19 outbreak, proposes aid for developing world,” Washington Post, May 18, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-xi-backs-who-led-review-of-covid-19-outbreak-proposes-aid-for-developing-world/2020/05/18/911a1544-98df-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html.
46 ↑ WHO, Draft Resolution: COVID-19 response, A73/CONF./1 Rev.1, May 18, 2020, apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA73/A73_CONF1Rev1-en.pdf.
47 ↑ “Editorial: Virus investigation must be fair, scientific,” Global Times, May 17, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1188620.shtml. On May 4, 2020, a Chinese Hsinhua publication asked the question “Where did the virus in the U.S. originate?”: “On March 11, CDC Director Robert Redford told a hearing on Capitol Hill that some COVID-19 deaths have been diagnosed as flu-related in the United States. Washington needs to clarify the number of COVID-19 cases previously diagnosed as flu, and make public the samples and genetic sequence of the influenza virus in the country.” “Spotlight: Five Questions Washington needs to answer on coronavirus pandemic,” XINHUANET, May 4, 2020.
48 ↑ Filippa Lentzos, “Will the WHO call for an international investigation into the coronavirus’s origins?”, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 18, 2020.
49 ↑ Personal communication, Rod Barton, May 25, 2020.
But Chinese officials reacted angrily in April when Australian officials suggested that the World Health Organization should be able to quickly investigate a disease outbreak that could lead to a pandemic, retaliating by instituting trade restrictions on several Australian agricultural exports to China. In early May, the World Health Organization’s representative in China, Gauden Galea, publicly complained that China had refused repeated requests to permit the WHO to participate in whatever investigations the Chinese government was undertaking itself. He said that the WHO had not been given access to laboratory logs at the WIV or the Wuhan Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.43
On May 18, prior to a meeting of the WHO governing board, the European Union submitted a draft resolution supported by 100 nations that asked the WHO “to work with other United Nations agencies to ‘identify the zoonotic source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population, including the possible role of intermediate hosts. … The document does not propose a review to identify missteps in how countries handled the outbreak and is instead forward-looking. It calls on the WHO to potentially arrange ‘scientific and collaborative field missions’ to help prevent similar future outbreaks. It also appears to rule out the possibility that the virus was man-made or experimented upon.”44
The draft resolution did not mention Wuhan or China.45
On May 18, China’s President Xi addressed the meeting of the governing body of the WHO via video. Ironically, Xi asked that countries “step up information sharing” but declared that China would support a review of the pandemic led by the WHO as long as it was “objective and impartial” and held after the pandemic was under control or over. The operative WHO resolution focuses on identifying “the zoonotic source of the virus” and says nothing about any forensic investigation.46 The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian declared that “China supported an international inquiry all along,” and China’s Global Times asked: “Will China oppose scientific research into the virus’ origin? No, because it is a necessary move to fight COVID-19 in a scientific way and conducive to prevention measures and development of vaccines and medicine,” but added “Not only China-related factors but also those related to the US and other countries need to be included. Earlier confirmed cases than the previously known first infected case have continuously been found in the US. Among those diagnosed as having flu last winter, how many were coronavirus infections? All these clues shouldn’t be missed.”47
What does this all mean at the present time? We have in China:
• a record of laboratory escape of the SARS virus in 2004 from a premier Chinese research institute.
• a record of poor biosafety in some of its high-containment facilities, including in the Wuhan institutes.
• a record of suppression of information in general, and in the case of SARS-CoV-2 in particular.
• the initiation of a disinformation campaign in regard to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, targeting US biological laboratories.
• a record of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including passage of a bat coronavirus construct through experimental animals.
Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists before the WHO governing board was convened, Filippa Lentzos advocated for a forensic investigation and described what it would entail:
Investigating the range of possible spillover sites—from the wet market, to an accidental lab or fieldwork infection, or an unnoticed lab leak—requires a forensic investigation. Obtaining case histories, epidemiological data, and viral samples from different times and places, including the earliest possible samples from infected individuals and samples from wildlife, is paramount… A forensic investigation would additionally involve auditing and sampling viral collections at relevant labs that had been studying coronaviruses, examining the types of experiments carried out and the viruses used, and reviewing the safety and security practices in place. Key data would also come from documents, including standard operating procedures at the labs and during fieldwork, risk assessments of individual experiments, experiment logs and fieldwork notebooks, training records, waste management logs, accident and infection records, facility maintenance and automated systems records, access logs, security camera footage and communications logs. …A COVID-19 origins investigation will need to be negotiated and begun rapidly before relevant data diminishes or disappears entirely as time passes.48
There is no semblance of any of this in the WHO resolution, and one can scarcely imagine that any of it would be permitted by the current administration in China. An investigation held after the pandemic “is under control” cannot possibly be carried out “rapidly,” and is in fact postponed into the indefinite future. Unfortunately, if there were any documentation in either of the two Wuhan virology institutes that recorded the infection of a laboratory researcher or an escape, or that either had a virus sample that was extremely similar to SARS-CoV-2, one has to assume that such information has already been removed or destroyed.
Others have suggested that an international “commission, independent of the WHO, needs to be set up with the broad objective of how to ameliorate the next pandemic. Its mandate should go well beyond that of the WHO and part of its work could be to look at how COVID-19 started.”49 Unfortunately it is equally difficult to envision such a commission coming to pass.
At present, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown. The pros and cons regarding the two alternative possibilities—first, that it arose in the field as a natural evolution, as many virologists maintain, or second, that it may have been the consequence of bat coronavirus research in one of the two virology research institutes located in Wuhan that led to the infection of a laboratory researcher and subsequent escape—are equally based on inference and conjecture. The points gathered in this paper can be no more than suggestive. There is no hard scientific evidence to support either position. Both are inferences from circumstantial evidence. The US administration’s political hectoring only assures that it will be very difficult if not impossible to ever find out which is true.
Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank several colleagues with far-better computer skills than he has for supplying many of the electronic references. I would also like to thank several colleagues for reading and commenting on the paper. This manuscript was submitted for publication on May 27, 2020.
Notes
1 ↑ Shane Harris et al, “Intelligence officials’ early alarms about possible pandemic went unheeded,” Washington Post, March 21, 2020; Eric Lipton et al, “Despite timely alerts, Trump was slow to act,” New York Times, April 12, 2020; Philip Rucker et al, “As deaths mounted, Trump fixated on stalled economy,” Washington Post, May 3, 2020; Edward Luce, “Inside Trump’s Corona Virus Meltdown,” Financial Times Magazine, May 14, 2020; Fintan O’Toole, “Vector in Chief,” New York Review of Books, 67:8, May 14, 2020; and Fintan O’Toole, “Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again,” Irish Times, April 25, 2020.
2 ↑ See www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050754/xi-jinping-calls-overhaul-chinas-health-crisis-response-system; www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-04/xi-warns-virus-may-impact-china-s-stability-at-rare-meeting.
3 ↑ Liu Caiyu and Leng Shumai, “Biosafety guidelines issued to fix chronic management loopholes at virus labs,” Global Times, February 16, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1179747.shtml.
4 ↑ Liu Caiyu and Leng Shumai, “Biosafety guidelines issued to fix chronic management loopholes at virus labs,” Global Times, February 16, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1179747.shtml, and Yuan Zhiming, “Current status and future challenges of high-level biosafety laboratories in China, Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity, Volume 1, Issue 2, September 2019, pp. 123-127. Accessed at: doi.org/10.1016/j.jobb.2019.09.005.
5 ↑ Shing Hei Zhan, Benjamin E. Deverman and Yujia Alina Chan, “SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?” BioRxiv, posted May 2, 2020 on: doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262.
6 ↑ Chaolin Huang Yeming Wang, Xingwang Li, Lili Ren, Jianping Zhao, Yi Hu, Li Zhang et al, “Clinical Features of Patients Infected with 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China,” The Lancet, Vol. 395, no. 10223 (February 15, 2020): 497-506, doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30183-5.
7 ↑ James T. Areddy, “China rules out Animal Market and Lab as Coronavirus origin,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/china-rules-out-animal-market-and-lab-as-coronavirus-origin-11590517508.
8 ↑ “Wuhan’s seafood market a victim of COVID-19: CDC director,” Global Times [China], May 26, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1189506.shtml.
9 ↑ Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, “The possible origins of 2091-nCoV coronavirus,” img-prod.tgcom24.mediaset.it/images/2020/02/16/114720192-5eb8307f-017c-4075-a697-348628da0204.pdf.
10 ↑ Jon Cohen, “Chinese researchers reveal draft genome of virus implicated in Wuhan pneumonia outbreak,” Science, January 11, 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/chinese-researchers-reveal-draft-genome-virus-implicated-wuhan-pneumonia-outbreak.
11 ↑ Christian Shepherd and Don Weinland, “China Rounds up Wuhan’s Citizen Journalists for ‘Provoking Quarrels’,” Financial Times, May 28, 2020, www.ft.com/content/3fd5c031-2152-4cab-8bd7-f7871f6ecf64; Aylin Woodward, “At least 5 people in China have disappeared, gotten arrested, or been silenced after speaking out about the coronavirus — here’s what we know about them,” Business Insider, February 20, 2020, businessinsider.com/china-coronavirus-whistleblowers-speak-out-vanish-2020-2; “Coronavirus: Wuhan doctor speaks out against authorities,” The Guardian, March 11, 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/coronavirus-wuhan-doctor-ai-fen-speaks-out-against-authorities; Scott Neuman, Emily Feng and Huojingnan, “China To Investigate After Whistleblower Doctor Dies From Coronavirus,” February 7, 2020, www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/07/803680463/china-to-investigate-after-whistleblower-doctor-dies-from-coronavirus; Verna Yu, “’Hero who told the truth’: Chinese rage over coronavirus death of whistleblower doctor,” The Guardian, February 7, 2020, wwwthe.guardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-chinese-rage-death-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang.
12 ↑ “A 4th Chinese citizen journalist was reportedly detained after livestreaming what life was like in Wuhan at the height of its coronavirus outbreak,” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/zhang-zhan-fourth-chinese-journalist-arrested-for-livestreaming-in-wuhan-2020-5. This paper does not attempt to resolve allegations that have been published claiming that a former graduate student at the WIV, Huang Yan Ling, was the index case and subsequently died or disappeared. The allegations have been denied by the Chinese government as well as by members of the WIV staff. Jun Mai, “Chinese research lab denies rumours of links to first coronavirus patient,” South China Morning Post, February 16, 2020, www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050872/chinese-research-lab-denies-rumours-links-first-coronavirus.
13 ↑ Keoni Everington, “Chinese Media Estimates 500,000 Coronavirus Cases in Wuhan, Quickly deletes News,” Taiwan News, May 19, 2020, www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3936718.
14 ↑ Elise Thomas, “Chinese diplomats and Western fringe media outlets push the same coronavirus conspiracies,” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, March 24, 2020, www.aspistrategist.org.au/chinese-diplomats-and-western-fringe-media-outlets-push-the-same-coronavirus-conspiracies/. The “Western fringe media” were reposting earlier Russian disinformation posts.
15 ↑ Matt Schrader, “Analyzing China’s Coronavirus Propaganda Messaging in Europe,” securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/analyzing-chinas-coronavirus-propaganda-messaging-in-europe/.
16 ↑ CGTN, “US operates over 200 military biological laboratories worldwide,” 21 May 2020, news.cgtn.com/news/2020-05-21/U-S-deployed-over-200-military-biological-laboratories-worldwide-QFtLkqhuVy/index.html.
17 ↑ Milton Leitenberg, “ Russian Disinformation Campaigns re Biological Weapons in the Putin Era,” cissm.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2020-05/Russian%20Disinformation%20on%20Biological%20Weapons%20in%20the%20Putin%20PPT
%2011%20Dec%202019_Rev%208%20May%202020.pdf.
18 ↑ Lynn Klotz, “Human error in high-biocontainment labs: a likely pandemic threat,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 25, 2019.
19 ↑ Lynn Klotz, “The risk of lab-created potential pandemic influenza,” March 2020, armscontrolcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Quantifying-the-risk-9-17-Supplementary-material-at-end.pdf.
20 ↑ Martin Furmanski, “Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes: Self-fulfilling prophecies,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 31, 2014 and Martin Furmanski, personal communication, May 29, 2020.
21 ↑ Robert Walgate, “SARS escaped Beijing lab twice: Laboratory safety at the Chinese Institute of Virology under close scrutiny,” The Scientist, April 24, 2004, www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-beijing-lab-twice-50137.
22 ↑ Rosie McCall, “Almost 100 Lab Workers in China Infected With Potentially Deadly Pathogen,” Newsweek, December 17, 2019, www.newsweek.com/almost-100-lab-workers-china-infected-potentially-deadly-pathogen-1477652.
23 ↑ Lei-Ping Zeng et al, “Bat SARS-like coronavirus WIV1 encodes an extra accessory protein ORFX involved in modulation of host immune response,” Journal of Virology 2016 May 11:JVI-03079, jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/early/2016/05/05/JVI.03079-15.full.pdf.
24 ↑ Laboratory biorisk management for laboratories handling human specimens suspected or confirmed to contain novel coronavirus: Interim recommendations, www.who.int/csr/disease/coronavirus_infections/Biosafety_InterimRecommendations_
NovelCoronavirus_19Feb13.pdf; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Appendix F5— Laboratory Biosafety Guidelines for Handling and Processing Specimens Associated with SARS-CoV. Supplement F: Laboratory Guidance. Public Health Guidance for Community-Level Preparedness and Response to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Version 2/3,” www.cdc.gov/sars/guidance/f-lab/app5.html.
25 ↑ John Xie, “Chinese Lab with Checkered Safety Record Draws Scrutiny over Covid-19,” VOA News, April 21, 2020, www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/chinese-lab-checkered-safety-record-draws-scrutiny-over-covid-19.
26 ↑ Josh Rogin, “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses,” Washington Post, April 14, 2020.
27 ↑ Josh Rogin, “State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses.” A press item reported that an alleged 15-page “Five Eyes” intelligence report shared among the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand validated many of the charges against the WIV. Dave Makichuk, “Dossier an indictment of China’s virus response,” The Saturday Telegraph [UK], May 3, 2020. However, the Australian government announced that the “report” had been prepared from open source materials by the US alone, was not an agreed intelligence report, and was leaked by the US embassy to a Rupert Murdoch publication. Anthony Galloway and Eryk Bagshaw, “Australian intelligence knocks back US government’s Wuhan lab virus claim,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 4, 2020, www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-intelligence-knocks-back-us-government-s-wuhan-lab-virus-claim-20200504-p54pk3.html; Anthony Galloway and Eryk Bagshaw, “Australian concern over US spreading unfounded claims about Wuhan lab,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 7, 2020, www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-concern-over-us-spreading-unfounded-claims-about-wuhan-lab-20200506-p54qhp.html.
28 ↑ See projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=9819304&icde=49645421&ddparam=&ddvalue=&ddsub=&cr=1&csb=default&cs=ASC&pball=
29 ↑ Fred Guteri et al, “The Controversial Experiments and Wuhan Lab suspected of Starting Pandemic,” Newsweek, April 30, 2020.
30 ↑ Vineet D. Menachery et al, “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence,” Nat Med. 2015 Dec; 21(12):1508-13. doi: 10.1038/nm.3985. Epub 2015 Nov 9, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/.
31 ↑ LP Zeng et al, “Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Like Coronavirus WIV1 Encodes an Extra Accessory Protein, ORFX, Involved in Modulation of the Host Immune Response,” J Virol. 2016 Jun 24;90(14):6573-6582. doi: 10.1128/JVI.03079-15. Print 2016 Jul 15, (methods for construction of chimeric coronaviruses, pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27170748.
32 ↑ B. Hu et al, “Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus,” PLoS Pathog. 2017 Nov 30;13(11):e1006698. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698. eCollection 2017 Nov, (construction of chimeric coronaviruses encoding different S proteins), pmlegacy.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29190287.
33 ↑ Yuri Deigin, “Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research, April 22, 2020, medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 and Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson, “The Case is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin,” Independent Science News, June 2, 2020, www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/.
34 ↑ Wuhan Institute of Virology, CAS, “Take a look at the largest virus bank in Asia,” 2018, english.whiov.cas.cn/ne/201806/t20180604_193863.html.
35 ↑ Jane Qiu, “How China’s ‘Bat Woman’ Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus,” Scientific American, June 2020, www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
36 ↑ Jon Cohen and Kai Kupferschmidt, “NIH-halted study unveils ist massive analysis of bat coronaviruses,” Science, June 2, 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nih-halted-study-unveils-its-massive-analysis-bat-coronaviruses.
37 ↑ Agence France Presse, “Wuhan lab had three live bat coronaviruses: Chinese state media,” May 24, 2020, au.news.yahoo.com/wuhan-lab-had-three-live-bat-coronaviruses-chinese-033127925–spt.html.
38 ↑ Personal communication, May 24, 2020.
39 ↑ Jonathan Latham and Allison Wilson, “The Case is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin,” Independent Science News, June 2, 2020, www.independentsciencenews.org/health/the-case-is-building-that-covid-19-had-a-lab-origin/.
40 ↑ Press Release, Flinders University, “Origins of COVID-19 still a mystery”, May 14, 2020; Sakshi Piplani et al, “In Silico Comparison of Spike Protein-ACE2 Binding Affinities across Species: Significance for the Possible Origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus,” ArXiv:2005.06199 [q-Bio], May 13, 2020, arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199. See also, Jeremy Andre, “Origine du coronavirus: ‘L’Infection d’un employé de laboratoire de Wuhan est plus probable’,” Le Point International, April 18, 2020 and Jef Akst, “Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate,” The Scientist, November 16, 2015 (updated March 11, 2020), www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502.
41 ↑ John Xie, “Chinese Lab with Checkered Safety Record Draws Scrutiny over COVID-19,” VOA News, April 21, 2020, www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/chinese-lab-checkered-safety-record-draws-scrutiny-over-covid-19.
42 ↑ Kenneth Rapoza, “China Lab in Focus of Corona Virus Outbreak,” Forbes, April 14, 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2020/04/14/the-washington-post-goes-rogue-china-lab-in-focus-of-coronavirus-outbreak/.
43 ↑ Patrick Smith, “WHO official says agency not invited to take part in China’s coronavirus investigation,” NBC News, May 1, 2020, nbcnews.com/news/world/who-official-says-agency-not-invited-take-part-china-s-n1197516.
44 ↑ Gerry Shih, “China’s Xi backs WHO-led review of covid-19 outbreak, proposes aid for developing world,” Washington Post, May 18, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-xi-backs-who-led-review-of-covid-19-outbreak-proposes-aid-for-developing-world/2020/05/18/911a1544-98df-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html.
45 ↑ Gerry Shih, “China’s Xi backs WHO-led review of covid-19 outbreak, proposes aid for developing world,” Washington Post, May 18, 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-xi-backs-who-led-review-of-covid-19-outbreak-proposes-aid-for-developing-world/2020/05/18/911a1544-98df-11ea-ad79-eef7cd734641_story.html.
46 ↑ WHO, Draft Resolution: COVID-19 response, A73/CONF./1 Rev.1, May 18, 2020, apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/WHA73/A73_CONF1Rev1-en.pdf.
47 ↑ “Editorial: Virus investigation must be fair, scientific,” Global Times, May 17, 2020, www.globaltimes.cn/content/1188620.shtml. On May 4, 2020, a Chinese Hsinhua publication asked the question “Where did the virus in the U.S. originate?”: “On March 11, CDC Director Robert Redford told a hearing on Capitol Hill that some COVID-19 deaths have been diagnosed as flu-related in the United States. Washington needs to clarify the number of COVID-19 cases previously diagnosed as flu, and make public the samples and genetic sequence of the influenza virus in the country.” “Spotlight: Five Questions Washington needs to answer on coronavirus pandemic,” XINHUANET, May 4, 2020.
48 ↑ Filippa Lentzos, “Will the WHO call for an international investigation into the coronavirus’s origins?”, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 18, 2020.
49 ↑ Personal communication, Rod Barton, May 25, 2020.