It has been expected that COVID-19 lies will recycle (6/3/2020 blog). The latest fad is the lab leak theory, a more deceptive form of the lab made theory, though adherents of the latter usually first masquerade as of the former. This is set against the backdrop of the political environment that while Trump is gone, the moral combat, disinformation war against China, and Sinophobia continue. Many “reasonable” people are suddenly “curious” about the leak theory. Fauci swung back and forth according to the media, although he denies his position changes. Ralph Baric of UNC signed the letter in Science (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1), but he said he just wanted to know (https://khn.org/news/article/wuhan-lab-leak-coronavirus-virologists-seek-inquiry-covid-origins-bat-research/). It is probable that much is mere scientist talk, distorted by the media and misunderstood by the laypeople without knowing the devil in the detail. Nathan J. Robinson tried hard to make sense of everything (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/the-stakes-of-finding-covid-19s-origins), while Glenn Greenwald just hates the liberal media too much, forgetting that while the liberal media may hate Trump, all hate China.
To top it all, for any scientist, of course all theories can be investigated. That means anybody who’d like to disprove, say, Darwin or Watson/Crick, can do the research. Heck, we already know DNA does form structures different from the one proposed by Watson/Crick in 1953, only nobody has claimed Watson/Crick are wrong, yet! If anyone can say or do whatever, it loses all the luster; you can investigate all you want, but the real question is: what is the possibility of you success, and what do you want others to do? If other people don’t think you are right or going to succeed, should they be forced to help you out, no matter what and how? Or, do I have to prove my innocence when you have nothing? Can I plead the fifth?
1. Why now?
Is there any new evidence prompting the new call of lab leak? In reality, none, unless you count the absence of evidence as evidence of absence, albeit only selectively. All the recent “scientific” focus has been the WHO report at the end of March that concludes that a lab leak is highly unlikely. Yet according to the lab leak people, since China tested 80K animal samples and found nothing, there must/should/might be a lab leak. But China also said the Wuhan lab in question didn’t have the virus before Dec 2019, nobody at the institute (WIV) was infected or tested Ab-positive, early on in 2020. So that was a negative result, too. How can any person take one as an absolute negative, but not the another one? If you don’t believe the Chinese for the second part, why do you believe the first part?
The same people cry that the lab leak theory wasn’t given enough consideration, as only 4 pages were devoted to it in the WHO 300+ pages report. Well, guess what, the theory that 5G causes COVID-19 has 0 (?) page in the report! Pretty sure some “scientists” believe in that too. Why don’t we all call for THAT investigation as well? The only “evidence” for lab leak is there is a lab in Wuhan. Everything else doesn’t pass the muster.
A few media reports quoted “experts” claiming that we knew the origins of SARS and MERS very quickly, perhaps even within months of the outbreaks, so COVID-19 is unusual or takes too long, the implication being Chinese are hiding sth. It all depends on what “knowing the origin” means. If it means that we identified similar viruses in civets, bats, camels, then for COVID-19 there are already quite a few similar viruses known in bats, pangolins, and other animals. But how much “similar” suffice? We still haven’t found 100% or 99% in civets (the SARS example), right? Even if we do find 100% in civets, how do we know for certain it was civets, not another species, since you can never look at all the animals, and further, how do we know for certain the time and place it all started? In other words, having a good theory about origins is not the same as knowing the origins. For most people, knowing an origin means, simplistically, finding patient 0, bat 0, civet 0, etc. But once there is a patient 0, any scientist will ask: is he really patient 0? Is there a patient -1? This work can take forever. Do we know for sure how and where AIDS started, as over the years, the timing keeps being pushed back and back? As if we need more confirmation, here is on the May 26 Senate hearing Fauci saying, that as an example of how long it takes to study disease origin, Ebola was first reported in 1976, and we still don’t know how it went from bats to humans. He also said that no diseases are known to have started from a lab. These are plain, verifiable facts. Not knowing the origin of COVID-19 at this point is to be completely expected, but there are already good theories based on past experiences with other diseases.
2. Without the science and any new data, what is left?
The same old US “intelligences”. Funny Greenwald always rails against media publishing CIA talking points, but not against those he likes (in Greenwald’s defense, he hardly recites those “intelligences”, and he is just “curious”, even though his inclination is crystal clear). Anyhow, the question must be: are the “intelligences” supported by evidence, and what does it mean? It actually doesn’t take much to trash them, armed with some scientific background and public knowledge. Thus, don’t just be curious, be smart.
Take the two most “damning” pieces in the eyes of the leak supporters: 1. WIV did gain-of-function experiments on viruses, meaning that WIV made the COVID-19 virus from another virus. 2. Three WIV researchers went to the hospital in Nov 2019, meaning COVID-19 infection due to lab work.
It must be first stressed that these allegations are not new: they and their cousins have popped up periodically since 2020 and have been smashed down many times over. The WIV director, deputy director, Dr Shi Zhengli, the bat CoV researcher in everybody’s crossfire, and others, have talked to the media, traditional and social, given interviews, domestic and international, allowed visits (e.g., NBC, WHO), and answered all kinds of questions (e.g., scim.ag/ShiZhengli, and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6503/487), since Jan 2020. They have said consistently, and in no uncertain terms, that WIV didn’t know of or have the virus until the end of Dec 2019. They have dismissed all “intelligences” imaginable. And so far exactly zero has contradicted their words. While their opposites are now undergoing their 20th round of twisting and morphogenesis.
2.1. What gain-of-function?
There is absolutely no evidence WIV or Shi Zhengli has done any gain-of-function experiments on CoV. Dr Shi relied “No” to whether she did such experiments in scim.ag/ShiZhengli. And there are tons of things wrong about this “gain-of-function” allegation, some requiring more biological knowledge than most people have.
That piece of “intelligence” is vague, like others, perhaps in order to mislead people, giving no specific examples of gain-of-function experiments by WIV. What is gain-of-function? It is an idea/technique that most biochemists, geneticists, molecular biologists, etc, use, hence nothing special. For example, to study how a virus enters a cell, we need to know how a viral protein, e.g., the S protein, binds to its cellular receptor, e.g., ACE2, and which amino acid residues in S and ACE2 contribute to the binding. So we make mutations in S and ACE2, and some mutations will reduce (loss-of-function), some enhance (gain-of-function) the binding. A goal is to help identify potential drug targets, i.e., S and ACE2, and screen drugs that block the S and ACE2 interactions. But this is not sexy or what the lab leak/made theorists want.
For them, it means that WIV made COVID-19 out of, say the RaTG13 virus, the closest virus to the COVID-19 virus, 96.2% identical. But has anybody done a similar thing? No. The best example they can cite is that Shi and Ralph Baric co-authored a paper making a new CoV, but they would not tell you that Shi simply gave Baric a starting material, and all the gain-of-function work was done in Baric’s lab at UNC! The aim of that study was to show the infectious potential of a CoV, and the experiment involved swapping known CoV sequences. Consequently, the engineered CoV can be unmistakably traced back to the original viruses. If anybody had done this to create COVID-19, it would have been easily identifiable as “unnatural”. Sequence analyses, however, have conclusively demonstrated that COVID-19 is natural.
The only, theoretically possible way to elude sequence detectives is to make COVID-19 out of a known CoV via random mutations and long-term passage and selection. Possible only in theory, but impossible in real life. For one, the literature has reported nothing remotely similar: maybe in other viruses, but never in CoV, a large RNA virus. Second, not many CoVs were studied prior to 2019, so what was the source? Even RaTG13 has 1200 nt differences across the whole genome. In nature it means decades of evolution. In a lab, even if one does it, what does he want to achieve, how to select for a winning CoV, and how much time and effort will he commit, considering that there is no precedent of success? Since this would have been a large effort involving a lot of money, time, materials, and efforts, there would be simply no hiding it. It would have been the elephant in the room, draining all the resources, 10 times harder than the most difficult work Shi have ever published. And all Shi’s coworkers and collaborators would have known. Yet, none of her collaborators, many from outside China, has seen or heard of such a thing. Lastly, if the COVID-19 virus comes out of the screen, you can bet your own house that a bunch of variants also come out of it, over time, not unlike the UK, South African, Brazil, Indian variants now. Then why didn’t we see any in 2019 or earlier? In sum, this “gain-of-function” lab origin of COVID-19 is never science, it is science fiction or fantasy. Even if someone is crazy enough to attempt it, its success or coverup is beyond human ability.
And there is even more. The above assumes WIV or Dr Shi had the RaTG13 virus. But she has maintained she never had the live virus, and her publication record is consistent with it. She had reported only a partial sequence of RaTG13 prior to 2019. Nothing else about RaTG13 at all until COVID-19. This makes perfect sense since her interests were to survey natural CoVs with the focus on the origin of SARS (obviously she doesn’t think SARS origin was solved within months after SARS outbreak in 2002/2003 either). See scim.ag/ShiZhengli, and https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6503/487. She indicated that prior to 2019 she had 3 parental live CoVs, related to the SARS CoV, which is 80% identical to the COVID-19 virus. All the other CoV samples were simply “dead” viruses with RNA. In other words, even though her lab collected samples widely, they did so in a manner that killed the viruses while keeping the genetic materials, which simplified the processing and transportation and reduced the risks of infection. Just like having the DNA of dead people, even fossils: you don't expect the dead people to hit you, right? Then, if no RaTG13, making COVID-19 out of SARS (80% identity) would have been even harder, akin to mutating a fruitfly to make a firefly.
So this gain-of-function baloney is the lab made conspiracy theory, nevertheless embraced by the lab leak supporters, because, you know, they just want to know. But being curious is no excuse for being ignorant, or worse.
2.2. The supposedly 3 WIV researchers being sick in Nov 2019?
Again, many things wrong or missing here. Firstly, we don’t know if the “intelligence” is even true. What was the source? Are there names? WIV has categorically denied it or its variations in 2020, in March 2021, and in May 2021. Secondly, even if 3 people went to a hospital, how do we know for what? Maybe they shared a bad meal? Maybe they got the flu or cold? Remember, COVID-19 is not the only thing infectious. All assuming that 3 went to the hospital, which is far from certain. Thirdly, Chinese go to a hospital often for a minor discomfort, nothing alarming about it. In China, no appointments are required, so one can go any time, and only pays like $2 to see a doctor, then maybe a few more to have a test and some medicine. Unlike in the US. The bottomline is, this “intelligence” is a red herring, meaningless, and likely crap anyway.
Besides, for lab leak to stand, Shi, her lab, and WIV must have the virus to begin with, otherwise, you can have 30 going to the hospital, and that still doesn’t mean squat. Yet as mentioned above, they have always denied that, which has held up under the most intense scrutiny perhaps in the history of science. Clearly they couldn’t have made COVID-19 out of RaTG13 or anything else. So a remote possibility, for pure scientist talk, is that when they collected bat samples in the field, someone was infected with COVID-19, and carried it back to the lab or Wuhan. Fauci was asked about this scenario in 2020, and he replied: then COVID-19 is still natural, and I don’t see what the fuss it is about. Fauci couldn’t be more right. But consider this: WIV has consistently stated that nobody was infected, and nobody was Ab-positive, in early 2020, meaning that nobody at WIV had COVID-19 or had had the virus. In fact, even if one at WIV was sick, how do you know if he was not infected outside of WIV? It is still formally possible that someone was infected but had left WIV before 2020, but this becomes a pure conjecture, an argument for arguments’ sake. According to Peter Daszak, of the EcoHealth Alliance, which got a grant from NIH that subcontracted to WIV to survey CoVs, there may be 1-7 million human infection events by bats per year. So millions vs 1, what is special about the granted 1 at WIV? Because COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan? Hasn't the history taught us enough that first reports don't equate first infections? If, as the argument goes, someone got infected and brought it to WIV, what is preventing him or someone else from getting infected and bringing it to another city? Is there a difference between Wuhan and somewhere else? Perhaps what Fauci and others mean by more investigation is for curiosity, like reading and finishing a mystery novel. Perfectly OK then. Yet this is not what the lab made/leak theorists have in mind, which is to use a natural disaster, one of the many in history, to blame China all along.
3. Friendly fire
Since the WHO report discounts the lab leak theory, much fire has been directed at Peter Daszak on the WHO team, for he has worked with Shi for years and defended her throughout 2020 and 2021. But his own qualification is not in doubt, and his past experience with Shi and familiarity with WIV should have been a plus. Besides, he is only one of the dozen or more members of the WHO international team, how could he make up science and data to dissuade all the others? The attacks just show some people will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Sure enough, the gain-of-function charge has also been used against Fauci and Baric. Even Nathan Robinson wondered if his own NIH had supported making COVID-19, since WIV and Shi got an NIH subcontractor grant. But the whole premise is wrong and scientifically impossible from the start, as argued above. I believe Fauci’s denial 100% that the NIH grant didn't support gain-of-function work conjured up by the lab theorists. The grant proposal, at least its abstract, is public online, and with the proposal made public (if it hasn’t been already), people would see there is nothing sinister in it. No serious scientists will believe otherwise.
4. New findings, truly, and productive toward understanding the origin of COVID-19
The WSJ has hyped a 2012 incident at a mine/cave in Yunnan, China, where supposedly 6 miners got sick and 3 died, and the same place where RaTG13 was collected in 2013. WSJ apparently got the information from Chinese news, although there is little now in the Chinese media that elaborate or even confirm the story. Without additional data it is hard to make any references.
WSJ fosters the storyline that COVID-19 or RaTG13 started in the cave, killing a few miners, then WIV went to collect samples, found RaTG13, and carried COVID-19 back to Wuhan in the process, or RaTG13 somehow turns into COVID-19. But for all we know, the miners might or might not get sick, and if they were sick or died, that might or might be due to CoV: they might as well got bitten by bats or something else in the cave, or they might have inhaled toxic fume. Now a latest preprint from Shi’s group tells us more about RaTG13 and other CoVs (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.21.445091v1). They collected more samples from the cave in 2015. For this new report, they sequenced 8 bat samples and found all were the same virus named RaTG15. RaTG15 is related to the COVID-19 virus, although no closer than RaTG13. The most relevant part of their discovery is that the S proteins of RaTG13 and RaTG15 have very weak or no affinity for the human ACE2 receptor, while the pangolin CoV, despite an overall lower genome sequence identity to COVID-19 (low 90s%), has an S protein that binds the human ACE2 much better. What the data strongly suggest is that RaTG13 and 15 can’t infect humans, so the miners in Yunnan, who might or might not have existed, but if they did, were not sick due to RaTG13 or RaTG15. Looking at the bigger picture, the COVID-19 virus clusters with CoVs like RaTG13 and RaTG15, and some CoVs in the cluster don’t infect humans, but if they recombine with other CoVs, then a potentially human infectious CoV might form. Finally, the publication of RaTG15 only now further buttresses Shi’s point that she focused on SARS origin prior to 2020 and switched her attention only after COVID-19.
5. How did COVID-19 start?
The default theory, which is based on history, maths, and virus biology and practically inescapable, goes like this. A virus from the cluster mentioned above, by evolution and/or recombination in bats and/or other animals, developed into the COVID-19 virus or similar. A person made contact with the bat or intermediate animal, anywhere in the world but probably in the countryside, where such interaction routinely takes place, and got infected. If he cleared the virus or died without transmitting it to another person, nothing else happened. But if a transmission link was established and remains unbroken, then the virus lives on, or even mutates further to become more infectious. Initially the infection flew under the radar, for it either caused little trouble, or was like a flu or cold, or affected too few people in too remote areas, with insufficient medical awareness or ability. Then an infected villager passed it to a person who was more mobile, and one by one, COVID-19 entered a big city or cities. These many steps almost certainly happened, although the timing of each step is flexible, taking weeks, months, or years, because COVID-19 could be asymptomatic or mistaken as flu, and it is well established that many infections are dead ends. Don’t believe some sequence analysis that said COVID-19 began in Nov 2019, because it lacked sufficient data and/or applied dubious references. Eventually a superspreading event at the Wuhan Huanan market rang the bell at the end of Dec 2019. Wuhan reported the first cases because 1) a superspreading event happened there and 2) Wuhan had the medical infrastructure to identify it, but Wuhan is not necessarily where COVID-19 all started. It never needs to involve lab-made, because nature has been doing it continuously and efficiently, with many more bats and other animals than humans, and human-animal contact occurs everywhere, wet market or not. The lab leak theory, even if true, only means a researcher was infected in the wild: what is that different from a non-researcher being infected in the wild, which happens millions of times more?
One last thing: COVID-19 origin is an open scientific question that needs more work, everybody can agree on that. But how to do it is differentiating. For all the brouhaha in the West about investigating the origin, even if we eventually do come to know how COIVD-19 started in China, it still doesn’t solve the question of how COVID-19 started. This is a dilemma no scientists can deny but few dare to say on MSM. The March WHO report calls for more studies, looking at more bats and other animals, checking old, saved sera for COVID-19 Ab, etc, in China and around the world, which is the only sensible way. Yet the lab leak supporters make sure that nobody pays any attention to it, since there is no incentive for doing the right thing, but limitless reward pinning it on China.
6. What is all this really about ?
In the end, the lab angle is never about science or curiosity, because if one truly wants to learn, he will be persuaded to jump ship quickly. Instead, it is all about the anti-China hysteria and political correctness in the West. If whatever China says or does is wrong, and the Chinese can’t be trusted, no amount of explanations and data will satisfy. The idea appeared almost as soon as COVID-19 was reported. For 18 months now, it is simply stunning that exactly blank has come up supporting it. Not for a lack of trying and twittering, by governments, media, scientists, and everybody else, while all available evidence discounts it. WIV and Shi have been as consistent and steadfast as possible, while the conspiracy theorists have been vague, evasive, moving the goal post, and recycling baseless claims as news, free speech, or fake curiosity. In essence, they are not interested in the truth, only to keep the lies alive against China, and anything goes. Hope more “openness” from WIV will solve the problem? Think showing a few lab notebooks will make a difference? What is preventing them claiming the notebooks are fake? How about the 2002/2003 Iraq WMD? Like the WMD fiasco, rest assured plenty of CIA scientists and analysts, perhaps even most, don’t believe a word about the lab made/leak theory, but the best they can do is to say it needs more investigation: kicking the can down the road is the safest. Yeah, more investigation will work magically this time, when the previous 18 months either they had just slept over it, or all the investigation had yielded nothing but outright shredding it. Like this article (https://khn.org/news/article/wuhan-lab-leak-coronavirus-virologists-seek-inquiry-covid-origins-bat-research), which gives the most scientifically sound analyses and all but calls BS on the lab angle and the US demands. But you will never see it on NYT or CNN.
So, if you want to investigate lab made/leak, do it yourself, just don’t expect China to help you, for China and WIV has done enough and said enough.
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