What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically”, from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.
There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap — no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.
Nicholson Baker
The author of this article goes out of his way to remind us at each step that he is not promoting a conspiracy theory about the virus’ origin, but merely discussing a plausible theory. Nevertheless, his arguments and assertions do resemble the methods employed by conspiracy theorists a lot, connecting convenient bits of facts and presenting them as established truth, while ignoring other, more likely explanations.
This whole edifice ultimately relies on the author’s initial impression of the virus as ‘something oddly artificial’. He made up his mind last year on March 13th and went on to gather every piece of evidence supporting this hunch, no matter how tenuous or unlikely – as any respecting conspiracy theorist would.
the timeframe for working out the exact path of SARS in 2003 from horseshoe bats to Asian palm civets to humans was *fourteen years*.
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) May 27, 2021
we might work out the course of this one quicker, but there's no guarantees.
One of his supposed arguments for an artificial origin is that horseshoe bats are not native to Wuhan, living hundreds of kilometers to the south – therefore the disease must have been introduced in Wuhan by humans, either accidentally or on purpose. At no point does he consider the – obvious – alternative that the initial carrier could have been infected elsewhere and Wuhan was simply the first super-spreader event of the coronavirus. Bats may not venture out of their caves to travel for hundreds of kilometers, but people certainly do. Considering how the disease can remain asymptomatic in up to a third of infected individuals, and its long incubation period, it is entirely likely that patient zero came from outside Wuhan.
- The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
- The Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which first reported signs of the novel coronavirus in hospital patients;
- The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an early suspected origin of the pandemic, where the first major outbreak occurred.
SARS-2 seems almost perfectly calibrated to grab and ransack our breathing cells and choke the life out of them.
By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission, Alina Chan and her co-authors have written, whereas SARS, when it first appeared in 2003, underwent “numerous adaptive mutations” before settling down. Perhaps viral nature hit a bull’s-eye of airborne infectivity, with almost no mutational drift, no period of accommodation and adjustment, or perhaps some lab worker somewhere, inspired by Baric’s work with human airway tissue, took a spike protein that was specially groomed to colonize and thrive deep in the ciliated, mucosal tunnels of our inner core and cloned it onto some existing viral bat backbone. It could have happened in Wuhan, but — because anyone can now “print out” a fully infectious clone of any sequenced disease — it could also have happened at Fort Detrick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rotterdam, or in Wisconsin, or in some other citadel of coronaviral inquiry. No conspiracy — just scientific ambition, and the urge to take exciting risks and make new things, and the fear of terrorism, and the fear of getting sick. Plus a whole lot of government money.
Another completely bogus argument is this notion that the virus emerged ‘almost perfectly calibrated’ to human cells. It is a recent cultural fallacy to assume nature could not be this vicious, that any disruption must be human-made. The simple fact that the virus mutated several times in past months to become more transmissible should be enough to dismiss this idea completely (the UK and one of the Indian strains both appear significantly more contagious than the wild virus). Some genetic studies indicate that the virus has been spreading in humans before the first reported cases, picking up mutations and naturally adapting to a new host.
Another aspect conveniently overlooked is that humans had no natural immunity to this particular coronavirus, since this was the first time we came into contact with it. This could partially explain how easy it spread, as our bodies had no prior defenses against this pathogen. In fact, the same thing happens when new influenza strains (coming from animals I might add) infect people for the first time. The same thing happened when Spanish conquistadors introduced European diseases to new populations in the Americas who lacked prior immunity against them. Pathogens jumping between species is a quite common occurence; here is a recent example of a canine coronavirus infecting humans in Malaysia, but with no signs of human to human transmission for now. No need to invent complicated theories for the origin of this virus when old explanations work so well.
The uncomfortable truth is that we may never discover the precise origin of the virus. If it did in fact originate in a lab leak, however unlikely, Chinese authorities have most certainly covered any tracks of the unfortunate accident by now. Baring a complete change of leadership in the country, or a whistleblower coming out with concrete evidence, this will remain a mystery for the near future. And, as much as an investigation is important, the outcome has little bearing on the concrete measures needed to contain the current and future pandemics.
Personally, I lean towards the ‘circulation model’ outlined below: a virus variant quietly circulating in a couple of people, causing light symptoms, easily mistaken for seasonal flu – until it chanced upon the right mutation and many susceptible hosts. Coincidently, a large outbreak of influenza happened in early December 2019 in Hubei province – without genetic testing it is possible that some of those cases may have been early coronavirus patients.
This thinking led to the development of the “circulation model”, an alternative theory to spillover. It hypothesizes that a progenitor to SARS-CoV-2 was likely circulating through a handful of different animals, including humans, before the first cases appeared in Wuhan. Perhaps thousands of zombies had been born in the respiratory tract of a person, before chance and circumstance allowed SARS-CoV-2 to emerge, now-adapted to spread.
It was an “accident”, Frutos says.
Sometime in 2019, the accident enabled SARS-CoV-2 to spread through the human population. This probably occurred inside someone who found themselves in Wuhan during the leadup to Lunar New Year. The virus, suddenly adept at infecting humans, now found itself in the middle of one of the planet’s biggest annual human migrations. The perfect opportunity to start a global pandemic.
Jackson Ryan
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