Sunday 22 August 2021

SARS-CoV-2: evidence veers to lab source

In April, May and June of last year, I posted references to news items and Web articles that pointed to a source other than the Huanan fish market for the leap from wild animal to human of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The leap must also have occurred before the first cases confirmed by the Chinese authorities. I also recall that in a September edition of Five Live Science (now no longer available on BBC Sounds, unfortunately) a British gene sequencing expert had worked back to an "A" version of the virus in humans which existed in September 2019. He had it seems established that there were mutations (B and C) circulating in Wuhan in 2019, but only A in Guangdong where there was a significant bat population. He drew the conclusion that the original species leap occurred in Guangdong.

At the time, from my reading of the literature, I discounted the suggestion mostly coming from America that the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After all, had not Dr Shi Zhengli, director of the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, and her co-workers there, been among the first to publish papers, in English, warning that there would be other diseases spreading from bat to man, as SARS1 had already done? It strained credulity that a lab well aware of the dangers would be so sloppy as to allow any of the viruses they were working on to escape. An expert contributor to al-Jazeera's Inside Story who had visited Wuhan attested that the safeguards there were as good as any other lab he had worked on.

Now comes a Channel 4 documentary, Did Covid Leak from a Lab?, to be shown tonight at 22:15. In a preview in the i newspaper, two pieces of circumstantial evidence leap out. First, in September 2019, the Wuhan Institute's database of samples and sequences, including the world's largest collection of bat coronavirus sequences, was taken offline. That date is significant, suggesting that Dr Shi herself had become aware that the A strain was out there. Secondly, the Institute had been investigating how viruses could mutate to leap from one animal to another. American researchers have pointed to a particular component of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 which they say could only have been engineered artificially. (There is more in the i article.) 

A possibility which is not discussed in the article, but which was raised by the al-Jazeera contributor referred to above, is that the virus was released deliberately. The West does not have a monopoly of disgruntled employees or psychopaths. One recalls the Japanese who terrorised the subway system with Sarin nerve gas in 1995. It is hard to say whether this is more or less worrying than the leak hypothesis.

None of the above excuses the criminal negligence of the UK government. Chinese lab workers did not infect citizens throughout Britain in January and February of 2020; returners from known virus hot-spots did. In the spring of 2020, Dr Shi did not tell the NHS in England and Wales to send recovering patients who had acquired the coronavirus in hospital back to institutions caring for vulnerable elderly people; that was down to local managers, not directed differently. 

Stories can be told of most major governments failing to have a plan ready to tackle a pandemic. Indeed, in the USA not only President Obama in 2014 but also GW Bush in 2005 moved for such action, only to be thwarted by Trump and Congress respectively. As a reminder, here is a timeline issued by the national broadcaster of a country which did act promptly: New Zealand.


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