Covid virus lab leak is looking less like a conspiracy theory

Noah was a conspiracy theorist until it started to rain. . . Facetablet post from Noah: Quick, get on the ark! Facetablet advisory: Visit the Land of Nod Flood Information Center for weather updates.

Yes, Noah would have been at home during these Covid times with everyone laughing at his crazy idea. But, of course, he was right. And some of the conspiracy theories that have swirled around the Covid pandemic may also contain more than a bushel of truth. 

The most egregious is the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. This rumor was quickly squashed, and instead a petrified public was told the fable that the epidemic started in a wet market in Wuhan, just down the road from the lab, in fact.

The usual suspect was the poor, misbegotten pangolin, a lovable mammal that eats ants. In fact, it’s known as the scaly anteater and has a long snout to help scoot them up.

According to the fable, a pangolin became infected with a bat virus after it carelessly ate a bat. (Bats? Ants? All the same to me, pal.) Then the virus did its zoonotic flip into humans when someone fancied a pangolin burger while browsing the Wuhan market stalls.

Compared to that convoluted tale, the possibility the virus escaped from a lab seems less fanciful, but it had been dismissed as a conspiracy theory by February last year, and people in polite society never spoke of it again.

Leading the agenda was Professor Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that explores the threat of animal viruses for mankind. He denounced any ideas of a Wuhan lab escape as a conspiracy theory in a letter he drafted and got some of his scientist friends to co-sign, which The Lancet medical journal happily published.1

“We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health,” it thundered. Several signees later walked away from it, but the die had been cast.

Other scientists who were more convinced the virus had escaped from the Wuhan lab were getting short shrift in the scientific community, and they couldn’t get their papers published.

Late last year, Professor Daszak was chosen to head up the WHO investigation team that visited Wuhan. It was an exercise in frustration and obfuscation by the Chinese authorities, but Daszak still returned with a ‘nothing to see here’ report that seemed to convince pretty much nobody.

Then it all started to unravel. US President Joe Biden ordered the US intelligence community to investigate the source of the pandemic after it had been revealed that three scientists from the Wuhan lab had needed hospital treatment for “Covid-like symptoms” in November 2019, one month earlier than the official version placed the virus outbreak.

Then it came out that EcoHealth was being used as a channel for research funds that were making their way to Wuhan from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the division of the National Institutes of Health headed by Dr Anthony Fauci, chief health adviser to the President.

This circuitous route was set up in 2014 after President Obama put a stop to US funding for research into ‘gain-of-function,’ the engineering of viruses to make them more virulent and transmissible. The US had poured around $42 million into the research, which was being concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a facility at the University of North Carolina was closed due to the potential threat to human health.

Why do such hazardous research? The idea is that animal viruses could leap across to humans at any time, and it’s better if it happens in a controlled environment such as a lab where it can be carefully studied—and where an antidote (vaccine, anyone?) can be developed.

That’s perilous enough, but if the virus walks out of the lab (something that has happened at least six times in the last 50 years, and they’re the incidents we know about), then we have a problem, Wuhan.

While everyone has been celebrating the drug companies and their rapid response to the epidemic, Covid-19 is a disaster for science. Not only was the virus manufactured by scientists, but the scientific community also then closed down any sensible debate. 

That Ark sure looks welcoming now. . .

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