Lab-leak theory reminds of Iraq war

The lab theory gathered momentum after American President Joe Biden said he had asked intelligence community to find out the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in 90 days

The debate over whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, got leaked from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology has been revived, with renewed vigour, over the last one month. It is vital for our future to know how the virus originated, yet the rekindling of the debate appears as choreographed as the 2002-03 campaign asserting that Iraq's Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Consider this: In March, a World Health Organisation (WHO) report concluded that the laboratory origin of the virus was "extremely unlikely", and that it was "likely to very likely" to have jumped from wildlife to people, a process known as zoonotic spillover. On May 13, 18 prominent scientists accused the WHO of not giving a "balanced consideration" to the lab-leak and zoonotic spillover theories on the virus's origin. Nothing unusual that, for experts seldom agree on issues bereft of solid evidence, as is true in the case of SARS-CoV-2.

But then the American media cited intelligence sources to say researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen ill and required hospitalisation before the first case of Covid-19 was reported. This suggested the virus had a lab origin, which was also insinuated by Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in sharp contrast to his earlier position.

The lab-leak theory gathered tremendous momentum on May 27, when American President Joe Biden said he had asked the country's intelligence community to report to him in 90 days with a definitive conclusion about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Sure enough, as in the past, British newspapers, taking America's lead, quoted their country's spies to say the leak from the Wuhan lab was "feasible". Since then, there has been an explosion of stories on amateur sleuths who surfed the internet to gather evidence backing the lab-leak theory.

Rewind to February 5, 2003, when then Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that Hussein possessed WMDs. Powell said, "What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." London parroted Washington's line, even though international weapons inspectors had by then failed to unearth WMDs in Iraq. The US invaded, devastated and occupied Iraq but never found WMDs.

This is not to diss the bewilderment of scientists over the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Viruses usually jump from animals to humans through an intermediary host and undergo several changes in their structure before they become lethal. This was how the SARS1 and MERS pandemics were triggered. In a piece in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nicholas Wade pointed out that the SARS1 virus jumped from bats to civets, and underwent six changes before it became a mild pathogen in people. The virus underwent another 18 changes before it infected the world. It took scientists four months to track down the intermediary host species for SARS1 and nine months to do the same for MERS, for which the camel was the bridge to humans.

For a virus whose pre-history is still unclear, SARS-CoV-2 seems to have come ready-made for humans. The link between the animal and the human is missing because, as some scientists suggest, SARs-CoV-2 could have been cooked in a lab - and inadvertently leaked into the world. For decades, virologists worldwide have been manipulating the genes of viruses to increase their infectivity for humans. These experiments, called ‘gain-of-function', are undertaken to predict the possibility of viruses becoming deadly pathogens, and the knowledge gained is used to produce vaccines.

Both American and Chinese scientists have been together in this endeavour. Fauci's NIAID funded the Wuhan Institute's Shi Zhengli for carrying out gain-of-function experiments on bat viruses, precisely of the kind that could have produced SARS-CoV-2. There have also been instances of lab-leaks around the world. It could well have happened in Wuhan in 2019.

There are many scientists who insist the virus could have had only a natural origin. It is important for us to know the origin because, as Kristian G. Andersen wrote in Nature Medicine, "If SARS-CoV-2 pre-adapted in another animal species, then there is the risk of future re-emergence events." What can happen to the world is, in a way, dependent on ruling out the lab-leak theory.

In March, the US alleged China, notorious for its secretive ways, was not sharing data with the WHO's investigators. Among them was Dominic Dwyer, who dwelt upon the RaTG13 virus, which is closest to SARS-CoV-2 and speculated to have been tweaked in Wuhan, in a piece he wrote for The Conversation. "…All the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus [RaTG13]. They hadn't managed to grow it in culture," Dwyer wrote.

Are the Chinese speaking the truth? Well, it is also true that a country cannot prove it does not possess something which it actually does not have. Nobody believed Iraq's disavowal of having WMDs - certainly not journalists, whom spooks had also convinced that Hussein had a double. So, whenever Hussein was sighted, the media would say it could not confirm whether it was the real Hussein or his double. A Hussein double was never found. Therein lies a lesson on what not to do in seeking out the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

The writer is a senior journalist. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.