I don’t know if COVID-19 leaked out of a scientific research lab in Wuhan, China or not. Even if it did, I don’t know that it was purposeful or that the virus originated there. What I do know is that a lot of people seem to be very invested in this idea, and it’s very important to them that it turns out to be correct and that they get an opportunity to bash anyone who doubted them.
Apparently, there’s an abandoned mine in China–nowhere near Wuhan, by the way–where a population of bats has taken up residence. And some workers were sent in there and got sick or died from a pneumonia that resembles what we see in COVID-19 patients. This led the Wuhan lab to do some research, and the bats turned out to carry some coronaviruses, one of which is a fairly close cousin to the one that has caused a global pandemic. We still don’t know for certain that one of these coronaviruses caused the workers’ pneumonia, but there is some evidence to support that hypothesis.
From what I’ve read from virologists, I gather that the COVID-19 virus doesn’t contain any hallmarks of genetic engineering, so there’s still a lot of skepticism that the virus jumped to humans through some kind of plan to weaponize it. I’ve also read that a very clever and evil team of scientists might be able to pull off a stunt like that while hiding any traces of human manipulation.
It’s definitely possible that the Wuhan lab was studying a coronavirus that had already jumped from bats to humans and they didn’t take the proper precautions. It’s been reported through a third-country intelligence that some Wuhan lamb researchers were hospitalized just prior to the major outbreak in the city. If so, it would be a tragic mistake, but other than some rather massive liability issues, the only repercussion of that would be much stricter guidelines for who and how viruses can be researched.
It’s also possible that the lab took a coronavirus, perhaps one from the abandoned mine, and manipulated it to see if they could make it (more) transmissible to humans. This would still most likely fall into the first category, just with more liability and greater proscriptions about acceptable research. In other words, this kind of research is typically done as a precaution, to help understand how to stop a naturally occurring viral outbreak. The last thing they’d want to do is cause an outbreak through their own actions.
It’s only in the last case where things would be substantially different. If scientists at the Wuhan Lab deliberately created COVID-19, not to learn how to treat a SARS-like outbreak, but to use it as a weapon, then the world would have a very real and serious beef with China. It’s hard to imagine that they’d create such a weapon and then deliberately detonate in their own city, but I guess even that is within the realm of possibility.
I guess what I’m saying is that I am as curious as anyone about how this pandemic began, above all because I never want to try to survive another one or witness again the unnecessary deaths of more than a million people. But I’m not sure that the truth, if ever discovered, is going to be that meaningful in terms of how we think about China.
It’s still most likely that the virus emerged naturally, but if the Wuhan Lab is responsible for the spread of the virus, that’s almost certainly a mistake rather than something that should be treated as an act of war. As far as I’m concerned, exotic meat markets are as likely to cause a viral pandemic as research labs, and the solution is close to the same for both. We need governments to do a better job of protecting us, and that means sometimes there has to be very rigorous regulation.
And I think that the fact we’re even talking about COVID-19 possibly escaping from a research lab means that this kind of research is not regulated enough–in China or anywhere else.
I agree with you, I don’t think it means anything if the virus escaped from the lab or came from the animal market. Given that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence against it being an actual bioweapon, yeah, this doesn’t really mean much. I’m not terribly interested in it. One day there will be a bioweapon, and it will have a much higher lethality than COVID-19. But this virus is not it.
But it does speak to the relative lack of safety precautions at either of the labs or the animal markets. Our factory farms in this country are also equally capable of breeding the next pandemic-causing virus. The less animals we farm in this manner, the better.
“It’s been reported through a third-country intelligence that some Wuhan lamb researchers were hospitalized just prior to the major outbreak in the city.”
The WHO has had this information for a few months. On March 11, NBC News reported:
The WSJ gussied up their story by attributing this information to super-double top secret information, divulged by an anonymous source (of course).
The WSJ described the intelligence as “of exquisite quality.” Back in 2002, I recall intelligence “of exquisite quality” about aluminum tubes, mobile bio-weapons labs and Saddam’s fleet of killer drones.
The media is getting played, yet again.
I care. While highly skeptical of any deliberate release, I have been open the possibility of an accidental release of the virus from the git-go. It matters in the same way we investigate airplane crashes or infrastructure failures–so we can avoid such disasters going forward.
That describes how I feel about it.
I guess its not outside the realm of possibility that Wuhan research labs played some role with COVID — after all, if a new virus first started infecting people in Atlanta, the world would be more than a little suspicious about the CDC.
But on a side note – I know its petty, but I really do hate the idea that Trump (which his “China virus” talk) and the conspiracy nuts could have been right, even a little bit.
Before the current brouhaha, sparked by a story in the WSJ, David Frum wrote a pretty good article about the politics of the lab-leak hypothesis:
To reiterate what I wrote in my previous post: the report of three workers coming down with a respiratory illness a few weeks before Covid was identified is not new and the WHO publicly reported it back in March. Perhaps it’s relevant and perhaps it isn’t, but why has it suddenly attracted attention now? It burst into the news because the WSJ spiced up the story by claiming their report is based on intelligence of “exquisite quality” but it adds nothing to what we already knew.
Beware of reporters bearing intelligence of “exquisite quality.”
Wired has a good article on this….”The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty”
https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-lab-leak-theory-weaponized-uncertainty/
Yes, there are unknowns. Yes the origins need to be investigated. But the calls to prove a negative–that’s just nonsense, which makes it harder for the work to get done. The people in the area where the bats live have antibodies to corona viruses. The precursor could have come from that local population, and it found a vulnerable population in Wuhan. Towns people visiting or researchers going back and forth…