Dissecting the China 'lab leak' Covid origin theory

Asia Times

01-03-2025

In a January 24 interview with the far-right-wing outlet Breitbart News, newly appointed CIA director John Ratcliffe stated that assessing intelligence on a potential Wuhan lab leak was a top priority.
The following day, The New York Times reported that the agency had shifted from an undecided stance to favoring a possible Chinese lab leak, albeit with a 'low confidence' rating – the lowest on a three-tier scale (low, medium, high).
Within the US intelligence community, the CIA has thus joined the FBI and the Department of Energy (DOE) in supporting the possibility of a laboratory-related incident.
According to a 2023 report, among the US agencies that have investigated the pandemic's origins, one remains undecided, while four others, along with the National Intelligence Council, lean toward a natural origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to The New York Times, the CIA's revised assessment is based not on new evidence, but on a reinterpretation of existing data. However, neither the reasoning behind its reassessment nor the supporting data have been made public – making it impossible to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the agency's conclusions.
Adding to the complexity, 'laboratory origin' is an umbrella term encompassing multiple, sometimes contradictory, scenarios.
Confirming CNN's 2023 report on the Department of Energy's revised stance, The New York Times noted that the DOE identifies the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WCDC) as the outbreak's likely source, while the FBI attributes it to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). At the time of writing, the CIA had not disclosed which scenario it deems most plausible.
Though WCDC is not an actual research laboratory, some of its employees were participating in wildlife sampling programs at the time of the outbreak. In late 2019, WCDC moved to a location close to the Huanan market. A theory implicating the WCDC confirms evidence that the earliest detected cases are epidemiologically and geographically linked to the market, and suggests that the virus emerged naturally.
In contrast, WIV is a research institute operating across two campuses, one situated 12 kilometers from the market as the crow flies and the other, which houses the P4 laboratory, 27 kilometers away.
Scenarios implicating WIV generally posit that 'gain-of-function' coronavirus experiments – intended to enhance a virus's transmissibility or virulence – were conducted under biosecurity conditions deemed to be unsafe, at level 2. The presence in Wuhan of a biosafety level 4 laboratory is therefore irrelevant to this scenario.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, has a single origin. If it did escape from a laboratory, it could not have simultaneously leaked from two separate labs conducting different types of research. Two mutually incompatible hypotheses are not two points in favor of a lab origin – and this is not even considering alternative lab-leak scenarios positing that the virus was engineered in a US lab and then sent to Wuhan.
Beyond determining where the virus originated, the nature of the virus is another source of divergence among lab-accident scenarios. Was it a naturally-occurring virus that accidentally infected a scientist during fieldwork? A virus cultured in a laboratory, passaged on cells or animals? Or even a directly genetically modified virus?
Here again, SARS-CoV-2 cannot be at the same time a natural virus and the result of lab experiments. Accumulating arguments built on conflicting premises does not strengthen the case for a research-related incident.
The lab-origin hypothesis would carry much more weight if definitive proof emerged that, by late December 2019, a Wuhan laboratory possessed a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. Hazard suits hang at the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan. Photo: Wuhan Institute of Virology
In the case of the 2007 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in southern England, for example, virus sequencing quickly led investigators to nearby high-security laboratories conducting research on a similar virus. The inquiry ultimately traced the outbreak to faulty effluent pipes at the facilities.
In contrast, to date, no virus has been identified that could have been used in a laboratory as a direct progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.
If the virus did emerge from a research-related incident, two possibilities remain: It was either an uncharacterized natural virus, unknown even to the researchers who worked on it, or it was a previously characterized virus that had not been disclosed – either because it was recently identified or because it was part of a classified program – and that is still being kept under wraps by scientists in Wuhan.
This is in particular the case if SARS-CoV-2 was the result of genetic engineering.
A lab-modified virus implies that its genetic sequence was known to some researchers before the pandemic. However, by 2021, the US intelligence community had determined that researchers at WIV had no prior knowledge of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak.
While absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, concrete data have yet to emerge supporting the hypothesis of laboratory modification.
Theories about a potential lab origin have also fueled speculation about the involvement of accomplices outside of Wuhan, in China or abroad. A US Senate committee report put forward a China-only scenario, citing the suspicious 2020 death of a Beijing-based researcher working on a new vaccine.
Other theories center on the US-based NGO EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated with WIV to collect and study natural coronaviruses before its funding was abruptly cut off at President Donald Trump's request in Spring 2020.
The organization's president has since been banned from federal funding for five years, facing criticism over oversight issues, including delayed reporting of an experiment on a chimeric coronavirus and failure to provide WIV's laboratory notebooks.
Among the most high-profile figures implicated in US-based complicity theories is Anthony Fauci, the former White House Covid advisor and head of the agency that funded the collaboration between EcoHealth Alliance and WIV.
But allegations against Fauci go far beyond him approving research grants. One narrative claims that Fauci deliberately suppressed discussions about the pandemic's origin, pressuring researchers to alter their conclusions in exchange for funding. No evidence has surfaced to support this claim.
Anticipating potential retribution from his successor and the Republican Party, former President Joe Biden preemptively granted Fauci a presidential pardon. However, newly elected President Donald Trump has since revoked Fauci's personal security detail, and Republican Senator Rand Paul has vowed to continue efforts to prosecute him.
The multiplicity of lab-origin scenarios is caused by the absence of data supporting this type of origin. As a result, anything is possible.
Data related to the origin of the Covid-19 exist, however. So far, available data suggest the virus may have originated naturally from animals sold at the Huanan Market. Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. Photo: Weibo
Multiple types of data, from various Chinese sources, support this hypothesis: The residences of the cases with earliest onset dates are located in the vicinity of the Huanan Market, whether the cases were epidemiologically linked to the market or not.
The two early SARS-CoV-2 lineages were detected at the market; and data from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CCDC), that we analyzed, indicated that raccoon dogs and civets – species implicated in earlier SARS outbreaks – were present in the market's southwest corner, where traces of SARS-CoV-2 were frequently detected.
However, by the time the CCDC team arrived at the Huanan market for sample collection, just hours after its closure, raccoon dogs and civets were no longer present. As a result, no direct traces of infection could be detected, and the definitive evidence some are hoping for may never be uncovered.
But even if such proof were to emerge, it would not likely settle the debate. Additional confirmation would be needed to show that the animals were not secondarily infected by humans in the market. Moreover, skeptics could argue that the animals themselves came from a laboratory. In other words, the controversy is far from over.
For now, with the new Trump administration focused on finding a culprit, the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic will remain in the spotlight. Senator Rand Paul, now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), has made the issue his hobbyhorse.
The declassification of information from the US intelligence community may help assess the merits of competing conclusions regarding the origin of the pandemic. In parallel, however, the new administration may unfairly target researchers, potentially resulting in more innocent victims.
Florence Débarre is CNRS research director and a researcher in evolutionary biology, Sorbonne University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.