Mick Hartley

Matt Ridley in the Spectator is not, on the whole, impressed by Jeremy Farrar's book Spike, where politicians are hopeless but scientists are heroes. This part of his review is interesting, though, on the lab-leak hypothesis:

Farrar has been candid about an incident where others have been less so. In late January 2020, watching the new virus, Farrar was ‘beginning to suspect this might be a lab accident’, so he emailed the Australian scientist Eddie Holmes, who was in close contact with scientists in China. Holmes then took a call from Kristian Andersen, a prominent virologist in California, who mentioned two features of the virus that looked suspicious. ‘This is bad,’ said Holmes; ‘I drank about three beers after that call,’ said Andersen.

On 1 February Farrar set up a conference call with these two and several others, including Anthony Fauci, the US President’s chief medical adviser. The participants in that call have not been forthcoming, and disappointingly this book sheds no light on what was said. At the time, Farrar reports, Holmes thought it was 80 per cent probable the virus had originated in a Wuhan laboratory; Andersen 60-70 per cent and Farrar 50 per cent. This is really interesting, because none has aired these thoughts publicly and Holmes and Andersen have both become vocal critics of anybody who talks about a possible laboratory origin. The revelation that they thought the possibility more likely than not is stunning.

Farrar gives no good explanation for the sudden change of mind after that phone call. He merely says that ‘after the addition of important new information, endless analyses, intense discussions and many sleepless nights’, Andersen drafted a paper dismissing the laboratory hypothesis. But the most ‘important new information’ that came forward was the revelation that the closest related virus had come from a sample that had been collected by scientists and brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from more than 1,000 miles away, which if anything should have made people more suspicious.

Andersen’s paper gives only flimsy arguments against the possibility of a deliberately engineered virus, which is quite a different proposition from an accident. Moreover, one of those arguments — that the virus was imperfectly designed to attack human cells and an engineer would have made a better job of it — is both unconvincing (it’s suspiciously close to an argument from intelligent design) and a direct contradiction to what Farrar says elsewhere in the book. A few pages before this passage, Farrar writes that the critical part of the virus’s spike protein ‘looked too good to be true — like a perfect “key” for entering human cells’, and that this was one of the reasons he thought a lab origin was possible. So which is it: a good fit, implying a laboratory origin, or a poor fit, implying a natural origin?

One cannot help wondering if the dilemma that the scientists wrestled with in those sleepless nights after 1 February was more political than scientific. What would the implications be for the reputation of science if it had caused the pandemic, and in doing so seemed to vindicate Lord Voldemort himself, one Donald Trump?

There is a strong sense, in all these discussions of the lab-leak hypothesis, of scientists circling the wagons to protect themselves.