Mick Hartley

It's easily done. A lab worker catching the coronavirus from a deliberately infected lab animal, that is. From today's Sunday Times – Mouse bite infection of Taiwanese researcher gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory:

Two years after victims of a mystery illness began arriving at hospitals in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the infection of a researcher in a Taiwanese laboratory has raised questions about the origins of the pandemic.

The lab worker, who tested positive on Thursday for the Delta variant, had been bitten by a mouse infected with the coronavirus for experiments at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei, the island’s capital.

Taiwan has had no domestic transmissions for more than a month, and the infected woman, who is in her twenties and double-vaccinated, has not travelled abroad recently.

Health investigators believe that the researcher caught the virus at work at the Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s leading research institute. That reinforces the theory that the pandemic was caused by a similar lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

“If the lab worker is confirmed to have been infected at her workplace, then this will add credibility to the lab leak theory,” said Yanzhong Huang, a Chinese public health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

“This case comes as we have reached an impasse on the origins probe for Covid-19, with no progress on establishing whether the outbreak was the result of a natural spillover from animals or a lab leak.”

The WIV is on the outskirts of the central Chinese city, just a few miles from the wildlife market associated with several early cases of Covid-19. WIV scientists led by Shi Zhengli, a coronavirus expert known as China’s “bat woman”, used mice to test the impact of modified bat viruses in “gain of function” experiments.

The genetic adaptation of animal pathogens is championed by some academics as valuable research for tackling future pandemics. But the practice is banned as dangerous in many countries, fearful of the risks of an escape of a turbocharged virus.

American and British government investigations have concluded that the lab leak theory is plausible. In one possible route of transmission, a researcher could have been infected in an accident and then spread the disease after leaving work — as it was feared that the Taiwan lab worker had done….

Richard Ebright, an American biologist and biosafety expert, noted that human infections occurred at laboratories in Taiwan, Singapore and China in 2003 and 2004 during research into the Sars coronavirus.

“The incidents underscore that laboratory accidents, including those that result in infection of a laboratory worker and transmission of infection from the laboratory worker to the general public, occur,” he said.

“It is eminently plausible that a Wuhan laboratory worker handling Sars-related coronaviruses was infected and then transmitted the infection to the general public, sparking the pandemic.”

Accidents will happen, even in labs which claim to have stringent safety measures. No, this isn't exactly a smoking gun, but it is instructive.