Mick Hartley

Matt Ridley sums it up:

The case for the lab leak comes in two forms. The first is that the evidence for Covid having come through a seafood market in Wuhan is so weak. Within six months of the emergence of the SARS epidemic in 2003, it was very clear that animals had been infected in a market on quite a large scale. The early cases involved food vendors, food handlers and animal vendors, etc. But none of that evidence has emerged in the case of Covid. We are yet to find an infected animal from a market in Wuhan or a trail of early cases that suggest it came through a market.

The Chinese authorities are being very coy about the early cases. We know that there were about 90 cases in November 2019 – we saw a leaked document early on that showed that. But we don’t know who they were or where they worked. Possibly, they were lab workers, for example.

The second part of the case for the lab leak is the evidence about what scientists were doing at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The WIV contains the biggest bat-coronavirus research lab in the world. Scientists were collecting viruses from a very long way away and bringing them to Wuhan. The nine closest relatives of this virus that were known to exist at the time the pandemic began were in the lab already. And the experiments that were being done in that lab were high-risk, gain-of-function experiments [aimed at making viruses more infectious], which in some cases led to a 10,000-fold increase in the infectivity of viruses in humanised mice – that is, mice with human genes.

Now, if a virus, similar to SARS-CoV-2, was being inserted into humanised mice, then you’re basically training it to infect human beings. And if you’re doing this at inadequate biosafety levels, as seems to have been the case at the WIV just before the pandemic, then the chances of one of those researchers developing a cough was really quite high.

The final clue is that SARS-CoV-2 is the only SARS-like beta coronavirus ever found to this day that has a thing called a furin cleavage site. This makes it much more infectious and is the reason we’ve had a pandemic and not a local outbreak. Virologists have been inserting a furin cleavage site into coronaviruses over the past few years. And the Wuhan Institute of Virology was party to a plan, developed in 2018, to put a furin cleavage site into a SARS-like virus for the first time.

Fairly persuasive, you'd think. But leading scientists, instead of looking for the truth, collaborated to ensure that the lab-leak theory was dismissed as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory which should be dismissed out of hand. 

Why were they doing this research anyway? Were the dangers not obvious?

After SARS, there was a lot of money going into pandemic prevention. And so gain-of-function research was seen as a possible way of finding the next pandemic virus, of testing viruses we find in the wild, and of seeing how dangerous they are by mixing and matching their genes. That became an article of faith among a group of scientists led by the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak. He was funnelling US money to China for this work, particularly at Shi Zhengli’s lab at the WIV.

There were other scientists who were saying that this is not the best way to predict or prevent a pandemic. They said that it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to try to find the next virus that’s going to cause a pandemic. They even said that researchers might actually cause a pandemic in doing this work. It’s as if these scientists are looking for a gas leak with a lighted match, as someone put it. So there was a live debate about the wisdom of this research.

What I think is remarkable now is that I’m having debates with virologists who tell me not to call for more regulation of virology labs. They say that there is loads of regulation already and that, anyway, they should be the ones deciding which experiments they do. I’m a libertarian, but even I don’t go quite that far.

So, have lessons been learned? Apparently not.

Should some of these virologists not be brought to account, then? Nearly seven million people dead, and that's just the start of the reckoning as the world, in effect, shut down for a couple of years. As I've said before, that's one hell of a responsibility.