Wuhan Lab - Coronavirus Leak Theory Is Unlikely, Scientists Say - Vox

9/2/2020 Wuhan lab: Coronavirus leak theory is unlikely, scientists say - Vox
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Workers in protective suits walk next to the closed Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, on March 30. It’s one of many possible
places where the novel coronavirus could have jumped from a bat, or from an intermediary species, to humans. | Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty
Images
Why these scientists still doubt the

coronavirus leaked from a Chinese
lab
A Wuhan lab studied SARS-related viruses. But there’s no evidence it
discovered or was working on the new virus.
By Eliza Barclay @elizabarclay eliza barclay@vox com Updated Apr 29 2020 11:27am EDT
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus-china 1/14
By Eliza Barclay @elizabarclay eliza.barclay@vox.com Updated Apr 29, 2020, 11:27am EDT
One of the great mysteries of the Covid-19 pandemic is how, exactly, the SARS-CoV-2
virus made the leap from wildlife into humans. Scientists who’ve analyzed the virus’s
genome believe it came from a bat, likely in China. But Chinese epidemiologists have
revealed little about how or where the first patients were infected.
One focus has been a wet market in Wuhan, where live wildlife was sold for food, because
66 percent of the first cluster of 41 cases in December 2019 had exposure to this market.
Yet there is also genomic evidence and reports the virus could have been circulating
earlier, in November. Which means there are many other possible places it could have
jumped from a bat, or an intermediary species, to humans.
Finding the index case, or “patient zero,” for an infectious disease that’s just emerged can
take months or years, if the person can even be found at all. So it’s not unusual we still
don’t have one, especially for a disease with so much asymptomatic transmission.
Into the vacuum has seeped a potent, speculative, and confusing discussion about the
virus’s origin, particularly in the US, where the GOP is intensifying its efforts to blame
China for the pandemic.
In March, I offered explanations from virus experts for why they dismiss two of the
theories that have surfaced about the coronavirus origin: that Chinese scientists
bioengineered it in a lab and/or deployed it as a bioweapon.
In this piece, I’ll address the theory du jour: that a Chinese researcher was infected with
the new virus inside a high-containment Wuhan laboratory and accidentally spread it, after
which China attempted to cover it up.
This hypothesis has been circulating in US, UK, and Chinese media since February, with
fresh reporting and speculation this month in the Daily Mail, Vanity Fair, Fox News, and
the Washington Post. A Tuesday op-ed drawing solely from circumstantial evidence by
chief “labber” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) in the Wall Street Journal raised the question anew.
Riding the wave of these reports, President Donald Trump is also now using this potential
avenue for blaming China; on April 15, he said his government was looking into whether the
virus came from the Wuhan lab Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also said Beijing
virus came from the Wuhan lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also said Beijing
“needs to come clean” on what it knows about the virus’s origin.
Trump and the GOP’s motivation to establish new ways to blame China for the pandemic is
clear: The president’s response to the pandemic has been abominable, and he faces an
election in six months, with more than 22 million people unemployed and an economy
heading toward recession. The lab-escape theory joins a variety of arguments he and his
supporters are using — including scapegoating the World Health Organization and former
President Barack Obama — to divert attention from his failures.
The Wuhan lab may also be the most tantalizing of the diversions, not just for Trump’s
supporters but also for some political journalists and China hawks. What if the catastrophe
is a result not of nature but of China’s incompetence with handling viruses and habit for
suppressing information?
Such a spy-novel-worthy plot may seem plausible for a number of reasons: the Chinese
government’s poor record of transparency; the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a
research center with facilities in the same city where the virus first appeared, was
studying dangerous pathogens, including bat coronaviruses; and US officials’ concerns
about the lab’s safety standards in 2018, per the Washington Post.
Yet five scientists I interviewed, some of whom have worked extensively in China with
researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, say the pandemic can’t logically be pinned
on an accident at that lab. (Researchers at the institute didn’t respond to my request for
comment.)
The scientists I did speak to all acknowledge it’s not possible to definitively rule out the
lab-escape theory. “The trouble with hypotheses is that they are not disprovable. You
cannot prove a negative,” said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a
disease ecologist who has studied emerging infectious diseases with colleagues in China.
Yet he also sees the lab-escape theory as “ironic and preposterous.”
The scientists I spoke to also noted that all countries with high-level containment facilities,
including China and the US, must be vigilant to prevent accidental leaks of dangerous
diseases from labs. “I think we all are concerned about the increasing presence of high-
consequence pathogens in laboratories and the issue of inadequate biosecurity,” said
Dennis Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who helped
design Predict a surveillance program for dangerous animal viruses that the Trump
design Predict, a surveillance program for dangerous animal viruses that the Trump
administration chose to shut down in October. “We’ve seen examples of inadvertent
release in the past and I’m sure we will see it in the future. So it’s a very major concern
that we need to pay attention to.”
But scientists told me that based on what they know about the Wuhan Institute of Virology
and the likelihood of a natural spillover event, they didn’t see lab escape as probable. And
one expert added that it could be dangerous to get too preoccupied with this theory when
the threat of another disease with pandemic potential from wildlife is so high.
Since politics will continue to propel this theory into the public sphere, let’s walk through
six reasons a lab leak is unlikely.
1) The probability of the virus jumping from animals to humans outside the lab is
much higher than the virus infecting humans inside the lab
Daszak is a scientist who has spent the past 15 years collaborating with scientists in China
and other emerging disease hot spots around the world to find out where dangerous
viruses lurking in wildlife — like the first SARS virus, MERS, and Ebola — are, how they get
into people, and how to stop people from spreading them and spiraling into pandemics.
He says he’s confident SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus, originated in bats and jumped
into people somewhere, likely in China, because he and his colleagues have established
that viruses like it are out there and there are so many opportunities for this to happen.
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“This is not the bat’s fault”: A disease expert explains where the coronavirus likely comes from
“If you do the math on this, it’s very straightforward. ... We have hundreds of millions of
bats in Southeast Asia and about 10 percent of bats in some colonies have viruses at any
one time. So that’s hundreds of thousands of bats every night with viruses,” Daszak says.
“We also find tens of thousands of people in the wildlife trade, hunting and killing wildlife in
China and Southeast Asia, and millions of people living in rural populations in Southeast
Asia near bat caves.”
Next, he says, consider the data he’s collected on people near bat caves getting exposed
to viruses: “We went out and surveyed a population in Yunnan, China — we’d been to bat
caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk So we sample people nearby
caves and found viruses that we thought could be high risk. So we sample people nearby,
and 3 percent had antibodies to those viruses,” he says. “So between the last two and
three years, those people were exposed to bat coronaviruses. If you extrapolate that
population across the whole of Southeast Asia, it’s 1 million to 7 million people a year
getting infected by bat viruses.”
Compare that, he says, to what we know about the labs: “If you look at the labs in
Southeast Asia that have any coronaviruses in culture, there are probably two or three and
they’re in high security. The Wuhan Institute of Virology does have a small number of bat
coronaviruses in culture. But they’re not [the new coronavirus], SARS-CoV-2. There are
probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let’s compare 1 million to 7
million people a year to half a dozen people; it’s just not logical.”
The biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) laboratory (left) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on April 17. | Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty
Images
But he told me he gets why people in the US, who aren’t regularly exposed to bats, have a
hard time understanding how great the risk is of humans getting infected with novel
coronaviruses circulating in bats.
“I understand — it’s a weird thing. Bats live out there, we don’t see them that often, we
don’t realize how common, how abundant, how diverse they are,” he says. “In Southeast
Asia, they carry their own viruses, and there’s just this really big interface between bats
and people, every night, every day. People live in caves, people shelter from the rain in
caves, people hunt bats.”
ca es, peop e u t bats
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, also sees the lab-leak theory as
very unlikely. “This virus came from bats under unknown circumstances,” she told me.
“While I cannot rule out the lab-accident theory, there are so many other possibilities for
how it could have happened. It could have been someone collecting bat guano for fertilizer,
somebody cleaning out a barn, somebody exploring a cave. It could be any situation like
that of someone in contact with animals who then spread it to other humans. There are so
many other options than a lab leak.”
2) Yes, the Wuhan lab studied bat coronaviruses and SARS-related viruses. But
there’s no evidence it discovered or was working on the new virus.
One of the big arguments “labber” theorists make for why we should suspect the Wuhan
Institute of Virology of accidentally leaking the virus: Researchers there were already
studying bat coronaviruses.
This is true; they published studies on the first SARS coronavirus that infected humans in
2003 and other bat coronaviruses, noting presciently in one paper, “it is highly likely that
future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an
increased probability that this will occur in China.”
In 2020, they reported on a virus called RaTG13 that they’d discovered in a cave in Yunnan,
China, in 2013. This virus shares 96 percent of its genome with the new coronavirus, which
makes it the new virus’s closest known relative.
Some have speculated that perhaps the new coronavirus is derived from RaTG13. Yet
virologists say it’s very unlikely: A 4 percent difference in genome is actually huge in
evolutionary terms.
“The level of genome sequence divergence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 is equivalent
to an average of 50 years (and at least 20 years) of evolutionary change,” said Edward
Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney who has published six academic papers
this year on the genome and origin of SARS-CoV-2, in a statement. “Hence, SARS-CoV-2
was not derived from RaTG13.”
Another questionable assumption is that the mere existence of a related virus in the lab
signals the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was also there.
Daszak, who collaborates with the Wuhan bat coronavirus researchers and has co-
th d ith th thi i f l H
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus-china d th h th i d d 6/14
authored papers with them, says this is false. He and the researchers there were indeed
looking for viruses related to the first SARS virus, also known as SARS-1, in the hope of
finding ones that might be a threat to humans. He confirmed that they had collected
samples of bat feces that contained viruses and brought them back to the Wuhan lab.
However, he said, the new coronavirus is only 80 percent similar to SARS-1 — again, a
very big difference. “No one [in Wuhan] cultured viruses from those samples that were 20
percent different, i.e., no one had SARS-CoV-2 in culture. All of the hypotheses [of lab
release] depend on them having it in culture or bats in a lab. No one’s got bats in a lab, it’s
absolutely unnecessary and very difficult to do.” (Cell culture is a way of storing viruses in
vitro in a lab so they can be studied over long periods.)
3) Scientists like to gossip about new viruses. There was no chatter before the
outbreak about the virus that causes Covid-19.
Carroll, the former director of USAID’s emerging threats division who also spent years
working with emerging infectious disease scientists in China, agrees that there’s no
evidence the Chinese researchers were working with a novel pathogen. His reasoning? He
would have heard about it.
“The reason I’m not putting a lot of weight on [the lab-escape theory] is there was no
chatter prior to the emergence of this virus to a discovery that would have ended up
bringing the virus into a lab,” he says. “And if nothing else, the scientific community tends
to be very gossipy. If there is a novel, potentially dangerous virus which has been identified,
circulating in nature, and it’s brought into a laboratory, there is chatter about that. And
when you look back retrospectively, there’s no chatter whatsoever about the discovery of
a new virus.”
“IF NOTHING ELSE, THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY TENDS TO BE VERY

GOSSIPY”
Carroll is confident he would have heard about it because, in his current role as head of the
Global Virome Project, he has his ear to the ground and remains active in the community.
When I asked if the Chinese researchers would have kept it secret, he replied, “People will
come back and say China is China, they would have suppressed that information. But
Chi i i I hi k j
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus-china i l ” 7/14
Chinese scientists, I think, are just as gregarious as everyone else.”
Rasmussen, for her part, also thinks there’s no suggestion of a cover-up. “I haven’t seen
evidence of a grand conspiracy to cover up that there was a lab leak of this virus,” she said.
4) The US military chief reviewed the evidence and says “the weight of evidence
seems to indicate natural” origin
As the lab-escape theory has gotten more attention in the media, we’ve learned that US
military and intelligence officials have also been reviewing the possibility.
On April 14, we got a window into what those ongoing investigations have revealed so far
about whether the virus leaked from a lab or jumped to people outside a lab, in nature.
“There’s a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc,”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters at the Pentagon. “It
should be no surprise to you that we’ve taken a keen interest in that, and we’ve had a lot of
intelligence look at that. And I would just say at this point, it’s inconclusive, although the
weight of evidence seems to indicate natural [origin]. But we don’t know for certain.”
Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, has also said “there is nothing to” the
idea that the virus originated in a laboratory as a bioweapon experiment.
What’s more, as the New York Times reported in its sweeping April 11 review of the
administration’s failed coronavirus response, intelligence officials couldn’t find evidence
for the lab theory after Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser who was
one of the earliest advocates for Trump to refer to Covid-19 as the “Wuhan virus,” pushed
them to look for it:
With his skeptical — some might even say conspiratorial — view of China’s ruling Communist Party, Mr.
Pottinger initially suspected that President Xi Jinping’s government was keeping a dark secret: that the
virus may have originated in one of the laboratories in Wuhan studying deadly pathogens. In his view, it
might have even been a deadly accident unleashed on an unsuspecting Chinese population.
During meetings and telephone calls, Mr. Pottinger asked intelligence agencies — including officers at
the C.I.A. working on Asia and on weapons of mass destruction — to search for evidence that might
bolster his theory.
They didn’t have any evidence. Intelligence agencies did not detect any alarm inside the Chinese
government that analysts presumed would accompany the accidental leak of a deadly virus from a
government laboratory.
Newsweek reported April 27 that in March the US Defense Intelligence Agency issued a
report that “reveals that U.S. intelligence revised its January assessment in which it ‘judged
that the outbreak probably occurred naturally’ to now include the possibility that the new
coronavirus emerged ‘accidentally’ due to ‘unsafe laboratory practices’ in the central

Chinese city of Wuhan.”
Again, the US government’s investigation into the theory is ongoing, so it’s possible it will
turn up new information. But so far, the reports we do have suggest the natural origin is
more likely.
5) Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists deny a lab leak

There’s no question the Chinese government and ruling party made grave errors in
managing the outbreak from the outset that contributed to its spread around the world.
And according to Nature, the government is putting in place new rules in reviewing
research on the virus origin.
As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) put it to my colleague Alex Ward, “We don’t know the true
extent of the Chinese government’s complicity in the spread of the virus, and we may
never have a full picture due to their obfuscation and control of information. We do know
that they lied to their own people and the world about the details and spread of the virus,
and today we face a pandemic that has left no country untouched.”
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And China should, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius pointed out on April 23,
“promptly begin a serious, credible investigation into how the Covid-19 pandemic began.”
But the scientists I interviewed say that we still shouldn’t immediately conflate the work of
the highly regarded Chinese scientists who work at the lab with the transgressions of their
government.
We also have the word of one of the top virologists at the Wuhan lab, documented in news
articles, that she too wondered if the virus could have originated in her lab and then took
steps to verify it didn’t match any of the viruses they had in culture.
In this excellent article by Jane Qiu in Scientific American, we learned that the team at the
Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli known as China’s “bat woman” for her 16 years of work
Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli, known as China s bat woman for her 16 years of work
collecting samples of bat viruses in caves, sequenced the genome of the new virus in early
January and published it on January 23:
Shi instructed her team to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another
laboratory to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own
laboratory’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials,
especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the
sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a
load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
Yuan Zhiming, vice director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also recently spoke up on
Chinese state broadcaster CGTN. “As people who carry out viral study, we clearly know
what kind of research is going on in the institute and how the institute manages viruses
and samples. As we said early on, there is no way this virus came from us,” he said,
according to NBC News.
I asked Jim LeDuc, head of the Galveston National Laboratory, a level-4 biosafety lab in
Texas, for his thoughts on Yuan’s statement. “I like to think that we can take Zhiming Yuan
at his word, but he works in a very different culture with pressures we may not fully
appreciate,” he said. In other words, we don’t know what kind of pressures he might be
under from his government to make such a statement.
LeDuc says the hypothesis that the animal market played a role in the virus jumping to
humans also remains strong. “The linkage back to the market is pretty realistic, and
consistent with what we saw with SARS,” said LeDuc. “It’s a perfectly plausible and logical
explanation: The virus exists in nature and, jumping hosts, finds that it likes humans just
fine, thank you.“
6) State Department officials worried about safety issues at the Wuhan lab in 2018.
This is concerning but doesn’t prove its scientists were incompetent.
In an April 14 piece, Josh Rogin, a global opinions columnist for the Washington Post,
reported that in January 2018, the US Embassy in Beijing dispatched science diplomats to
the Wuhan Institute of Virology who later sent back cables that warned of “safety and
management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help.”
Rogin went on to cite an anonymous senior administration official’s belief that “the cables
provide one more piece of evidence to support the possibility that the pandemic is the
result of a lab accident in Wuhan ”
Other scientists who have worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology have spoken up
about its standards and practices in the face of the theory it leaked the virus.
“I have worked in this exact laboratory at various times for the past 2 years,” wrote
Danielle Anderson, scientific director of the Duke-NUS Medical School ABSL3
Laboratory, in a March 2 post on Health Feedback, a site where scientists review the
veracity of news reports. “I can personally attest to the strict control and containment
measures implemented while working there. The staff at WIV are incredibly competent,
hardworking, and are excellent scientists with superb track records.”
Gerald Keusch, a professor of medicine and international health and associate director of
Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, also doubts
the lab would have been prone to accidents.
“The Wuhan lab is (as far as I know because I have never visited) state of the art in terms of
safety and security systems and protocols, and because [the Galveston National
Laboratory in the US] helped to train many of them and has collaborations I would bet they
are highly professional, which makes the likelihood of an accident remote,” he said. “Is it
possible? Yes. Is it likely? In my opinion, no.”
We may never find out exactly when this virus made the leap into humans. But
focusing too much on the lab-leak theory could ultimately be dangerous.
Since there’s no robust evidence in support of the lab-leak theory, Daszak says he’s
worried that it could become a conspiratorial distraction with serious consequences.
“There is a group of people who do not want to believe that this is a natural, unfortunate
incident,” he said. “And the real bad part of that is that if we don’t believe that we won’t try
and stop other viruses in wildlife. Instead, we will focus on labs and close them down when
they’re the ones trying to develop vaccines to cure us right now. I mean, how ironic could
we go?”
Carroll says the lab-leak theory, even if there isn’t evidence to support it, is a healthy
reminder that lab accidents can happen and that biosecurity needs attention in country
studying dangerous pathogens. But he’s also much more concerned with preventing the
next pandemic.
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o dead y pat oge s a e escaped t e ab o e a d o e aga
Pandemics, says Carroll, do not have to happen. “They are a consequence of the way we
live. You can pick [viruses] up earlier if you’re really including in your surveillance those
places where animals and people are having high-risk interaction, those hot spots.”
If you have that surveillance, “you would never get a virus sweeping out of hand. You would
never get a repeat of an uncontrolled, unrecognized event.”
Which means it’s time for the whole world to invest in studying the viruses in the bat caves
and beyond, and building up the systems to stop them from spreading in humans, so this
doesn’t happen again. Because otherwise, it will.
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result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
The article sparked a rich discussion on Twitter, with Rasmussen of Columbia pointing out,
“The bottom line is that those vague diplomatic cables do not provide any specific
information suggesting that #SARSCoV2 emerged from incompetence or poor biosafety

protocols or anything else.”
Dr. Angela Rasmussen

@angie_rasmussen
I had a great exchange with @JeremyKonyndyk about the

state department cables reported yesterday by @joshrogin
and the credence they supposedly lend to the "lab accident"
origin story of #SARSCoV2. Jeremy distilled this into the
perfect meme:
Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk

Replying to @JeremyKonyndyk
Or to put this all much more simply:
12:44 PM · Apr 15, 2020
520 See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter
In a follow-up conversation with me, she reiterated: “This line that they’re incompetent, it
doesn’t hold water with me.”

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9/2/2020 Wuhan lab: Coronavirus leak theory is unlikely, scientists say - Vox

Why these scientists still doubt the

“IF NOTHING ELSE, THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY TENDS TO BE VERY

Chinese scientists, I think, are just as gregarious as everyone else.”

coronavirus emerged ‘accidentally’ due to ‘unsafe laboratory practices’ in the central

5) Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists deny a lab leak

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

The police shooting of Jacob Blake, explained

Your state’s Covid-19 epidemic, explained in 5 maps

View all stories in Explainers

information suggesting that #SARSCoV2 emerged from incompetence or poor biosafety

Dr. Angela Rasmussen

I had a great exchange with @JeremyKonyndyk about the

Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk

12:44 PM · Apr 15, 2020

520 See the latest COVID-19 information on Twitter

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