As his book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 - co-authored with Alina Chan - comes out in paperback, Matt Ridley returns to the fray at Spiked. The case for the lab-leak theory:
We keep coming back to this simple question: why Wuhan? It does not do much wildlife trade with southeast Asia compared with other Chinese cities. It is not in an area where the horseshoe bats carry such SARS-like viruses poised for spillover into people: we know this from extensive surveys of bat viruses in the region of Wuhan done mainly by Jun-hua Tian of the local Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
But there is one thing that stands out about Wuhan. It is the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This is China’s leading bat SARS-like virus research laboratory. It (and nowhere else in China) is the lab that tracked down the ancestral source of the first SARS epidemic. It led more expeditions to look for bat SARS-like viruses in southern China than any other lab. It sampled that mineshaft in Mojiang county at least seven times after the guano shovelers fell ill and found the then closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in bats there. It is where scientists sent samples from bats in Laos, a country where an even closer relative to the pandemic virus was found. It has the largest database of SARS-like viruses in the world by some distance, but has refused to release it, even though doing so at the start of the pandemic would have been the easiest way to exonerate its scientists.
And that is only the start of the coincidences. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (and nowhere else in China) is home to the team that collaborated with American labs to develop techniques for manipulating SARS-like viruses in the laboratory to test their infectivity. It kept live bats in the lab to experiment on. It grew live SARS-like viruses in culture and infected human airway-epithelial cells with them. It developed humanised mice to test viruses on. It was swapping parts of spike genes from newly discovered viruses collected from nature into cultured viruses in the lab.
And then came the most shocking revelation of all. We knew from the start that SARS-CoV-2 is the only SARS-like virus ever found – among hundreds – with a furin-cleavage site in its spike protein: an insertion of 12 letters of genetic code that makes the virus especially infectious, and is therefore the reason we had a pandemic and not just a localised outbreak. But in September 2021 a document was leaked to internet sleuths that showed the Wuhan laboratory was party to plans in 2018 to insert novel furin-cleavage sites into undefined SARS-like viruses in its possession. Yet the institute and its American collaborators had never bothered to tell the world about this plan, and they ignored the furin-cleavage site in their seminal 2020 paper about this virus in the journal Nature....
In a court of law, a prosecutor would regard all this as a strong case. ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’, he would probably say, quoting Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. And then he would start going through the extraordinary litany of unhelpful obstacles that the Chinese government has put in the way of the World Health Organisation and everybody else who tries to get information on the early patients and what happened in the lab. When WHO investigators went to Wuhan in early 2021 they spent just three hours in the institute and visited the wrong lab (with the wrong biosafety level) on the wrong campus (in Jiangxia instead of Wuchang). As far as we know the WHO investigators were not shown the lower biosafety labs where the SARS-like virus work had been conducted.
We don’t say this virus definitely jumped out of a laboratory, but we do say that if there is one city in the world where a laboratory leak of a novel SARS-like virus from bats would be most likely to happen, it would be Wuhan.
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