Junk Explained: Why Is Everyone Talking About The COVID-19 ‘Lab Leak’ Theory Again?

As President Joe Biden pushes for an investigation into the origins of COVID and Facebook refuses to ban posts that call the virus ‘man-made’, the theory that COVID may have been developed in a Chinese laboratory has officially gone mainstream.

Earlier this week, Biden ordered intelligence officials to investigate the origins of COVID, specifically revisiting the possibility that COVID-19 was developed and accidentally leaked by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The investigators have been instructed to report back to the president with their findings in 90 days.

---

Unpacking The ‘Leak Theory’

Speculation that COVID is a man-made virus emerged very soon after the pandemic began, and conspiracies around this theory were propagated largely by American right-wing commentators and members of the Trump administration.

In May 2020, Trump tweeted that “it was the ‘incompetence of China’, and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing”.

The ‘leak theory’, as well as theories that the virus was purposefully spread by the Chinese government, gained traction amongst online communities with tendencies towards nationalist and racist belief systems.

These theories in the hands of xenophobic online communities fuelled racist backlash against Asian communities worldwide that has resulted in violent, even fatal, attacks on Asian people.

In terms of credible evidence for the ‘leak theory’, there were reports from 2018 that US embassy officials were worried about biosecurity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but this did not represent particularly significant evidence at the time.

Politically speaking, the idea has also obviously been a particularly sensitive one and insistence on further investigation by Prime Minister Scott Morrison in May last year helped to kick off some significant diplomatic tensions between Australia and China.

The ‘leak theory’ gained traction amongst online communities with tendencies towards nationalist and racist belief systems.

China has already hit back at Biden’s investigation, dismissing the theory as a “conspiracy” and saying that international experts had “repeatedly praised China’s open and transparent attitude” to COVID’s origins.

Could The ‘Lab Leak’ Theory Actually Be True?

The World Health Organisation (WHO) conducted their own investigation in Wuhan in January this year, interviewing the first people to fall sick with the virus, and tracing possible leads in the Huanan wet market.

While there is evidence that COVID was circulating in the wet market in December 2019, there’s diversity in the viral sequences the team looked at, meaning that there was still a missing link for the chain of transmission.

The team said it was “extremely unlikely” that a lab leak caused the pandemic and that other possibilities…

Dominic Dwyer, the director of public health pathology at Westmead Hospital in Sydney and one of WHO’S investigators on the ground in Wuhan, wrote in The Conversation that the market “was more of an amplifying event rather than necessarily a true ground zero”.

The team said it was “extremely unlikely” that a lab leak caused the pandemic and that other possibilities, including transmission through frozen food or that the outbreak occurred at a farm that provided animals to the market, needed more research.

The conclusion follows the dominant theory of origin, articulated in an article in Nature Medicine in March 2020 that stated the virus likely originated through “natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer”.

After the WHO report was published, director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that he was looking forward to future studies of the animal origins of the virus but also added that the theory of a laboratory leak required “further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts”.

Wuhan Institute of Virology, like a handful of other laboratories world-wide, was performing ‘gain of function’ research that saw scientists manipulating coronaviruses to see what could make them more virulent or infectious.

However, some researchers have pointed out that the genetic difference of COVID from previously seen coronaviruses is big enough that it would have taken a really big feat of genetic engineering to create it.

Associate professor Paul Griffin, an infectious disease expert from the University of Queensland, told Junkee that even if researchers had the capacity to create a virus like COVID, they would understand the full implications of doing so and take a lot of care with it.

“With advances in technology, it could be theoretically possible, but I think highly improbable, to be honest.”

So, Why Is This Kicking Off Now?

The push from the US has been driven by an intelligence report released earlier this year by the state department, which stated that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had sought treatment at a hospital after fall ill in November of 2019.

There is no confirmation that these researchers were suffering from the effects of COVID but the report said that the symptoms were consistent and these findings “raise questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-Cov-2”.

Griffin said that the difficulties in pinning down any natural reservoirs of COVID so far may also be to blame, at least in part, for the ‘leak theory’ going mainstream but maintained that it’s unlikely that the investigation undertaken by the WHO team will be challenged significantly.

“I think people need to appreciate that it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever fully understand this.”

“While I think it’s potentially an interesting discussion and we should certainly look at how this might have arisen for the purpose of preventing or reducing the probability of this happening again, I really doubt we’ll reach a different conclusion,” said Griffin.

He also pointed out that it generally takes years to find a disease’s origin following outbreaks.

“I think we need to be realistic…it’s not easy to identify train of transmission or a crossover event. There are obviously so many factors that potentially contribute to those things happening,” said Griffin.

“I think people need to appreciate that it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever fully understand this. While I think we should focus on it so that we improve our ability for recognising and addressing this in the future, I think we shouldn’t be trying to look for someone to blame either way.”

(Images: Getty Images / Emin Baycan via Unsplash)