The case that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, leaked from a Chinese lab seems, on first sight, to be robust.
After all, it first appeared in close proximity to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a major lab that was carrying out research on just such viruses.
Furthermore, it’s plain that the virus is not of natural origin.
The Chinese authorities have confirmed that none of the animal reservoirs that a natural spillover event would require have been found, either in the Huanan wet market in Wuhan or elsewhere, despite wide and extensive testing.
The virus was also already well-adapted to humans in its earliest recorded cases, with no signs of the early genetic diversity that such adaptation would produce.
In addition, the virus is unusually contagious by virtue of having, among other things, a furin cleavage site. This feature has not been seen in SARS-like viruses before, but is often added by scientists in the lab to increase infectiousness.
So, it’s clearly a lab-engineered virus, and it first emerged in a city with a major lab working on such viruses. The conclusion seems inescapable: the virus leaked from the lab, as viruses do from time to time.
There’s just one problem with this theory: there is no real evidence to support it. After more than three years, no hard evidence has appeared that the virus escaped from the WIV.
There is no evidence, for instance, that the WIV held samples of SARS-CoV-2 or had been conducting experiments which would have led to its creation.
The virus known to be most similar to it is (or was at the time) RaTG13. This we know, however, because the WIV team themselves told us about it in their initial paper of January 23rd 2020, where they stated they had a sample of it and compared the two virus genomes.
Importantly, no published paper exists in which RaTG13 was reported to be being manipulated in the WIV. Furthermore, nobody, including from the U.S. Intelligence Community, has claimed to have evidence researchers were carrying out such work there.
There was, in 2015, a paper involving WIV researchers that detailed the addition of a furin cleavage site to a SARS-like virus. However, the work was done in the U.S., and the virus (SL-SHC014-MA15) was very different to SARS-CoV-2, by 5,000 nucleotides, which is around 15%.
So, there is no direct evidence the WIV was working on SARS-CoV-2 or a precursor virus. How, then, do lab leak proponents build their case? Largely by pointing to the alleged tell-tale behaviour of leading WIV researcher Dr. Shi Zhengli.
Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, for example, argue that Shi’s failure to disclose in early 2020 the link between RaTG13 and a severe pneumonia in six miners in Mojiang in 2013 is highly suspicious. However, it’s possible it was just overlooked. After all, Shi and her team were not slow to publish the genome of RaTG13 alongside that of SARS-CoV-2 and draw attention to their similarity, doing so on January 23rd 2020. Given the constraints of the authoritarian secrecy of the Chinese state, there is no sign they were trying to hide anything specifically about RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2.
It’s also been claimed that the first thing Shi did on December 30th 2019, on learning about the virus, was “to alter WIV computer databases of novel coronaviruses used by the world’s virologists for research to make it more difficult to search for which coronaviruses she had in her building”. This appears to be a reference to the altering of ‘key words’ in the WIV database on or before December 30th. The reason this was done is unclear, but it should be noted that the database had already been inaccessible to the public for months by that point. Whatever the explanation, it’s relevant that shortly afterwards Shi published her paper setting out how closely related SARS-CoV-2 is to one of the samples held in her laboratory, so again, she does not appear to be hiding anything.
The WIV did take its virus database offline on September 12th 2019. The Chinese later said this was due to hacking attempts – which if true raises the question of who was hacking it and why. In the 2022 Covid origins report from the U.S. Senate, the U.S. said the removal of the database was linked to a political inspection of some kind – which could be connected with a hacking attempt. Either way, this occurred months before the pandemic and there’s no evidence the Chinese took the action because they were aware of a virus having escaped or anything like that.
In fact, there’s no evidence the Chinese were aware of the outbreak at all before December. U.S. intelligence has stated it does not have evidence the Chinese were aware of it before then, and this is consistent with how the Chinese themselves behaved.
After all, if the Chinese authorities knew a highly infectious engineered virus from their lab was on the loose, why did they spend weeks in January not taking any countermeasures, while investigating whether it spread between humans?
And why did Shi Zhengli publish the virus genome alongside the RaTG13 genome and point out there was no evidence of a recombination event in SARS-CoV-2 (i.e., there was no indication it had been produced naturally from RaTG13 combining in a host with another virus), if she knew that they had in fact created the virus from RaTG13 in their lab?
It’s been claimed that the WIV shut down for two weeks in October, the implication being that this could be the leak event. However, the claim is based only on an unpublished private analysis of mobile phone use that has never been further corroborated. It was not mentioned in the Senate Covid origins report.
The Senate report did list what it claimed was evidence of safety issues at the WIV. However, the details are vague, and the report also makes clear that all of the information included was already in the public domain.
Significantly, a Western researcher, Dr. Danielle Anderson, has said she was working at the WIV during the period in question, up to November 2019, and did not witness or hear about any major concerns or interventions relating to safety or a possible leak.
So, the problem with the lab leak theory can be summarised as follows: there is no evidence the WIV was working on SARS-CoV-2 or a precursor to it, and it’s clear the Chinese did not behave in December and January as you would expect if they already knew a highly infectious engineered virus from their lab was on the loose. Pointing the finger at the behaviour of Dr. Shi Zhengli in the early weeks as supposedly suspicious backfires because it is clear that she swiftly published the virus genome alongside that of RaTG13 and drew attention to the similarities and the fact that it is unlikely the novel virus emerged naturally from the sampled virus.
I won’t say the theory is certainly false. Maybe WIV researchers actually were undertaking these experiments but for some reason had failed to record them anywhere. And maybe there are understandable reasons they would let the virus rip for a few weeks while pretending not to know it was spreading, as well as reasons they would choose to be transparent about the virus’s close relationship with a sample they held and the evidence it did not emerge naturally from it.
But I can’t think of any.
So where did this engineered virus come from, and why did it first appear in Wuhan?
As I have written previously, a major clue may be the fact that multiple U.S. intelligence sources have stated they were following the outbreak in China from November 2019. This is despite China not being aware of the outbreak at that point (U.S. intelligence has even said as much), and there being no detectable signal of such an outbreak.
The evidence above against a WIV lab leak further adds to the case that the Chinese may have had nothing to do with this engineered virus. It’s becoming increasingly hard to escape the conclusion that the people responsible for the virus may be the same ones who already knew it was there.
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Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!