The Daily - What to Know About the Covid Lab Leak Theory

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Three years after the start of Covid, the central mystery of the pandemic — how exactly it began — remains unsolved. But recently, the debate about the source of the coronavirus has re-emerged, this time in Congress.The Energy Department has concluded, with “low confidence,” that an accidental laboratory leak in China was most likely the origin, but politics are making it harder to find definitive answers.Guest: Benjamin Mueller, a health and science correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Republicans have pushed the lab leak theory, but they lack a “smoking gun.”What we know and don’t know about the origins of Covid.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Three years after the start of COVID, the central mystery of the pandemic, how exactly it began, remains unsolved. But recently, the debate about the origins of the virus has re-emerged, this time in Congress. Today, my colleague Benjamin Mueller on what we actually know about how COVID started and why the politics are making it harder to find answers. to find answers. It's Wednesday, March 15th. So Ben, in Washington last week, there was a hearing on the question of where and how COVID actually began. And it really felt like deja vu, right? Like, here we are again,

three years later, listening to a debate about whether COVID leaked from a lab or crossed over from a sick animal in a market. How are we all of a sudden having this conversation again? Well, Republicans took control of the House recently, and they've made it a priority to investigate the origins of the virus. They see themselves as having unfinished business, which is to look much more closely at how the virus began, and specifically at a theory that's popular on the Republican side of the aisle, which is that the virus may have accidentally leaked from a lab. I think they have grievances with the way Democrats have handled

many parts of the pandemic response, and that includes the idea that Democrats have unfairly overlooked this theory about how the virus started, the possibility that it came from a lab. Good morning, everyone. The select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic will come to order. So they set up a committee to look at just that question. And they had their first hearing last week.

And at it, they used the hearing to go after one of their most favorite political targets, Tony Fauci, a public health official who led parts of the coronavirus response. We released a memo highlighting new evidence that suggests that Dr. Fauci prompted the drafting of a publication that would disprove the lab leak theory. They blame Fauci in particular for steering scientists away from the lab leak theory in early 2020, and they furnished emails and other records that they say proves their case against him.

This was a narrative that was decided that they were going to say this came from a wet market and they were going to do everything they could to support it, to negate any discussion about the possibility that this came from a lab leak. But it's not only Republicans who have taken interest in this question. Democrats have become much more careful lately about saying that we need to investigate the possibility that the virus came from a lab leak. It is my sincere hope that we can conduct this work in an objective, bipartisan way based on evidence to save lives. If there is no further business without objection, the select subcommittee stands adjourned. Thank you.

But Ben, my memory of the lab leak theory is that it was something that Trump had really pushed and had kind of gotten caught up in his rhetoric, right? Like his insistence on calling it the China virus, like the pandemic was somehow China's fault. But that it was also largely dismissed by scientists. That's right. Scientists early on in the pandemic, some of them referred to the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory. President Trump has now claimed, without citing evidence, that COVID-19 likely originated in a government lab in China. It became very identified with Trump and his accusations against

China. Some people call it the Chinese flu, the China flu. He even raised the idea that it might have been intentionally released from the lab. Are you insinuating they intentionally let it spread? Well, they could have done it. And I'm just saying, well, one of two things happened. They either didn't do it and, you know, they couldn't do it from a competent standpoint or they let it spread. I think that made it harder for scientists to openly talk about the idea that the virus may have come out of a lab, even if that was only accidentally. And so then what happened? Well, that started changing when Trump left office. I think he became a little less identified himself with the theory that the virus may have leaked out of a lab. There was also something really important that happened in early 2021. An international group of scientists working for the World Health Organization

An international group of scientists working for the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan. The World Health Organization, with a lot of input from China, released a big report about how the pandemic may have started. How much cooperation did you get from the Chinese authorities when you did this investigation? Was everything you would wish to see on the table? No. That report said a lab leak was extremely unlikely. It even ranked that possibility below one of China's pet theories, which is that the virus came into the country from abroad. And so now you have scientists who had spent a lot of 2020 either not investing that much of their own work

in looking into this question or sort of watching it from a distance, who felt troubled by this report, who felt like China had had too much influence on its findings. The World Health Organization had not gotten the evidence they might have. And that motivated them to start speaking up more openly about the idea that a lab leak needed to be taken seriously. So how did the scientists go about doing that?

There was a group of 18 prominent scientists, that's virologists and other experts in the field, who decided to publish an open letter in the scientific journal Science in May of 2021, pushing for all origin theories to be investigated. What we're saying in this letter is, let's just refrain from offering our opinions and simply look at the cold, hard facts that we have available. What that did, I think, is give Democrats

and the Biden administration in particular an opening to themselves come forward and push for the same sort of openness to the lab leak theory. President Biden apparently has some specific questions for the Chinese, and he wants the intel folks to double down. Which took the form of the Biden administration telling their intelligence agencies to review the evidence and try to furnish their own answers about how the pandemic may have started. And what did they find?

Initially, a majority of the intelligence agencies weighed in in favor of the natural origin theory, the idea that the virus spilled naturally from animals into humans outside of a lab. But there was one agency, the FBI, that opened the door to the idea of a lab leak. And they were joined just two weeks ago by the Department of Energy, which long after Biden ordered the initial review, updated its assessment, reviewed the intelligence, maybe found some new intelligence, and said that they, with low confidence, also think it's possible that the virus leaked from a lab. With low confidence? What does that mean? We're not exactly sure. It's not clear that there's some smoking gun new evidence at all or how new the intelligence even is that led them to this updated assessment. What I think the new assessment has done is it's really revived the public debate around the origins. It's put it front and center and it's sort of re-energized the public conversation and the conversation in Congress in a way that hasn't been true for some time. So, Ben, let's get into that debate. I mean, you know, we have the changing of the Guard in Congress, this new assessment by this government agency, all resurfacing the theory. But devil's

advocate for a second here. It's been three years. Do we care about where it came from at this point? Like, why is that important? Well, I used to be a police reporter and I saw the kind of government resources that got poured into answering the question of how even a single person was killed. Here we've got a pandemic that's killed 7 million people and sickened many others. And so I think some public health officials feel a kind of moral obligation to those victims to figure out how the pandemic started. So what do we know at this point about what really happened? And I'm assuming there's not one clear, you know, black and white answer to the thing. There are the two main theories that have gotten a lot of public attention. One of those is that the virus leaked from a lab or was

related to research in some way. And the other is that the virus spilled over naturally into humans outside of a lab from some sort of animal source. Okay, so let's start with a theory that the virus was leaked from a lab. Tell me about that theory. That theory starts really with a coincidence, which is that the virus happened to start spreading in the city Wuhan that happens to house a major center for coronavirus research, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, early on, proponents of that theory were talking vaguely about the idea that the virus may have been intentionally engineered as a kind of bioweapon. The intelligence community later sort of took that theory off the table and said it was

not likely that it was a biological weapon. But the theory that is still on the table is that researchers at that virology institute, in the course of trying to isolate a virus from a bat sample, for example, or tinkering with the virus, may have accidentally become infected themselves and let the virus into Wuhan that way. And Ben, what's the case for that theory? Like, what's the argument about what happened? Well, this lab in Wuhan was collecting new coronaviruses from bats, which are known to harbor viruses that closely resemble the virus that ended up spreading in humans. One of the leading researchers at the lab was this woman, Shi Zhengli, who was nicknamed the Batwoman for those very experiments on bat

coronaviruses. We also know that lab accidents do happen. They've happened in China, as they have in the United States. And some experts became China, as they have in the United States. And some experts became more suspicious as they learned more about the kind of studies that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was interested in. That included a proposal in 2018 that outlined experiments looking at new coronaviruses and a particular feature of viruses that can make them more efficient at infecting human cells. So the lab was actually considering doing an experiment on coronaviruses and how to make them more infectious in human cells. That's the way some experts see it. Now, it's important to know that that grant proposal was rejected. The researchers involved in it say the work was never done.

And some of the proposed experiments were in fact envisioned to happen at the University of North Carolina and not in Wuhan at all. It's also important to know that scientists who've looked at the genetic sequence of the virus say it doesn't bear the sort of hallmark features of genetic engineering. And I'd say the most important thing to know is that it's not really possible for scientists to make one of these viruses from scratch. They've got to start somewhere. And as far as we know, no labs in Wuhan had a virus in their collections that they could have altered in such a way that that virus became the pandemic virus. So what's the bottom line for this lab leak theory overall? Like, does any of it add up to any conclusive understanding of how COVID started? Some scientists think there is this circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of the lab leak.

But no, as of yet, there is no hard evidence that's emerged suggesting this pandemic came from a lab. So where does the evidence point? Does the evidence point? Well, many experts believe that the evidence actually points more strongly now than it ever has toward this one wild animal market in Wuhan. We'll be right back. So, Ben, you just said that there's evidence pointing to the theory about the animal market, that this is where COVID really came from. And, of course, this has been kind of the primary operating theory of many scientists since really the early days of the pandemic.

So tell me about this theory. Lay it out for me. Well, there's a market in Wuhan called the Huanan Market. We know that that market sold in the months before the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Animals that are known to harbor viruses very much like this. That includes the raccoon dog, for example, which is a kind of cross between a fox and a raccoon. Some of the very early cases of the virus were linked to the market. And so the theory goes that an animal at this market was sick and passed the virus to someone who was shopping there or someone who was working there or someone who was trading animals at the market. And Ben, what's the evidence supporting this theory? Like,

what's the case for the market being the culprit? Well, every previous human coronavirus has had an animal origin, as do most human viruses in general. And we actually have to look back only a couple decades for a very similar event to have happened in China. So in late 2002, there's an outbreak of a virus called SARS-1 related to this coronavirus that ended up killing almost 800 people. That outbreak is believed to have begun at a wild animal market that was selling animals, including raccoon dogs. Okay, so other coronaviruses that we've seen have actually started at animal markets as well. What other evidence was out there?

The missing piece of evidence in this case is an animal that was infected, we know, with the virus at the market shortly before the pandemic started. Now, part of the reason for that is that the police moved very quickly to shut down the market after the coronavirus outbreak started. very quickly to shut down the market after the coronavirus outbreak started. That's a huge difference from back in the days of SARS-1, when scientists could sort of waltz into the market and freely sample animals that were being sold there. So in the absence of that kind of evidence, scientists have combed through what other clues they might be able to use to build a picture of how this outbreak began. A lot of those clues were assembled for a series of two studies that were published about a year ago now. Those studies looked, for example, at the home addresses of early COVID patients and asked, where were those patients clustered? Whether or not they shopped

at the market or worked at the market, where did they live? And it turned out that those patients lived in much closer proximity to the market than the scientists said you would have expected by pure chance. They also zoomed in on the market itself and said, well, we know that researchers didn't have access to live animals, but they did sample the walls and the cages and the drains of that market looking for evidence of the coronavirus, and they found some. And they said that those samples predominantly came from parts of the market that were selling live animals, including particular stalls, where in previous years, researchers had found animals in very close proximity to each other, living among each other in a way that made it easy for viruses to spread and mutate and jump into humans.

Including, for example, raccoon dogs living in a cage that sat right on top of a cage that housed birds. But Ben, didn't you say that this kind of trade had been made illegal in China? I mean, after all, it had spread the SARS epidemic, right? That's right. China had clamped down after the SARS outbreak, which is part of why experts think

China would have been so sensitive to the idea that there was this illegal activity happening right under their noses in the very same kind of market that we know poses huge risks for viruses jumping into humans. So that's perhaps partly why the authorities moved quickly to shut down the market. And beyond that, made it very hard to investigate the farms that were supplying the market, for example. Those animals, too, were either released or killed or the farms were closed. That all has made it hard to sort of build the complete picture of the outbreak, if it did indeed start at the market in the way that some scientists wish we could.

And what does China itself say happened? Like, what's its version of the origins of COVID? China's argued that the virus came from anywhere but within China's borders. They've suggested that the virus may have sprung from an American military lab. They've suggested that maybe it came in on big shipments of frozen food packages. And are either of these remotely plausible? Scientists think they're a bit ridiculous and don't put much stock in those explanations. They think there's very strong evidence that the pandemic did start in China.

But I think in the course of making those kinds of arguments, China has made it very difficult for researchers to go back and do the sorts of follow-up investigations within China's borders that could help us nail down the question of how the pandemic started. So, for example, they've not given researchers the kind of access to blood banks that could help establish what sort of patients and how many and who they were who were infected in the very earliest stages of the outbreak. They've not been as transparent as many folks think they could have been about the kind of research happening in labs in Wuhan. And I was talking about those samples earlier

that they took from the walls and the cages of the Huanan market. They've not published the complete genetic sequences from those swabs that could help us get a sense of what sort of animals they came from and who may have been infected within the market. So Ben, after hearing you lay all of this out for me, I am left kind of wondering whether there's enough evidence for the animal market theory. Some scientists think that that evidence does paint a compelling picture of a virus that started at the market. The combination of the location data and what we know about the animals being sold there and the genetic evidence from

the early sequences of the coronavirus, they think that that points strongly to the market. Other scientists are much more focused on the holes in that theory that remain. But I would say that most virus experts think that the evidence so far published points to an origin at the market. That's definitely where most of the sort of published, peer-reviewed scientific evidence sits at the moment. So, Ben, stepping back here, it sounds like there's still a lot we don't know. And that, of course, leaves the door open for more and more debate about what actually happened. It leaves the door open for politics to keep going and to keep trying to answer the question in committee hearings like the one we just had. I guess my question is, does it matter that we can't come to a conclusion on this?

It matters because we've all lived through this horrendous pandemic. And we, and we, and especially scientists, are obsessed with figuring out how it all started. Despite that, though, I think the truth is we might never have the conclusive evidence that some people crave to be able to come to a sort of settled conclusion. But I think the question about the origins of this virus inevitably shapes the conversation about what steps we should take to best prevent the next pandemic. On the one hand, you have experts who have been voicing concern for decades about the risks of

dangerous lab experiments and about the sensible steps that we can take to both preserve the value of those experiments, which is to help produce vaccines and therapeutics, while also reducing the chances that a virus spills out of those labs and starts an outbreak. It's also true that nature is running experiments that are in some cases far more dangerous than anything being cooked up in labs. In the last few months, we've seen the bird flu spread rampantly across countries. That's included in Spain, where it's spilled into mink farms. And in passing from mink to mink, picked

up mutations that some scientists worry could make the virus more transmissible in humans. Those are exactly the kind of natural experiments that scientists think we need to be paying attention to, even as we also focus on the risk of lab accidents. I think some scientists are worried that in the course of getting so fixated on one hypothesis or another, that we lose sight of the steps we need to take right now to address the threat of future pandemics. Ben, thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Thank you. regional banks, including First Republic Bank, which had to take emergency action to shore up

its finances over the weekend, bounced back over the course of the day. The crisis began last week when a sudden drop in the value of Silicon Valley Bank triggered a run on the bank. The Times reports that the Justice Department is investigating that collapse. And American officials said that a Russian military jet flew into an American reconnaissance drone over the Black Sea, causing the drone to crash into international waters. Russia, for its part, denied the collision and said that the drone had crashed of its own accord. A National Security Council spokesman called the behavior of the Russians, quote, unsafe and unprofessional. If a collision is confirmed, it would be the first known physical contact between the two nations' militaries as a result of the war in Ukraine.

Today's episode was produced by Mary Wilson, Sidney Harper, and Eric Krupke, with help from Diana Nguyen. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, with help from Paige Cowett, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. We'll see you tomorrow.