Today, Explained - The lab leak theory

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

The idea that Covid-19 emerged from a Chinese lab once sounded too fringe to take seriously. That’s starting to change. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Halima Shah, sitting in for Sean Ramos-Furham. Remember the lab leak theory? You know, the claim that COVID-19 actually came out of a lab in Wuhan, China? We're looking at exactly where it came from, who it came from, how it happened separately and also scientifically. So we're going to be able to find out. And my question is, have you seen anything at this point that gives you a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin of this virus? Yes, they have. Well, the story that seemed too conspiratorial to be true is now getting a second look.

The debate over the origin of COVID-19 is heating up. Yesterday, President Biden announced he's giving the U.S. intelligence community 90 days to produce a report on the subject, which could have major implications for U.S. relations with China. And though we're talking about a theory about a coronavirus that emerged in 2019, Vox's science reporter, Omer Irfan, said the theory's roots are actually back in the early 2000s. Back to the original SARS outbreak. March 2003, panic grips Hong Kong as a deadly new virus sweeps through the city, one of the most densely populated in the world. At that point, there was a spillover event where a virus likely jumped from bats into civic cats into humans at some place in China, and that really caught the world's attention. The WHO says once they knew how serious SARS was,

they did everything they could, issuing a global alert in mid-March and later warning travelers to stay away from southern China. That really caught the Chinese government's attention as well. And so they devoted more resources to doing more research on coronaviruses. And one of the main institutions doing that was the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And part of that work involved actively prospecting for viruses. So they were going out to where these coronaviruses likely were, basically in bats, finding bat caves, sampling them,

and then bringing them back to the laboratory and analyzing them, seeing how well they could infect humans, and then conducting some experiments to see if there were ways to counter them so they could get ahead of the next pandemic. Okay, so the lab leak theory suggests that coronavirus might have escaped from the lab, right? How does something like that even happen? There are a number of different possibilities. But one of the researchers I talked to about this said the simplest route was just that this is a laboratory that may have been studying a virus very similar to the one that causes COVID-19 or perhaps the ancestor to it

directly. And while sampling this in the wild, or while studying it in the laboratory, a researcher may have inadvertently gotten infected, and then went on to infect other people. Now, crucially, this doesn't impute any kind of malice or any kind of more sinister effect here. Like, you know, this is not necessarily mean that this was a bioweapon, this was an engineered virus. At its core, the simplest explanation is just that this was a bioweapon, this was an engineered virus. At its core, the simplest explanation is just that this was ordinary research being done on a virus that through an innocent accident ended up infecting people. Now, this is all speculation. There isn't evidence for any of these claims at this point, but it is a possibility. And there's a lot of speculation that goes far

beyond that, that this laboratory was conducting research on modifying viruses that could have created this virus in a laboratory and made it more virulent and ultimately allowed it to escape. Or that, you know, some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories are that this laboratory was also developing bioweapons or was doing other kinds of nefarious research. And there's no evidence for any of those claims. But the researchers who want to investigate this say that there is a possibility that there could have been an accident at the laboratory. And whether or not it's likely, it's a possibility that deserves being investigated, if only to foreclose it. And is proving or disproving this going to mean anything for

our current COVID-19 response? It's a bit moot for the current pandemic, but it's an important route to investigate because this is how the virus originally started spreading. And so if we can figure out how it came out, then we can take steps to mitigate the next potential outbreak. So if it originated in the wild, then we can figure out what the exposure route was and take steps to close that off. But if it originated in a laboratory, then it's really important to figure out just exactly how that accident happened and then take steps to ensure that laboratories around the world

who are doing this kind of research are taking steps to ensure that this doesn't happen again. I mean, when I first saw the lab leak theory floating around at the beginning of the pandemic, I have to say I was very skeptical of it. It seemed like a fringe idea, smelled potentially xenophobic. Who was embracing the theory at the time when we first started hearing about it? Generally, at the time, there was also an effort, particularly among some on the right, to pin this on China. We still don't know where it originated. I would note that Wuhan also has China's only biosafety level four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus. I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.

I think the United States, I think the world community needs to insist on accountability and consequences for China's responsibility here. And so a lot of different theories actually got collapsed into one. So everything from China deliberately engineered this as a bioweapon to the more innocent laboratory accident explanation were being promulgated by people who were trying to essentially shift the blame for losing control of the pandemic away from the United States and onto China. But one of the earlier proponents of this was CDC Director Robert Redfield, who said that he thought that a laboratory leak was among the possibilities. And how was the idea received by both scientists and government officials in those early days? It got a pretty mixed reception. So within the government, you know, you had some elements of the government who were eager to promote this as an idea and investigate this further as a way to sort of deflect responsibility from the pandemic abroad. But there were also circles within the government who were also eager to clamp down on this because they were worried about alienating China during a critical phase of the pandemic when they really needed international cooperation in order to figure out just what was going on.

And among scientists, many scientists were publicly saying that, you know, the natural origins of this virus were far more plausible and that this promotion of a laboratory leak was stemming from, you know, a xenophobic inclination and also that the evidence wasn't there. This morning, Dr. Anthony Fauci is shooting down theories that the coronavirus was man-made. He tells National Geographic everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species. But recently, we also saw some evidence that scientists were actually taking this pretty seriously in the early days of the pandemic. Just this week, we got some emails that were sent to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and his correspondence with other researchers, including those who were suspicious that this may have originally leaked from a

laboratory. I said that I think the most likely origin is a jumping of species. I still do think it is at the same time as I'm keeping an open mind that it might be a lab leak. One of those researchers later published a paper and effectively said that the natural origin was ultimately the more plausible story behind this virus rather than a laboratory leak. But he did take that possibility of a lab leak seriously and look into it. So then why is this idea making a comeback now? And why are people starting to take it seriously? I think part of it is that the political context has changed now that there is a different president in the White House. Now that we have also some distance from the early days of the pandemic, with the United States seeing its case numbers drop, there's a little bit of breathing room

and people are now asking, you know, how did this all get started to begin with an interest in revisiting that question. And in that light, you know, some scientists have started being a little bit more vocal saying that they haven't completely foreclosed the possibility that this originated from a laboratory that this didn't get completely foreclosed properly. So a lot of scientists say that they have some breathing room to take a step back and reassess. And another factor was also that the World Health Organization had conducted an investigation on the ground that officials said that they didn't get full cooperation from the Chinese government, that there was still some information that they wanted to look into that they didn't get full cooperation from the Chinese government, that there was still some information that they wanted to look into that they didn't get.

And so taken all together, there are some researchers that are saying there are still some important unanswered questions that they want to get the answers to. So how is the Biden administration talking about this? They are taking it pretty seriously. You know, the White House has also expressed some skepticism about the World Health Organization's investigations into this and have also expressed some frustration with China not being fully transparent about its laboratory procedures and some of the details about the early stages of the pandemic. And Biden himself has also, while not being a proponent of the lab leak theory, has been a bit more skeptical of China in general. We'll confront China's economic abuses,

counter its aggressive, coercive action to push back on China's attack on human rights, intellectual property, and global governance. So this is something sort of a culmination of all of that, that the White House wants to give this a more thorough look. So the Biden administration is showing skepticism of China and maybe even the World Health Organization's investigation. Does this mean that Trump was right?

I mean, Trump was, you know, all over the place when it came to the origins of this, saying that this was deliberately engineered by China. And it was wrapped up in a lot of the racism and xenophobia around the moment in the early stages of the pandemic. You know, he was using slurs to refer to Asian people and at that point was, you know, very eagerly motivated to deflect responsibility for handling the pandemic. Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus? Why do you keep using this? Because it comes from China. It's not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China. It's hard to separate the signal from the noise

from what he was saying. And even though the new administration might not be using the same racist language, it's still struggling to get China to cooperate with investigations. So will giving more credibility to the lab leak theory just strain U.S.-China relations further? It's something that's going to add more strain to it, certainly. You know, this is a delicate line to walk, you know, because the U.S. has some pretty substantial grievances with China ranging from trade to human rights. But in this case, this is something where the U.S. really needs cooperation with China because this is where the epicenter of the original outbreak was.

And this is where some of the best information is. Now, while there was criticism of the original World Health Organization investigation, there is a follow-up visit that's in the works right now during which researchers are going to do things like talk to patients on the ground, collect blood samples, and look into the history. And in order to be able to do that fieldwork, they really need good cooperation from the Chinese authorities. And that's part of the reason why some of the skeptics of the lab leak theory are also saying that it's not necessarily worth the effort to investigate it. Because if they burn the bridges here with the Chinese government and damage the goodwill that's there, they'll have a harder time answering the more plausible questions about where they think the

virus more likely originated. And they'll have a harder time securing the cooperation that's needed to answer some of these questions. So it sounds like we need a lot more information if we're going to definitively say what caused this pandemic. But if investigations do conclude that the origin of the pandemic that effectively shut down the world was a lab leak. Is that going to change how the scientific community does things or how labs work? I should hope so.

I mean, if this is something that definitely happened, then yes, this is something that should prompt a lot of reckoning about what kind of research is being done in labs and under what circumstances, you know. And it's also important to note that, you know, lab leaks have happened before in the past. And this is a phenomenon that scientists have grappled with before in the United States, in China and in other parts of the world. Coming up, the surprisingly frequent history of lab leaks. It's Today Explained. Thank you. back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

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Incidents that potentially expose people to pandemic pathogens happen surprisingly often. Kelsey Piper covers biosecurity for Vox. There is a reporting system within the U.S. for incidents that could have resulted in exposure. This is just for a small list of 70 pathogens that are of particular interest to the government. The coronavirus would not have been on that list. But even on that list, there's a report of an incident every couple of days. Equipment malfunctions, violations of safety procedures, PPE problems, most of them don't result in anyone getting sick.

But something going wrong happens quite often. What is an example of a very deadly disease basically getting out of the lab? So the last case of smallpox occurred in the wild in 1977. But then in 1978, Janet Parker, who was a photographer at a medical school in Birmingham, came down with what doctors initially thought was chickenpox, as after all, smallpox had been eradicated. He got sicker, and it became pretty obvious that he actually had smallpox somehow. And after some investigation, it was determined that the lab that he had been working in had a different part of the lab that was working with smallpox. and she had somehow gotten exposed. And even worse, she had exposed some immediate family members. 300 people were quarantined.

To take what may seem to others to be extreme measures, it's necessary to trace them, vaccinate them, and keep them under daily surveillance. It's only by measures of this kind that you can keep a situation under very, very tight clinical control. Luckily, it did not become a full-blown smallpox pandemic originating in the UK, but the lead researcher at the lab that leaked the smallpox... 48-year-old Professor Bedsen was found here at his home in Harbourn, Birmingham, just before midday today. Died by suicide shortly after Janet Parker got sick.

His wife brought in the local doctor who took him by ambulance to Birmingham Accident Hospital. And Janet Parker herself died. She hadn't been eating for some time or drinking, and her general weak state, I'm afraid, prevented her from resisting. The whole situation was just a reminder that if we've eradicated a disease in the wild, but we still have it in labs, we should not assume we're safe. Wow. But that was over 40 years ago.

I mean, we must have gotten it together since then, right? You might think so, but no. In 2014, while the FDA was packing up for a move between offices, they found a box full of vials of controlled substances, including six vials of smallpox, just sort of sitting in a corner. Tonight, real alarm about how six vials of smallpox, one of history's most feared viruses, were left in a low-security FDA laboratory for decades. I read through the incident report, and in a panic, they're kind of carrying this cardboard box around to their superiors with the vials of smallpox and other dangerous substances in there. This is just a disaster that had been waiting to happen. According to a later

investigation, we just lost track of the fact that we had these vials of smallpox. If this material is infectious and these vials had broken, what could have happened? There is a potential that someone could have contracted the disease. That suggests to me that we haven't really improved our procedures since 1978 such that nothing like that could ever happen again. We very much have procedures where things like this can happen. Why are dangerous diseases like smallpox kept around at all? Why wouldn't you just destroy them? There are a couple of justifications that people use for keeping them around. One is the U.S. and USSR both insisted on keeping versions of smallpox out of, I think, suspicion that the other country would use or deploy them and that we would need to have some on hand so that we could respond. Probably not by deploying it, but like through research. And some people have argued

that by doing what's called gain-of-function research on potentially pandemic pathogens. What that means are experiments that make the virus more dangerous or more deadly. Where we do research in a lab in order to make them more deadly or more transmissible or make them able to function in humans when they were originally animal, not human diseases, then we will anticipate the next pandemic. And this gain-of-function research will actually save lives by helping us see what's coming. It's controversial. During the Obama administration, a temporary ban on funding gain-of-function research was put in place after some of these safety incidents sort of raised questions about whether the cost-benefit analysis was borne out. Kelsey, there's something about this that just

feels so hard to believe. Like, scientific institutions failed to label a box with vials of smallpox, but then were also brilliant enough to come up with a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. Why is it so hard not to screw this up? So I think most of the time people don't screw up. Like most scientists are doing incredible work and most labs can operate without dangerous mistakes, But you need a lot of things to go right to have perfect lab safety. You need hardware to not malfunction. You need equipment to not malfunction. You need sort of luck in some cases to be on your side. We have a lot of labs that are handling potentially dangerous pandemics across the world. So it only takes one thing to go wrong.

Whereas like a lot of the amazing bio advances we've seen are the other way around. Like it only takes one thing to go right. You have lots of people working on a vaccine and if most of them fail, but a couple succeed, we get an incredible world changing vaccine. Whereas with pathogen containment, if almost everybody succeeds, but there's one failure, we potentially get catastrophe. You just have a completely different cost benefit analysis for any of these technologies that have potentially pandemic implications. Does this track record and the possibility of something going wrong lead you to any conclusions about whether or not this research is worth the risk?

Yes. So gain-of-function research was already pretty hotly debated before we got this most recent reminder of just how bad a pandemic can be and how catastrophic it can be for the world when something like this happens. And I think even before that, the case was just very clear that gain-of-function research on potentially pandemic pathogens in humans is not worth it. It does not pass a reasonable cost-benefit analysis. The small chance of something going wrong is just overwhelming. And we also don't see a track record of gain-of-function type research preventing pandemics. Like the hope with some gain-of-function

research was that by doing it, we could anticipate the next pandemic and sort of see what was going to come and design vaccines in advance. But that's not really the story of how we beat COVID. We didn't see it coming. We didn't benefit from gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. We didn't design the vaccine in advance. We designed the vaccine when the disaster happened. So I just don't see the case that this kind of research passes a cost-benefit analysis, and I would be really excited about a worldwide movement towards ending it. So now that the term lab leak is front and center, as people try to determine the origins of COVID-19, how optimistic are you feeling that gain of function research might be limited? I think even before the pandemic, we were hearing from a lot of scientists that they had profound reservations. And, you know, if lab leak, you know, whether or not we

ever learn more definitive information about whether that's what happened, sort of draws attention to this question. I think the public has largely not been aware that our taxpayer dollars are going to fund this gain of function research that is opposed by a lot of scientists and has a lot of risks. So I think now that there's more awareness of that, I do expect people to say, wait a second, there's so much promising bio-research out there that doesn't have these enormous hazards. What are we doing? Kelsey Piper writes for Vox's Future Perfect. Omer Irfan is a science reporter for Vox. I'm Halima Shah, sitting in for Sean Ramos-Furham, who will be back next week.

And the rest of the Today Explained team includes Miles Bryan, Muj Zaydi, Emily Sen, Victoria Chamberlain, and Will Reed. Matt Collette is our editor. Afim Shapiro is our engineer, and Paul Mounsey gave us some extra help this week. Amina Alsadi is our supervising producer, Liz Kelly Nelson is the veep of audio at Vox, and Jillian Weinberger is the deputy. Laura Bullard checks our facts,

and the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder makes our music. Noam Hassenfeld does too sometimes. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thanks for listening. Thank you. you