The China paradox at the heart of the pandemic
Those quick to blame China for the virus ignore American fingerprints in Wuhan
In an interview set to air Sunday night but already widely reported on, Donald Trump’s former CDC Director Robert Redfield made waves when he told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta that he believed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, escaped from a lab rather than originating from a Chinese seafood market.
This is not a new theory, but it’s one that NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and others have been keen to pour cold water on from the start. And that’s exactly what Fauci tried to do after Redfield’s comments began making news (note in the first linked article the headline says “Scientists are dubious”, as if Redfield, a virologist, is not a scientist while Fauci, an immunologist, apparently is). The lab escape hypothesis has been portrayed as a wild conspiracy theory devoid of evidence, a right-wing effort to tar the Chinese Communist Party, and a shameful diversion at a time when all attention should be focused on ending the pandemic rather than trying to understand its origins. In other words, “move along; nothing to see here.”
The official story initially focused on the possibility that the virus jumped from bat to human, or perhaps from pangolin to human, via a seafood market in Wuhan, China. This narrative began to break down early on when infected individuals who had no connection to the market, nor to anyone who had connection to it, began to pop up in Wuhan and surrounding areas.
Then in January 2020 a group of researchers in India preprinted a non-peer-reviewed study in which they gingerly suggested that the virus might be a lab-engineered bioweapon because it appeared to contain genetic “inserts” almost identical to parts of the HIV virus grafted onto a coronavirus backbone, specifically in the area of the so-called “spike protein” that makes the new virus so efficient at attaching to and infecting human cells. The outrage from certain scientific quarters at such a suggestion was so great that the researchers were forced to withdraw the paper before publication.
Intriguingly, a COVID-19 vaccine candidate under development in Australia that was said to have been promising had to be abandoned in December after it was discovered to be causing “false positive” results on HIV tests in trial participants. The explanation given was that the vaccine “contained small fragments of an HIV protein, which helped stabilize the vaccine” and that “some of the participants developed antibodies against these fragments.”
If you think this idea of grafting parts of one virus onto another sounds too Frankenstein to be real life, you should understand that that’s exactly how so-called “viral vector” vaccines, such as the Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccines, work. They take another type of virus, an adenovirus, which is one of the viruses that can cause the common cold, genetically remove the portion of the virus that causes sickness, and then “graft on” to the modified adenovirus backbone the genetic instructions for the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The adenovirus used in this manner is called a “vector”. The J&J and Sputnik V vaccines use human adenoviruses as vectors, while the AstraZeneca one uses a chimpanzee adenovirus. The adenovirus is then the vehicle for infecting the human cell and introducing the genetic instructions for your own cell to produce the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on its surface, eliciting the immune response and production of antibodies.
In any event, once the notion was out there that the emergence of this novel coronavirus might represent an engineered bioweapon or some other form of lab-originated pathogen, it wouldn’t go away. So a group of 27 prominent public health scientists were recruited to sign their names to a letter in the prestigious journal The Lancet condemning the idea of a lab origin as conspiracy theory and misinformation. “Scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they wrote.
A bit of a red herring, that. Few dispute that coronaviruses originated in wildlife. The question is whether this particular one was released from a lab, intentionally or unintentionally, after either naturally jumping from an animal to a human while being studied or after being bio-engineered to make it more contagious or virulent. Some have explicitly said the former (natural jump in a lab, followed by accidental release) is most likely. And a bio-engineered virus wouldn’t necessarily mean a bio-weapon. So-called “gain-of-function” research could theoretically be tinkering with viruses just to understand and plan for future natural mutations or zoonosis (jumping from animal to human) events. As a matter of fact, gain-of-function research is exactly what was happening with coronaviruses in China, as we’ll see.
Nevertheless, officials as eminent as Fauci himself used the Lancet letter, as well as a study supporting the official version, to airily dismiss the very idea that a lab escape, whether accidental or intentional, could have been the origin of the pandemic. But when you look closely at the established facts about the rise of this novel coronavirus and the provenance of the Lancet letter, a disturbing picture emerges. And it’s a picture that potentially implicates more countries than just China.
For starters, one of the things opponents of the lab origin theory have to contend with is the highly coincidental location where COVID-19 was first detected and spread. A city of some ten million people, Wuhan just happens to be the only city in all of China that has what’s called a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab, a facility with the highest designation recognized by the World Health Organization for handling agents that are highly transmissible and severely disease-causing or fatal to humans. The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) BSL-4 lab opened only in 2015.
It’s true that while bats harboring coronaviruses exist all over the world, it’s primarily only in Asia, certain Pacific Rim countries, and some parts of Africa that bats are consumed as food. Yet, even knowing that, what are the odds that COVID-19 would just happen to first appear in the very city that hosts China’s only BSL-4 lab, a lab known to have handled and done research on bat coronaviruses? China is a country of 1.4 billion people, and people in Wuhan are no more likely to consume bats than people in many other parts of the country, or, for that matter, other parts of Asia, by far the world’s most populous continent. The case seems even more slam-dunk when you consider that WIV had long been conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.
As a reminder, “gain-of-function” refers to biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. It’s done ostensibly to study the possible mechanisms of and to protect against future natural zoonosis incidents or to protect against bioweapons introduced by other countries. However, such research done for defensive purposes is indistinguishable from the type of research that would be done for offensive purposes to create a bioweapon. The same steps would be taken.
Anthony Fauci and others championed coronavirus gain-of-function research when it was being conducted in the United States. But when it was halted here in 2014 due to safety concerns after numerous pathogen escape accidents, the research quickly shifted to the new BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. Fauci’s NIAID began funding scientists at WIV for gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. The US spent $3.7 million funding such research in China for five years, followed by another $3.7 million commitment over six years beginning in 2019, which at completion would be a total of $7.4 million in US funding of coronavirus gain-of-function research at Wuhan.
It is simply astounding that members of Congress and so-called journalists in the US don’t constantly question Fauci and other National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials about their own direct funding of coronavirus gain-of-function research in the very city in China where SARS-CoV-2 supposedly jumped to humans and initiated the COVID-19 pandemic that has turned the world upside down.
There’s more. The organization that NIH ran all the funds through for gain-of-function research in Wuhan was a non-profit research group called EcoHealth Alliance, run by the group’s president, an expert on disease ecology named Peter Daszak. Remember the letter mentioned earlier by 27 scientists attempting to refute the lab escape theory of SARS-CoV-2? One of the 27 who signed onto the letter was none other than Peter Daszak. If that weren’t enough, later investigations and reviews of leaked internal emails from EcoHealth Alliance revealed that Daszak was not only a signatory to the letter but also spearheaded the effort to draft it and have the other 26 sign it. In fact, he himself drafted it. The leaked emails reveal an effort to obfuscate the fact that the letter was coming primarily from EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak and to make it appear as “simply a letter from leading scientists.”
So here we have the president of the very organization receiving millions in US-government funding for coronavirus gain-of-function research in the very Chinese city where COVID-19 originated initiating and coordinating the effort to bury notions of a lab origin. And he does so by making it look like dozens of scientists unconnected with such research spontaneously wrote a letter to express their support for China-based researchers, which would include him and his organization, and disdain for “wild conspiracy theories” that could implicate…him and his organization. These are facts easily obtained by anyone with an internet browser, yet no one ever points this out in government or media. It’s astonishing.
If you think it impossible that US government institutions, or at least individuals tied to such institutions, could be involved in such shady things, you haven’t studied history closely enough. Few remember well the spate of anthrax attacks against certain elected officials and prominent media figures shortly after 9/11 in the US. The letters laced with anthrax powder contained messages clearly intended to lead people to believe they were part of the ongoing 9/11 attacks and were being sent by Islamic radicals. They included statements like, “We have anthrax. Prepare to die. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” Trigger-happy officials such as Senator John McCain also claimed the letters had links to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Some of the elected officials the letters were sent to were Democratic holdouts on the USA PATRIOT Act who were objecting to the all-encompassing powers the proposed law would give the burgeoning security-surveillance state. In the end, it passed.
The FBI finally admitted that the anthrax had all originated from the US Army research lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. They found a convenient scapegoat in the form of Fort Detrick scientist Bruce Edwards Ivins, on whom the FBI had focused their attention when Ivins died of an overdose of acetaminophen in July 2008, ostensibly a suicide. Federal prosecutors posthumously declared Ivins the sole culprit the next month and the FBI formally closed their investigation a couple of years later. However, the National Academy of Sciences released a report in 2011 that cast doubt on the conclusion that Ivins was the culprit.
All that is to say I don’t think it should be considered outside the realm of possibility that Anthony Fauci knew exactly what he was talking about when he confidently stated in a speech at the Georgetown University Medical Center in 2017: “[…] If there’s one message that I want to leave with you today based on my experience […] is that there is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming [Trump] administration in the arena of infectious diseases […] but also there will be a surprise outbreak.”
Critics will say that Fauci was simply stating the obvious — that disease outbreaks happen all the time and no government ever seems fully prepared for them. I accept that that benign interpretation is possible, and maybe we should assume it’s the correct one. After all, according to a soon-to-be-published hagiography masquerading as a children’s book, this 37-year bureaucrat who controls millions in subsidies to the pharmaceutical industry has now become “America’s doctor”.
I don’t know whether SARS-CoV-2 was developed as a bioweapon. I don’t know whether it escaped from a lab or jumped to humans in some other, natural setting. If it was lab-created, I don’t know if EcoHealth Alliance had anything to do with it, or if it was some project being conducted solely by the Chinese, outside the purview of research intended solely for defensive, public health purposes. But I do know that there’s lots of circumstantial evidence that could lead one to believe, and in fact does lead me to believe, that something nefarious was going on in Wuhan, that those involved are now trying to cover it up, and that if they fail to do so they’ll do everything they can to pin the blame solely on China.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.