Where did Covid-19 come from? The case for a natural origin.

Forget talk of "the China virus" and a "lab leak". Bats and the trade in wild animals are a far more likely source of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, people’s faith in official narratives has been eroding. In their place has come what Don DeLillo in his novel Libra calls “theories that gleam like jade idols”. Employing 20/20 hindsight, these theories are seductive precisely they provide simple, easy-to-understand explanations for seismic political events.

But what happens when these theories go mainstream or, in the case of Covid-19, a quasi-conspiracy theory is adopted by the White House and becomes the official narrative of how the coronavirus pandemic started? This is what happened last week when information about Covid vaccines and testing was deleted from US government sites and replaced with an image of the 47th president beside the phrase, “Lab Leak: the true origins of Covid-19”.

It was nothing of the sort of course. Instead, the White House made a series of factually inaccurate claims about alleged “gain-of-function” studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including that the virus possessed a biological characteristic “not found in nature” and that data showed that all Covid cases stemmed from “a single introduction into humans.”

As Adam Kucharski and others have pointed out, both claims are easily refuted (see for instance this paper in Lancet Microbe describing how a supposedly unusual biological characteristic, known as a furin cleavage site, that some experts believe was engineered, has been found in several naturally occurring viruses, and this paper in Science showing that there were at least two separate introductions of the coronavirus).

Peak lab-leak

When an official government site becomes a propaganda platform for a weakly supported theory, we have surely reached peak “lab leak fever”, to co-opt the title of a new book by the Swiss science blogger Philipp Markolin. The problem is that the lab leak theory, like conspiracy theories alleging the coronavirus was the product of a secret Chinese biowarfare experiment, are appealing precisely because they seek to lay the blame on state actors operating behind the scenes.

As the Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei puts it in his new documentary, Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet out of Balance:

“We have a natural tendency to think that big events must have big causes, a tendency to assume that events with a significant impact are the result of deliberate acts by intentional and powerful agents.”

But, with science, we are always dealing with degrees of probability, and it often takes years for convincing evidence to emerge.

Khao Chong Phran Cave, Ratchaburi Province, southern Thailand. The cave is home to 2.8 millions of bats; guano collectors enter the cave every week. Credit: Adam Dean for Christian Frei Filmproductions

In this week’s Observer News Review, I interview Frei and speak to several of the protagonists in Blame, including Peter Daszak, a close colleague of Shi Zhengli, the Chinese scientist whose research into coronaviruses at WIV triggered the claims of a lab leak [if you value independent journalism please considering buying a copy at your local newsagent].

The former president of the New York-based NGO EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak has suffered a torrid five years being vilified by US politicians and the tabloid press for his supposed part in facilitating gain-of-function studies at WIV. His appearance before Congress last year was nothing short of a witch trial. The result is that rather than being applauded for his role in helping to identify zoonoses with the potential to “spill over” into humans, Daszak has been banned from applying for research grants for five years. None of this makes us safer or better able to respond to the next pandemic.

In what follows, I sketch an alternative scenario of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike the lab leak theory, for which there is zero physical evidence, the natural origin scenario is based on direct physical and epidemiological evidence and peer-reviewed scientific papers. To my mind it is a far more compelling scenario than the lab leak, one that starts with the premise that, like every pandemic before it, the virus of Covid-19, emerged from an animal reservoir.

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