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The great Covid cover-up

As the pandemic enters its third year, questions about Covid-19’s origins appear increasingly distant. But if we are to forestall another coronavirus pandemic in the 21st century, understanding the causes of the current one is imperative.

Already, Covid-19 has caused more than 5.4 million deaths. But that’s just the beginning: the toll of the pandemic includes increased rates of obesity, unemployment, poverty, depression, alcoholism, homicide, domestic violence, divorce and suicide. And, as the Omicron variant fuels record infection rates and disrupts economies in many parts of the world, pandemic fatigue is morphing into pandemic burnout.

Our chances of eliminating Covid-19 now appear remote. But, as we attempt to figure out how to live with the virus, we must also identify the missteps—accidental and otherwise—that led us here. And that means, first and foremost, turning a critical eye towards China.

It is well known that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime censored early reports that a new, deadly coronavirus had emerged in Wuhan and hid evidence of human-to-human transmission, thereby enabling a local outbreak to become a global calamity. What remains to be determined is whether Covid-19 emerged naturally in wildlife or was leaked from a lab—namely, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Here, too, China has embraced obfuscation rather than transparency. Xi’s regime has blocked an independent forensic inquiry into Covid-19’s origins, arguing that any such investigation amounts to ‘origin-tracing terrorism’. After Australia called for a probe into China’s handling of the outbreak, Xi’s government punished it with a raft of informal sanctions.

China had help covering up its bad behaviour. Early in the pandemic, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus parroted the Chinese government’s talking points and praised its handling of the outbreak. Instead of verifying China’s claims, the WHO broadcast them to the world.

Yet, far from condemning this failure of global health leadership, France and Germany took the lead in nominating Tedros for a second term at the WHO’s helm, and the United States decided not to field a candidate to challenge him. Having run unopposed, Tedros will now lead this critical institution for another five years.

The West also helped China to divert attention from the lab-leak hypothesis. Not only are several labs in the West engaged in research to engineer super-viruses; Western governments have ties to the WIV—a French-designed institute where US-funded research has been carried out. Both the National Institutes of Health and USAID have issued grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a group studying bat coronaviruses in collaboration with WIV researchers.

The US government hasn’t disclosed the full extent of its funding to WIV projects, let alone explained why its agencies would fund research at an institution linked to the Chinese military. A January 2021 State Department fact sheet proclaimed that the US has ‘a right and obligation to determine whether any of our research funding was diverted to secret Chinese military projects at the WIV’. But why was that risk deemed acceptable in the first place?

The conflicts of interest surrounding the lab-leak hypothesis distorted early discussions about the origins of Covid-19. A letter published in The Lancet in February 2020, signed by a group of virologists, is a case in point. The letter ‘strongly condemned’ those ‘suggesting that Covid-19 did not have a natural origin’. The message was clear: to lend any credence to the possibility of a lab leak would be unscientific.

The letter turned out to have been organised and drafted by the president of EcoHealth Alliance. But by the time the conflicts of interest came to light, it was too late. Major US news organisations and social-media giants were treating the lab-leak hypothesis as a baseless conspiracy theory, with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter censoring references to a lab accident.

It should always have been clear that the lab-leak hypothesis had merit: the 2004 outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in Beijing resulted from such a leak. Instead, frank discussion of the possibility was suppressed until May last year, when US President Joe Biden announced that a lab accident was one of ‘two likely scenarios’ on which US intelligence agencies would focus as they carried out a 90-day inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.

By then, however, Chinese authorities had had plenty of time to cover whatever tracks there may have been. Add to that China’s unwillingness to cooperate in a probe, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the inquiry’s results were inconclusive.

But the exercise was apparently enough to convince Biden to take the pressure off China. Despite pledging to ‘do everything [possible] to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world’, he didn’t extend the intelligence inquiry and has since avoided any reference to the pandemic’s origins.

Xi announced last September that Chinese labs handling deadly pathogens would face closer scrutiny, but he continues to denounce any insinuation that the coronavirus could have been leaked. Meanwhile, China is profiting from the pandemic; exports are surging. The country has capitalised on the crisis to advance its geopolitical interests, including by stepping up its territorial aggression from East Asia to the Himalayas.

But a reckoning may yet come. Nearly three-quarters of Americans now believe that it’s ‘likely’ that Covid-19 was leaked from the WIV. And as China’s neo-imperialist ambitions have become clear, unfavourable views of China have reached record highs in many advanced economies. If world leaders wanted a mandate to pursue further inquiries into the pandemic’s origins, it’s safe to say they have it.

This isn’t the first made-in-China pandemic—the country produced SARS in 2003, the Asian flu in 1957, the Hong Kong flu in 1968 and the Russian flu in 1977. If the world keeps letting China off the hook, it won’t be the last.

So, where did Covid-19 come from?

The arrival of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, which has killed 3.5 million people and counting, should have been the moment when the World Health Organization came into its own.

This is its primary rationale and justification: to be the world’s frontline agency for preparing for, hopefully averting, but otherwise mitigating and managing a deadly new pandemic. Instead, it finds itself lurching from one crisis of credibility to another and taking trust in public health institutions and experts as collateral damage.

In May, an independent review panel set up by the WHO branded the confused global response to the pandemic as a ‘toxic cocktail’.

The WHO was initially tardy in acknowledging and alerting the world to the coronavirus outbreak, deferring dangerously to China’s sensitivities and pronouncements.

Since then it has issued constantly mutating, confusing and sometimes downright inconsistent messaging on human–human transmission, mask efficacy, the cost–benefit equation of lockdowns, testing protocols and outpatient treatment options for infected people. Now the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, long derided as fanciful and possibly racist, is gaining increasing mainstream traction.

In April 2020, Tom Sauer and I published an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists musing about the implications of intensive-care unit bed capacity as the new norm for assessing the acceptable risk threshold for nuclear weapons. That debate is not germane to today’s topic.

In its original formulation, our article began: ‘A novel coronavirus emerged from the wet markets of Wuhan, China, late last year by hopping across from animals to humans.’ The bulletin proposed the following change: ‘A novel coronavirus emerged from either the wet markets or biosafety laboratories of Wuhan.’ I demurred, relying primarily on the firmly stated conclusion of the WHO. Experts dismissed outright the idea of the deliberate weaponisation of a previously known virus, or that it had been manipulated in a lab.

The published article read: ‘… hopping in one way or another from other animals to humans’.

I felt vindicated two days later. In a press release on 30 April 2020, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated: ‘The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.’

Now I feel deflated, thanks in no small measure to an article in the bulletin on 5 May by science writer Nicholas Wade—back to that in a moment.

On 19 February 2020, 27 prominent scientists wrote an open letter in The Lancet condemning ‘conspiracy theories’ that questioned the natural origins of the virus. When Republican Senator Tom Cotton suggested early last year that the virus might have come from the Wuhan lab, he was buried under a media pile-on from the New York Times (‘Cotton repeats fringe theory’), the Washington Post (‘Cotton keeps repeating an already debunked conspiracy theory’), The Guardian (‘floated a conspiracy theory’) and CNN (‘the height of irresponsibility from a public official’).

A possible explanation for the media groupthink on the lab-leak theory has been dubbed ‘Trump derangement syndrome’—a view that everything Donald Trump did as president was wrong. In an interview with National Geographic on 5 May 2020, Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, explained that ‘this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated’. Instead, the evidence ‘strongly indicates’ that it ‘evolved in nature and then jumped species’. Chris Cillizza wrote on the CNN website on the same day that ‘Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus.’

In an interview with the Straits Times in May 2020, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan was adamant that, based on genome markers, the novel coronavirus was not synthesised in a lab. ‘What we do know’, she insisted, ‘is that this is a naturally occurring virus, that it was not artificially synthesised in the lab’.

On 15 September, Li-Meng Yan, a virologist, told Tucker Carlson on Fox News: ‘I can present solid scientific evidence to our audience that this virus, Covid-19 SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually is not from nature. It is a man-made virus created in the lab.’ PolitiFact gave her a ‘pants on fire’ fact-check rating. The WHO team reported in February that it was ‘extremely unlikely’ that the virus originated in a lab.

However, scientists have still not been able to substantiate the natural origin claim.

In his long and explosive article for the bulletin, Wade, who has written on science for Nature, Science and the New York Times, carefully explains why the most likely origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab. His analysis is backed by his now former New York Times science reporter colleague Don McNeill, despite initial deep scepticism. PolitiFact has now retracted its ‘pants on fire’ criticism.

Meanwhile, the plot has thickened about the role of the WIV. In two articles on 23 and 24 May, the Wall Street Journal detailed fresh US intelligence assessments based on WIV researchers struck by flu in November 2019.

Three scientists in a highly protected lab, in the same week, falling sick enough to require hospitalisation is a statistical improbability as a chance event. Adding to suspicions, the WIV has refused to share the raw data, safety logs and lab records on its extensive research on coronaviruses in bats.

There are unanswered questions also about another incident in southwest China in 2012, when six miners fell sick and three died. WIV scientists, called in to investigate, collected samples from bats in the mine and identified several novel coronaviruses.

Among those demanding a proper investigation into the origins of Covid-19 are 18 scientists  who’ve called on China’s labs and agencies to ‘open their records’.

At a Senate hearing on 11 May, Fauci conceded that the lab-leak hypothesis was a real possibility and said he was ‘totally in favor of a full investigation of whether that could have happened’.

To his credit, even WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in March that the lab-leak possibility required further investigation. At the meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva on 25 May, the US called for independent and transparent new studies on when, where and how the pandemic began.

However, the WHO cannot legally compel China to agree to and cooperate with another international inquiry, and there’s virtually no chance of China capitulating to US-led Western pressure to do so.