COVID escaped from a lab, Canadian scientist explains

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As the US Congress continues its investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic, with Dr. Anthony Fauci testifying on Monday, a Canadian scientist took to the New York Times to underscore his claim that the virus likely escaped from a lab.

Alina Chan is a molecular biologist specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is a post-doctoral fellow. She is also co-author with science writer Matt Ridley of the 2021 book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.

Her guest essay in the Sunday’s Times, titled ‘Why the pandemic probably started in a lab, in 5 key points’, takes readers through the so-called lab leak hypothesis. It was a minority view among scientists, many of whom had long believed that COVID spread to the human population from infected animals, much like the 2003 SARS outbreak or the 2012 MERS coronavirus.

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A random starting point

Her first point is one that has raised the eyebrows of many scientists and scientists alike: “The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic originated in Wuhan, the city that is home to the world’s leading research laboratory for SARS-like viruses.” .

It’s probably just a coincidence, but Chan sees it as one point among several that support her theory. She points out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been hunting for SARS-like viruses for more than 10 years, led by Dr. Shi Zhengli, whose team made several trips to Yunnan province, more than 1,500 kilometers away, to collect bats. .

When the pandemic began, she adds, Dr. Shi publicly questioned whether the outbreak could have originated in her lab.

A leaked document about a similar virus

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Chan’s second point: A year before the epidemic began, the Wuhan Institute, in collaboration with partners in the US, proposed creating viruses with the same defining characteristics as SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 pandemic virus.

While her reasoning is quite technical, part of it boils down to a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project called Defuse, which aimed to create a SARS-like virus with a unique feature called a furin cleavage site that would increase its infectivity in humans. . The SARS-CoV-2 virus has this characteristic, she says, and genetic data suggests that it acquired this characteristic even before the pandemic began.

“Finally, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site matching the description in the Wuhan Institute’s Defuse proposal caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after what proposal was drafted,” she writes.

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Substandard laboratory safety protocols

Chan’s third point is that the Wuhan lab was not capable of containing an airborne virus as infectious as the one that started the pandemic.

Laboratories working with live viruses can operate at one of four biosafety levels, with BSL 1 being the lowest level of protection and BSL 4 the most stringent. Chan notes that two years after the pandemic, a scientist working at a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan was infected with the COVID virus.

However, she adds that an initial version of the Defuse proposal suggested that the Wuhan lab would operate at BSL-2 for cost savings. She then quotes US virologist Ralph Baric’s note to another scientist who told him that the work in Wuhan would be done according to BSL-2 standards and that would be enough: “Yes, China has the right to set its own policy. Think that was adequate containment if you will, but don’t expect me to believe it. Also, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this amount of BS.”

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Market transmission lacks evidence

Chan makes another point, contradicting what was once a broad consensus that COVID-19 came from an animal at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market and saying the claim is “not supported by solid evidence.”

In part, this is because Chinese investigators initially assumed the market was the source, so they weren’t looking for anything to challenge that theory. But Chan also points out that Chinese authorities blocked reporting of early non-market cases and destroyed some early patient samples in the name of biosecurity, making it difficult to reconstruct the earliest spread of the disease.

“No infected animal has ever been confirmed on the market or in its supply chain,” she adds. “Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan directly points to its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.”

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Key information is still missing

Chan’s final point is that the key evidence that would be expected if COVID arose from the wildlife trade is still missing, despite intense search focused on the animal trade and the people connected to the market. “Investigators either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if COVID-19 arose from the wildlife trade,” she notes.

“Whether the pandemic began on a lab bench or a market stall,” Chan writes in her conclusion, “it is undeniable that US federal funding helped build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute , as well as contributed. to research that increased them. Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to emerge. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.”

Chan’s suggestion is that a thorough and credible investigation would deter future acts of negligence and help restore public trust in science and government. “It would also show the world that US leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic might be.”

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