166. The Covid Origin Story: Lab Leak or Animal Outbreak? (Ep 1)

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21:05David:Like your offer? Accept it. Schedule a pickup, and we'll come to you with a check in hand. Your car, your timeline, your terms. Visit Carvana.com to sell your car today. Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. So welcome back. We established that the idea of zoonotic natural, if you like, transmission is the broad consensus and the idea of a lab leak is seen as a conspiracy. And it's about April, late April 2020, when the intelligence community starts to get drawn in on this. And I guess that's because it is a question which is still being asked by politicians, by the public. Where did this come from?

21:47David:What does the intelligence community know? And I guess it's natural, isn't it? We think there might be a secret out there. We want to understand something. What do spies have to offer on answering that?

21:58Gordon:Well, you know, another theme of this question, the investigation around it will be that the Chinese government has not provided fulsome cooperation to really get to the bottom of this. And so, again, we've talked before the break about those early cases. You'd want to have access to the early cases in order to establish, have a better sense of the virus's origins. That's not happened by the spring. There's been a World Health Organization visit to China that seems to confirm the zoonotic hypothesis, but also makes, that's where the Chinese government wanted to land anyway. So there's this kind of, I think, growing sense that, well, someone's covering something up, right?

22:46Gordon:And maybe the Chinese are covering up the true origins of this, which then seems to make this a relevant question for intelligence agencies. So on April 30th of 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence puts out what I think is a very ambiguous statement that I think ultimately kind of backfires. Because the goal was to suppress, I think, the growing fear around lab leak theory. And the statement goes like this. It said the intelligence community concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified, but that the intelligence community would continue to assess whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a lab in Wuhan.

23:36Gordon:And so the statement's not saying much.

23:40David:But. But. But. I mean, I think it's a fascinating statement because it's a statement designed to basically say, well, we're looking at the different possibilities. But it is holding out the possibility of a lab leak, of an accident at a laboratory. In a sense, it's putting it on an equal footing. So it's bound to at least elicit more interest in it. And I guess this is where who else but Donald Trump enters the fray, because we should remind people, I guess, here that this is the tail end of the first Trump term. Again, another thing which people may have blocked out from their minds for various reasons, the undulations of American politics over these years.

24:22Gordon:I don't know what you're talking about, Gordon. I'm offended. I'm offended as a yank.

24:28David:but I guess one of the things to remember is at this point, particularly actually more in his first term, Donald Trump had been big on China, and I don't mean big in a kind of positive way, but he was pushing hard against China, trade deals particularly. The temperature was hotter, I think, than it is now, actually at the moment in the second Trump term when it came to China, and this is something which he is going to get involved in and where politics is going to meet this question of intelligence and the lab leak.

25:02Gordon:Because at a press briefing just hours after that ODNI, Director of National Intelligence statement, Trump immediately distances himself from the fairly, I'd say kind of nothing burger, but also balanced statement, factual statement that the intelligence community has put out, Trump distances himself from that pretty rapidly. He claims that he has seen classified information that the virus had come from a lab. And when asked what the evidence was, he said, I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that. Wow. So right off the bat, we have this unfortunate reality that the intelligence community's public assessments and statements aren't matching what the president's saying.

25:47Gordon:And so there is, I think, a real, if you're a kind of unbiased person who's looking at this, you're saying, well, either someone's lying to me or someone's hiding something, right? And is it the intelligence community? Is the intelligence community sitting on information in secret that doesn't match the public statements?

26:10David:Or is the president pushing his agenda against China?

26:14Gordon:Trump is basically saying that he buys the lab leak angle. And so maybe it's worth setting up what that hypothesis actually is. Now, it's interesting that there is a lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the WIV. It's been around since the 1950s. It's one of China's premier virology centers. Kind of looks like a college campus. Red brick buildings set beside this Mayabade Lake. And the WIV's signature work has long focused on bat-borne coronaviruses. It's an emphasis that really intensified after the 2003 SARS epidemic. The Institute has a very prominent, world-renowned scientist, Xi Zhang Li, who had the nickname Batwoman.

27:06Gordon:And the WIV housed one of the world's largest collections of bat samples and bat virus strains. There are only two other labs in the world that do anything similar. One of them is in Texas and one of them is in North Carolina. so right off the bat you have this very weird piece of circumstantial evidence coincidence that the world is is in the midst of a pandemic caused by a coronavirus and some of the the most cutting-edge coronavirus research in the world is being done at a nearby lab that is just a fact Now, one piece of Xi Zhang Li's work drew later scrutiny. And in a 2015 paper, she had showed that a spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells.

28:00Gordon:And this is research at the boundary of what is now called gain-of-function work, which is essentially research. And again, well, maybe, Gordon, you are the science explainer.

28:11David:I've done nuclear physics, but I'm afraid this is a little bit beyond me. But I find this gain-of-function work really interesting and slightly weird, because this is taking a virus and engineering it in a lab to see if you can make it more infectious. And this is something scientists do to understand what the risks are of a more infectious disease and potentially how you can treat it and deal with it. But I still find it extraordinary that they do that. And this will be one of, I think, the controversial aspects in the science world, is the fact that people are doing this kind of work, which to me is inherently risky.

28:51David:I mean, we hear so much about people trying to make bioweapons. Well, this is kind of trying to do that. Now, obviously, for good scientific defensive reasons and to try and protect people, but you can see the risks. And the fact that there are also other researchers, including from the West, who are involved in some of this work and who have an interest in presenting it as something positive and not seeing it as something dangerous or that could have led to the release of coronavirus will become part of the story. Because I think those scientists are very keen to say, don't look at this gain of function work as a problem because this is what we do and are worried about it.

29:27David:But what it shows is that they were doing that kind of work on coronaviruses and on bats here in this particular institute.

29:37Gordon:And then on top of all of that, there's real legitimate concerns about the safety measures that are being taken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I think this is in maybe April of 2020. So it's in the first few months of the pandemic. The Washington Post, a reporter named Josh Rogan at The Washington Post, breaks a story about concerns around those biosafety measures. And he got access to some State Department cables that had been categorized as sensitive but unclassified. And they are cables from basically the kind of science diplomats that are at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing who went on a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and reported back in these cables to Washington about what they'd seen.

30:24Gordon:And the cables warn about safety and management weaknesses there and actually propose that the U.S. might consider offering more attention and help. One cable warned that the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic. And one of the cables from January of 2018 read, quote, So during interactions with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory. Right. So there's there's there's worries.

31:06Gordon:Right. There's worries that predate the pandemic. Now, Xi Zangeli herself had also publicly acknowledged that up until the pandemic, all of her team's coronavirus research had been conducted in less secure biological safety level three and even biological safety level two labs. And BSL, biological safety level four, is like the absolute upper end. BSL two is like the equivalent of a doctor's office or a dentist's office. Wow. OK. Right. So they're doing coronavirus research. Now, we don't know exactly. Is it the gain of function stuff? Is it other research? But some of the coronavirus research is being done in facilities at the WIV that are, say, not particularly safe.

31:53Gordon:And there had also been, and I think this is also another piece of the mystery, collaboration between the WIV and military scientists attached to the PLA, the Chinese military, that goes back decades. There's over 50 co-authored papers. And frankly, on the face of it, you'd expect that, right? There's collaboration between the big national labs in the U.S. and the U.S. military. That's obvious. But this connection between the WIV and the PLA scientists, some of whom do work inside or adjacent to China's bioweapons program, raises the prospect of this worst case scenario, which is, was the virus engineered as a biological weapon?

32:44Gordon:And did it escape or, you know, in kind of the more conspiracy end of it, did the Chinese actually release it on purpose?

32:51David:So we end up with a series of competing hypotheses or potential options to explain what had happened. One is zoonotic origin, this idea is something happened at that wet market, maybe a bat or something else through another animal, eventually to humans. And that's why it spreads at Wuhan. And the other option is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is some kind of leak from there. And it is this weird coincidence. You both have a, you know, at the place where the virus emerges, you have both a wet market, which is a potential place, and you have an institute of virology. And I guess within the lab leak theory, as you put it there, you've got different possibilities, haven't you?

33:37David:You've got just that there happened to be an animal there and the virus escapes. Or you've got that they were engineering something with gain-of-function research and that that escapes. Or you've got the most extreme end, you've got the idea that they're building bioweapons to kill us all there and that that escaped. I mean, they all sit within lab leak, but they're all different, aren't they, to some extent?

34:01Gordon:And also, I mean, we should say, by the middle of 2021, the pandemic is an absolute catastrophe. Global confirmed deaths by that point are about 3 million against more than 140 million cases worldwide. And then when you look at the excess mortality estimates from the World Health Organization or The Economist, I mean, the real figure is probably well above the confirmed count. The pandemic has triggered the worst global downturn since the Great Depression. So the question of how did this happen and how might we prevent it from happening again is a really, really, really big question. and as we get into 2021 those lab leak theories and i think in particular the idea that it was it was zoonotic but had escaped from the lab somehow or that it had been engineered and escaped somehow are really starting to to gain steam because there's no host animal that's yet been discovered to prove the natural theory although that would be hard and i think is unlikely.

35:06Gordon:The Chinese, secondly, have aggressively blocked efforts at an investigation. The government had actually shut down the market. They'd ordered lab samples destroyed, tried to review any scientific research about COVID-19 ahead of publication. They'd expelled a team of Wall Street Journal reporters. So there's this question of like, what are they covering up? Why are the Chinese so insistent that we not find the origins of this pandemic? Right. And given China's authoritarian politics, there's this question of, well, if a leak had happened, would the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the scientists there have even been permitted to talk about it?

35:45Gordon:So there's much more focus on the Labley hypothesis. There's a big Vanity Fair article by Catherine Ebon that goes deep into the open source researchers who are investigating COVID's origins and the fight over this question inside the government. And I think really importantly, the scientific consensus is starting to break down a little bit because there's a former New York Times science writer named Nicholas Wade who puts out a big piece basically looking at the scientific clues both for and against a lab leak. You know, he quotes a really respected microbiologist named Dr. David Baltimore, who says that he believes that, and again, we won't go into the absolute details of the science, but he basically says that when you look at the actual, you know, virus genome, that there are particular signs that suggest it might have actually been manmade, right, or genetically modified in some way.

36:45Gordon:So you start to feel like this needs to be taken seriously. This can't be seen as a purely conspiracy theory going forward. And we should also say the public opinion on this is shifting. So the polling that's happening in the spring of 2021 shows that actually a majority of Americans believe that the lab leak theory was either definitely or probably true, like 59 percent, according to an economist YouGov poll done in May, June of 2021. And there are indications that US intelligence has picked up, I think, something useful, finally, to add to this debate.

37:25David:Finally, because the point is you have a mystery, but you would logically think there are answers out there that may be secret, particularly because the Chinese government is working so hard to prevent something coming out and to keep a tight lid on the investigation, on the discussion about this, which to me makes it a perfect question for intelligence agencies to be tasked to answer. It's not entirely clear to me that they were yet looking that hard, but at this point, it seems they are starting to pick things up.

38:01Gordon:You know, it's a classic example of there are different tiers of intelligence questions, Right. I mean, some are not as important as others. And what happens in the spring of 2021 is that this question rises not to the absolute top, I'm sure, but it gets to the point where Joe Biden, who is then president, having won the 2020 election and he's now in office in the spring of 2021, says, OK, let's have the intelligence community take a look at this and give us an answer. and he commissions a 90-day sprint to get to the bottom of the origins of the pandemic.

38:37David:So there, with the sprint underway, let's stop. And next time, we'll look at what an intelligence community can find out about this highly contentious and incredibly well-defining issue about the origins of the COVID virus. And we'll look at just how politicized that question and that debate becomes.

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39:30David:See you next time.

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