COVID theories - part 2

April 2022

Part II - Some key players in the Covid-19 drama

President of Ecohealth Alliance, Dr Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for 15 years, declared long ago that "Most pandemics ... originate in animals". Since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak he has claimed any suggestions that the virus might have come from a lab are "preposterous", "baseless", "crackpot", "conspiracy theories" and "pure baloney" because such "lab accidents are extremely rare", and "have never led to large scale outbreaks".

REALITY CHECK

How viruses can, and do, escape from laboratories

Scenarios leading to a virus leaking out of a laboratory include:

• lab-workers who have been scratched or bitten by an infected animal
• an accidental injury from a contaminated needle or scalpel
• escaped, infected animals
• inadequately contained aerosol experiments
• unnoticed failure of containment equipment
• incorrect or defective waste disposal

In the last 50 years there have been 16 known serious viral escapes from laboratories: that's one potential pandemic every three years. Three of these involved UK laboratories. (Many readers will remember the foot-and-mouth disease which leaked from the Pirbright Institute laboratories in 2007.)

The first theory, which only came to light two years after the pandemic emerged, seems to have been hatched by leading US and UK scientists. E-mails early in the Covid-19 outbreak reveal that the very real possibility of a laboratory leak as the source was pushed out of the debate for purely political reasons. They revealed concerns such as that it would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular, and that the 'debate' would become reframed as an 'accusation' which would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties.

In a paradoxical proposal for a conspiracy to stop people believing there was a conspiracy, Frances Collins, former director of the US National Institute of Health (NIH), suggested that "a swift convening of experts (a conspiracy?) in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony". Collins, having channelled NIH funds through EcoHealth Alliance into the WIV gain-of-function experiments, clearly risked being directly linked both to the source and to the creation of the Covid-19 virus.

Then, there was a paradoxical conspiracy to close down any debate on the possible laboratory origin of Covid-19 by branding it a conspiracy. This involved 27 scientists who put their names to a letter which was published in the Lancet in February 2020. The gist of this letter was that anyone suggesting Covid-19 does not have a natural origin is a conspiracy theorist spreading rumours and misinformation, creating fear and prejudice, jeopardising global collaboration and the rapid, open and transparent sharing of data on the outbreak.

The orchestrator of this anti-conspiracy conspiracy was Peter Daszak, aided by the Lancet, a highly respected UK scientific journal. As president of EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak had channelled funds into the WIV gain-of-function experiments and clearly risked being directly linked both to the source and to the creation of the Covid-19 virus. At the time of the publication of the letter, Daszak failed to declare this conflict of interest, and it was only sixteen months after the letter was published that he was persuaded to allow the Lancet to correct this omission. His excuse seems to have been that he's an expert on bats in China and his view should be listened to (... and definitely not debated, doubted or challenged?). The letter did, however, contribute to the desired effect of diverting all scientific attention onto a hunt for a reservoir of the Covid-19 virus in a wild animal.

A couple of months after Daszak's conspiracy-busting letter, an assessment of the likelihood of the Covid-19 virus being the "product of purposeful manipulation" was published in Nature Medicine correspondence. This was based on, for example, computer modelling of how close the virus' genome was to the predicted 'ideal' virus which a scientist would have constructed (the answer was not very), and an analysis of what additional, chance events were deemed necessary for the virus to have been created in a laboratory (immediately dismissed because there was no published supporting evidence). The authors concluded that they did "not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible".

This was an odd publication because back in January 2020 the lead author led a group of virologists who advised the director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, that they found the Covid-19 virus "inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory": in other words it was likely the new disease didn't come from nature and could have come from a lab. Yet, within three days of a hastily convened meeting with Fauci, the same author was singing a different tune, deriding as a "crackpot theory" the idea that the virus was "somehow engineered with intent" because it was "demonstrably not the case". Fauci, having channelled NIH funds through EcoHealth Alliance into the WIV gain-of-function experiments, clearly risked being directly linked both to the source and to the creation of the Covid-19 virus.

Also odd about the publication was the way it has been used by the scientific community. Computer modelling can provide useful predictions to guide scientific enquiry, but it's not evidence, while absence of evidence (especially published evidence, which will only happen if there is the will, the funds and the time to do the research) isn't evidence of absence. Indeed, the authors didn't entirely sell their souls to the Fauci conspiracy because what their letter actually indicated was "More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favour one hypothesis (about the origin of the virus) over another". And "Obtaining related viral sequences from animal sources would be the most definitive way of revealing viral origins". Despite this clearly stated awareness of the limitations of the analysis, the Nature Medicine letter somehow became a key citation which somehow provided definitive evidence which ended all speculation about the possible genetically engineered nature of the Covid-19 virus, and somehow proved it could only be the product of natural evolution.