What happened in Wuhan?

The alternative to the theory of zoonotic origin is, as science writer Nicholas Wade puts it, “the common-sense assumption that an epidemic outbreak in Wuhan may be related to a Wuhan lab that is cooking the novel virus of maximum danger under unsafe conditions.” . “Where COVID has come from,” Mr Wade makes the case that the evolutionary history and anatomy of COVID-19, as well as research and safety records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, show that the virus can be transmitted to humans. was modified by and survived the laboratory.

Mr. Wade, a former new York Times Reporters have never shied away from controversy, and when the text of this book was originally published online in May, it prompted other members of the media to take a closer look at the evidence for the “lab-leak” hypothesis. The consensus of the establishment was questioned. is becoming acceptable.

In the winter of 2020, Mr Wade noted, leading scientists circulated influential papers arguing that only a natural origin was possible. These were “political, not scientific, statements, yet they were surprisingly effective,” writes Mr. Wade. “Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that the consensus of experts had made the decision to avoid the laboratory out of question or highly improbable.” President Trump’s support for the lab-leak theory stoked public debate in many ways, as partisan polarization often does. But it was always possible to find dissenting voices in the media as well as in some corners of the Academy, and the Biden administration eventually allowed that Mr Trump and other Republican officials might have a point.

In May this year, following the publication of Mr Wade’s essay, President Biden gave US spies 90 days to prepare a report on the origins of COVID-19. Published in August, the nearly 500-word declassified report concluded that the intelligence community “remains divided on the most likely origin.” A 17-page follow-up in October provided some additional details but came back to the same conclusion. No wonder scientists, activists and journalists keep searching for answers.

In “Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19,” molecular biologist Alina Chan and author Matt Ridley assemble perhaps the most comprehensive case for lab-leak theory currently available. In May 2020, Mr. Ridley was researching an essay in this newspaper and came into contact with Ms. Chan, who co-authored a study implying that the virus had been “since the time it was first detected in Wuhan”. was well adapted to humans.” Mr Ridley wrote that “the simple story of an animal in the market being infected by a bat, which then infected several humans.” Since then Ms. Chan and Mr. Ridley have been making a case for what COVID-19 can do. Accidentally came out of a lab in Wuhan.

The authors also highlight flaws in the arguments for natural origin. “The SARS virus was isolated in March 2003, its genome was sequenced in April, and animal sources were identified in markets in May,” he notes. Not so with SARS-CoV-2. “Today, with the world nearing two years of outbreaks, much better technology and similar outbreak circumstances, we still don’t know where the first patients were caught” by COVID-19.

The authors attribute “help from a particularly tenacious, loose confederation on Twitter, which calls itself the ‘Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19,’ or hardwired.” At one point, for example, “a Spanish business consultant doing his extracurricular time” dug into the work of two prominent scientists who have been the strongest defenders of zoonotic theory: Peter Daszak of the Ecohealth Alliance, whose Wuhan Institute of Health Virology had extensive connections, and star WIV researcher Shi Zhengli. It seems that about half a decade ago, they discovered eight viruses “very closely related to viruses that are causing epidemics and brought them to Wuhan more than a thousand kilometers away.” Researchers have since presented their optimistic interpretation of those viruses. The strong suggestion is that not all scientists working in this field are clear about their research.

Like Ms Chan and Mr Ridley, Australian journalist Shari Markson says she is open to a zoonotic origin but apparently favors the accidental laboratory-leak explanation. Where “viral” reads as a scientific controversy, Ms. Markson’s “What Really Happened in Wuhan” is a fast-paced narrative. An intrepid film studio might find a global audience for the whodunit presented by Ms. Markson – although Hollywood, heavily dependent on China’s film-watching population, probably won’t go for it.

Reviewing an initial interview with a dissenting scientist, Ms Markson admitted that a year later “I was embarrassed to hear that I confused scientific terms in my questions.” While she doesn’t shy away from the technical discussions that lead to this debate, her best reporting comes from interviews with Trump administration officials who relate how they handled the early days of the pandemic, while the latter balked at the lab-leak theory. fighting internally.

“What Really Happened in Wuhan” also sheds light on how funding for the National Institutes of Health Moratorium for Gain-of-Function Research has been withheld in 2014 – in which laboratory scientists can identify the virus as more dangerous or transmissible. Can Create – Expired in 2017. was established by the Obama Administration. A temporary ban during a policy review. Ms Markson reports that some top Trump administration officials were apparently not aware that NIH-funded research had resumed. “What was even more terrifying,” she writes, “was not only was the NIH funding gain-of-function research in the United States—but it was funding research in China, where it had no oversight and it There was no way of knowing how safe the laboratories were where these risky experiments were taking place.”

All of these books contain many pages examining the details of the laboratory-leak hypothesis and the debate in the West about it. In “Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and the quest for biotech supremacy”, British journalist Jasper Baker goes much further. Mr Baker, who spent 18 years in Beijing as a correspondent for the South China Morning Post and other publications, provides useful context about the complex history of US-China relations. In particular, he brings to the surface what is often a subtext in these debates about virus research: the ghost of biological warfare.

During the Korean War, this was known as the “germ war”—and the Chinese Communists, in their propaganda, accused the Americans of practicing it. “This is one reason why Western intelligence agencies are skeptical or at least skeptical about official accounts of the origin of the virus and the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” writes Mr. Baker. “While the Chinese and Soviet governments put forward a completely false narrative of their enemies waging war with bio-weapons against civilians, they actively pursued their own germ warfare programs covertly.”

Mr Baker also points out that, even though SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a Chinese laboratory, Beijing could never accept responsibility. “National shame could spell the end of the seventy-year rule of the Chinese Communist Party,” he suggests. “It would trigger a political earthquake that would start in China but spread around the world.” Now it is unlikely that the world will ever know the truth for sure, but a reliable defender can start an uproar.