While a variety of conspiracy theorists, an assortment of Republican politicians in America, and many others across the world, including unaffiliated members of the wider general public, remain certain in their assertions that the Covid-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese laboratory, neither scientists nor intelligence agencies have yet to unanimously agree on the precise origins of SARS-Cov-2. A two-page summary released on 27 August 2021 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US, which oversees the nation’s eighteen intelligence agencies, only further added to the prevailing uncertainty about where the coronavirus in question first appeared in humans.
The “Unclassified Summary of Assessment on COVID-19 Origins” followed a 90-day investigation that was ordered by President Joe Biden on 26 May 2021 and then undertaken on behalf of the National Intelligence Council by various unspecified US intelligence agencies. Biden first received the report on 24 August, before the public release of its summarised findings. According to the investigators, human infection probably arose from “initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019”, leading to the first known cluster of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan in December. The virus was not developed as an agent of biological warfare, and it was also judged, with “low confidence”, that it was unlikely to have been genetically engineered. The agencies differed in their assessment of the source of the infection. It was thus not possible to confirm with any high degree of confidence that the pandemic was initiated either by natural animal-to-human spread (zoonotic transmission) or by a “laboratory-associated incident”.
Inconclusive though the latest report may be, it has provoked fresh Chinese allegations of reputational damage by an “unscientific” investigation, driven by a political agenda while shifting blame from America’s own mishandling of the pandemic. It has also once again brought to the fore unproven counter-claims from China that the coronavirus actually originated in a laboratory at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, in 2019.
Initially, the outbreak in Wuhan was widely believed to have arisen in the Huanan Seafood Market, a so-called “wet market”. It was considered most likely that the virus had to humans spread from infected bats, possibly via intermediary species, by the process of naturally occurring zoonotic transmission, which is one of the means by which pathogens ensure their evolutionary survival. Speculation about a laboratory leak was fuelled by the proximity of the high-security Wuhan Institute of Virology (operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences) as the source of either an accidental or even deliberate release of virus. It was alleged by some that the escaping virus may have been the product of gain-of function research, whereby the genetic manipulation of viral spike protein can render the virus capable of infecting and producing disease in humans, possibly by increasing its affinity for human ACE2 receptors. It so happens that the Wuhan Institute’s Dr. Shi Zhengli, also known as the “Bat Lady”, is a leading authority on bat coronaviruses, studying bats in their natural habitats in the caves of Yunnan in south-western China.
An earlier 28-day visit to China, during January to February 2021, by an international WHO team, which took in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, failed to identify the precise origins of the virus in their report, which appeared on 30 March. The composition of this mission has led to accusations that some members may have had conflicts of interest which influenced their rejection of the lab-leak theory. Upon receipt of the report, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, stated that all possibilities were still “on the table”, while admitting difficulties in accessing relevant raw data while in China.
SARS-Cov-2 was first notified to the world by the Programme for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED) on 30 December 2019, but “Patient Zero” has yet to be identified. As time passes and it proves difficult to obtain relevant samples, it is increasingly less likely that viral genomic analysis and antibody testing to detect early exposure to the virus will provide us with the required answers. And in a world full of emerging “virologists”, many self-proclaimed and growing in confidence, searching for the truth in the midst of background of overwhelming “noise” is proving to be one of the greatest scientific challenges of the century.
Ashis Banerjee