The Covid Lab Leak, and China’s Power, By Brian Simpson

Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan. He is well positioned to conclude on the present state of play on the two hypotheses for the origin of Covid-19, the natural origins view, and the lab leak. He documents how the scientific establishment do not want conferences on this, primarily because it might annoy the Chinese, which shows both China's role in this, and the cowardice of these academics and organisations. This is so even though at present, two thirds of Americans believe in the lab leak hypothesis. So, why is this topic off limits to the academics and scientists? In two words, China's power:

"Scientists in the West have become addicted to collaboration with China. They get students and money from China. Ten British universities rely on Chinese students for more than a quarter of their income. Scientific journals get rich on Chinese publication fees. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and recipient of a Friendship Award from the Chinese government, went on Chinese television early in the pandemic to say: 'I think we have a great deal to thank China for, about the way that it handled the outbreak.'

Occasionally, Westerners fret about the prevalence of scientific fraud, scientific espionage and low safety standards in China, but the money is too good. Yet it always comes with strings attached. As Ian Williams details in his new book, Vampire State, Western academia has been in the habit of 'stifling debate and parroting Communist Party propaganda in order to ingratiate itself with Chinese partners and sponsors'."

This is a major problem, as Chinese influence is penetrating right through the research and teaching institutions. Universities who depend upon China for their pitiful survival do not tolerate criticism of their communist master. The Covid origins debate well proves this.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/10/there-is-now-no-doubt-that-covid-leaked-from-a-lab/

What was the worst industrial accident in history? Bhopal in India, where in 1984, at least 25,000 people died as a result of a leak of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant? No, if – as most people who have examined the evidence now believe – the Covid pandemic began as a result of a laboratory leak, then what happened in Wuhan, China was worse than a thousand Bhopals. It killed around 28 million people – and was by far the most lethal industrial or scientific accident that has ever occurred.

Yet the silence of members of the scientific establishment about even the possibility of a laboratory leak in Wuhan is deafening. They refuse to debate it – quite literally. The World Health Organisation studiously avoids talking about it. I tried to get the Royal Society to organise a debate: it's not a suitable topic for discussion, it replied. I tried the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow: too controversial, it said. A former president of the Royal Society told me he hopes we never find out what happened, lest it annoy the Chinese. Would he have said the same about Bhopal, I wondered, or a plane crash?

Earlier this year, I was approached by Open to Debate, an online debating forum, to propose the motion that Covid probably began with a lab accident. I quickly agreed. The organiser then asked more than 30 scientists, journalists and politicians to oppose me, including some who have vocally argued that it cannot possibly have come from a lab. They all said no, sometimes with a barrage of insults about me. Finally, a Nobel-prize winning immunologist in Australia agreed. But two weeks later, he pulled out.

Around the same time I was approached by the Soho Forum, a live debating forum in New York run by economist Gene Epstein. Again, would I take the lab-leak side of the debate if he could find a worthy opponent? Yes. He offered a fee of $10,000 to a series of scientists and journalists to take me on; they all said no. He upped the fee (and downed mine, which I am giving away anyway), and eventually one said yes: Stephen Goldstein, a virologist from the University of Utah.

The debate went ahead in July. This was, as far as I know, the first formal, live debate anywhere on the planet to address the origin of the worst pandemic in a century. At the start, we took a vote, both of those in the theatre and those watching online, and repeated it at the end. Before the debate, 51 per cent agreed with me that the pandemic probably began with a lab accident and 15 per cent agreed with Stephen that it probably did not. At the end, 65 per cent agreed with me and 12 per cent agreed with him, so my arguments must have been persuasive.

Opinion polls show a similar result – two-thirds of Americans believe the virus originated in a lab in China – yet most senior scientists seem to be sublimely unbothered by the fact that the public holds this view. They show little or no interest in getting out there and persuading people to change their minds. Instead, they just hope the whole topic fades into history. That reluctance even to try persuading the public betrays either a marked lack of confidence in their own case or a guilty conscience.

I was recently invited by one of the editors of a prestigious scientific journal to write a scholarly paper setting out the case that it was a lab leak. I agreed. With Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, I detailed how it is no coincidence that this virus turned up in exactly the right city at exactly the right time as they were planning exactly the right experiments that would put exactly the right insertion into exactly the right place in exactly the right gene of exactly the right kind of virus. And to do so at exactly the wrong biosafety level.

Our paper had hundreds of references to back up our claim, yet the editors of the journal rejected it out of hand, claiming – entirely wrongly – that 'there is no evidence of gain-of-function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology' (WIV). In fact, that institute has published papers since 2017 detailing their gain-of-function experiments on SARS-like viruses. Were the editors of the journal unaware of this?

Why is this topic taboo? Scientists in the West have become addicted to collaboration with China. They get students and money from China. Ten British universities rely on Chinese students for more than a quarter of their income. Scientific journals get rich on Chinese publication fees. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and recipient of a Friendship Award from the Chinese government, went on Chinese television early in the pandemic to say: 'I think we have a great deal to thank China for, about the way that it handled the outbreak.'

Occasionally, Westerners fret about the prevalence of scientific fraud, scientific espionage and low safety standards in China, but the money is too good. Yet it always comes with strings attached. As Ian Williams details in his new book, Vampire State, Western academia has been in the habit of 'stifling debate and parroting Communist Party propaganda in order to ingratiate itself with Chinese partners and sponsors'. Right at the start of the pandemic, to take one example, Evergrande, a now bankrupt Chinese property firm, dangled a promise of $115million to Harvard Medical School, but only if Anthony Fauci – who has nothing to do with Harvard – spoke to its senior executives about US policy on Covid. Was the origin of the pandemic raised? Fauci has not said.

I did not start out thinking Covid came from a lab. For the first few months of 2020, I went around telling colleagues in the UK parliament we could rule that out (I retired from the House of Lords in 2021). Why? Mainly because I read the paper in March 2020 called 'The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2' in the journal, Nature Medicine, which dismissed a lab leak. And I assumed that its authors knew what they were talking about.

Only later did I discover that I had been deceived: not only did their arguments fall apart on closer inspection but also they did not believe them themselves. We now know from congressional inquiries what the five virologists who authored the 'proximal origin' paper were saying to each other in private, while they drafted a paper that ruled out a lab leak. All five thought a lab leak was possible if not likely. One called it 'friggin' likely', another 'not crackpot' and a third said 'I literally swivel day by day thinking it is a lab escape or natural'.

They went on saying things like this even after the paper was published – so it's not that they changed their minds in the light of new evidence (as they have since claimed). A whole month after publication, lead author Kristian Andersen wrote in a private message that, 'I'm still not fully convinced that no cell culture was involved' and 'we also can't fully rule out engineering'. Writing a scientific paper that says the opposite of what you think is the truth is scientific misconduct at the very least. The paper should be retracted.

Why did they do this? They made that clear too: it was political. Co-author Andrew Rambaut wrote privately: 'Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release', they dare not do so. Andersen agreed, saying it was impossible not to 'inject' politics into science.

So why have I gradually come to the same conclusion that all of them did in private that the pandemic may have begun in a lab? The outbreak began not just in one of the very few cities doing research on this kind of virus, but also in the city with the biggest SARS-like virus research programme on the planet.

These kinds of viruses are found a thousand miles away from Wuhan. That's the distance of London to Rome. We know of only one animal species that regularly travelled that route, carrying lots of viruses. That animal was the scientists themselves. In the 15 years before the pandemic, they collected over 16,000 bat viruses from all over southern China and south-east Asia and brought them a long way north to Wuhan. The nine closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 at the time of the outbreak were in the freezer of the WIV.

Coincidences do happen, but when foot and mouth broke out in the UK in 2007, just down the road from the world's reference lab for foot-and-mouth virus, people did not think it was just a coincidence. They investigated and sure enough it was a lab leak.

The experiments they did in Wuhan were crazily risky. They took the spike genes of SARS-like viruses they found in bats and inserted them into other virus backbones to make chimeras (viruses that contain genetic material from two or more sources), then infected human cells and humanised mice. In one case, the chimera virus proved to be 10,000 times more infectious in terms of viral load in the mice and significantly more lethal. That's a gain-of-function experiment of concern.

Why were they even doing this? Ostensibly to predict which virus would cause the next pandemic. That went well, didn't it? As Rambaut put it privately: 'Perhaps they had planned a press conference predicting which virus would cause the next pandemic but then it escaped from the lab early.'

What is more, the work in Wuhan was being done in unsafe conditions: at biosafety level two (BSL-2), most of the time. Don't take my word for it. The head of the lab, Shi Zhengli, said so explicitly. Her collaborator, Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, boasted about BSL-2 being 'highly cost effective'. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina called the WIV's work 'irresponsible'. Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin called it 'unacceptable'. Kristian Andersen called it 'completely nuts'. Francis Collins, former head of the National Institutes of Health, could not believe it. Jeremy Farrar, formerly of the Wellcome Trust, called it the 'wild west'.

When biosafety was discussed at a meeting in London of the US National Academies and the UK's Royal Society in 2015, the WIV was singled out as the riskiest lab on the planet. When US diplomats toured the place in 2017, they expressed extreme alarm about the biosafety training.

But it's a coincidence of time as well as place. We now know – as we did not in 2020 – from two EcoHealth Alliance documents that the experiments the Wuhan lab planned to do starting in 2019 were practically a blueprint for making SARS-CoV-2. WIV said it was switching its focus from SARS-1, the virus behind the SARS epidemic in East Asia between 2002 and 2004, to viruses from southern China that are 10 to 25 per cent different from SARS-1, ie like SARS-CoV-2.

It planned to introduce things called 'furin cleavage sites', potentially optimised for humans, into the spike genes of SARS-like viruses for the first time, at the so-called S1/S2 junction in the gene. All you really need to know about furin cleavage sites is that SARS-CoV-2 is the first and only SARS-like virus, out of many hundreds that have been described, ever to show up with a furin cleavage site in its spike gene. Sure enough, it's an insertion, not a mutation, and it's at the S1/S2 junction.

In any case, lab leaks happen all the time. There have been lab accidents that caused outbreaks of influenza, anthrax and many other pathogens. In 1977, there was a global influenza pandemic caused by the trial of an experimental vaccine that had been inadequately attenuated.

In 2003-4, SARS-1 leaked from a lab at least four times, once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and at least twice in Beijing, and killed the mother of a researcher. In three of those cases, we still don't know how the accident happened.

Besides, there is way more virology going on now than 20 years ago. So arguing that previous pandemics began naturally, and therefore you should give natural theories the benefit of the doubt, is like saying no soldiers were killed by gunpowder in the Roman Empire, so we should assume people are being killed by swords and spears in Ukraine.

The scientists in Wuhan have behaved very suspiciously. They refuse to this day to share the database they had accumulated with 22,000 virus samples in it, even though it would exonerate them in a flash if it does not contain a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. They also changed the name of the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 that was in their freezer, but did not admit to doing so, causing months of confusion. They implied they had not worked on it until 2020, then had to admit they had done so in 2018, the year before the pandemic started. They failed to tell the world that they had eight other similar viruses.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli inside a laboratory in Wuhan, 23 February 2017.

When Shi Zhengli of the WIV published the genome of SARS-CoV-2 for the first time in 2020, in two separate papers, she completely ignored the furin cleavage site. Those words don't appear. One of the diagrams is truncated just before the site would appear. As Alina Chan – with whom I co-authored a book on the lab bleak, Viral – put it, that's like 'describing a unicorn in detail and not mentioning the horn'. By contrast, Western scientists – like the five authors of 'proximal origin' – were immediately alarmed by the furin cleavage site because they worried that it was a sign the virus might be man-made.

There's a whole bunch of suspicious events that happened in the autumn of 2019 and the early months of 2020. The WIV patented a device for dealing with animal bites. It ordered new ventilation equipment for the lab. It held a pep talk about lab safety. There was a coronavirus drill at the Wuhan airport. Three key lab workers fell ill with a Covid-like respiratory disease in late 2019. Chinese government officials patented a vaccine really early (February 2020) and the leader of the vaccine project died by falling off the roof of a building. They sent in the military to take over running the lab. Somebody quietly deleted a bunch of crucial genomic data from an international database. They banned the sale of ex-laboratory animals in markets.

Now, these may not mean anything. They may be coincidences. Some of these claims we cannot even confirm. But we know – for sure – that China offered an astonishing lack of transparency and cooperation with investigations into the virus's origins – of a kind that the world would not have tolerated from any other country.

Against this deluge of evidence for a lab leak, what could the proponents of natural origin suggest? My opponent in the New York debate was reduced to arguing that the outbreak might have begun in a seafood market when an unidentified raccoon dog that had somehow been infected by an unidentified bat from a thousand miles away somehow infected an unidentified person who then passed it on to ordinary people, all while leaving no trace.

There was indeed a surge of cases in and around such a market in Wuhan in December 2019. But even Ralph Baric, the world's leading coronavirologist, dismisses this argument: 'People who say that those were the first cases, no chance.' The family trees of the virus's variants make clear that the first infection almost certainly happened much earlier, some time between July and November 2019.

Even the Chinese authorities, who blamed the market at first, have given up on that theory. They searched the market and found no infected animals, no antibodies in animals or people, no infected animal vendors, no infected handlers of wildlife food, no chain of upstream infection in suppliers, no other markets affected. Most of these things turned up very quickly for SARS, MERS, Nipah and other natural outbreaks. For none of them to turn up at all – at a time when the technology for detecting such things is far more sophisticated – is bizarre.

Despite a lot of talk about raccoon dogs and pangolins, it is a fact that no animal with this virus, or a closely related virus that might have evolved into it, has ever been found from before the beginning of the human outbreak. Yet vague speculation about something in the market is all the natural-origin theorists have left. So there they must stand.

There were traces of the human version of the virus in the market. But they were found only in and on inanimate objects and (with the doubtful exception of one possibly contaminated glove) they were all of one later human strain of the virus, which is most definitely not the ancestor. The earliest strains of the virus were not represented in the market.

The positive samples in the market cluster in one corner where there were stalls selling wildlife. Well of course they do because the authorities focussed their testing on the stalls selling wildlife: 'Shops selling wildlife as well as shops linked to early cases were prioritised for sampling', as one paper put it. There were traces of the virus in twice as many stalls that sold vegetables as sold wildlife.

They also argue that the early human cases cluster around the market. Well of course they do. The inclusion-exclusion criteria for deciding if you had Covid in the early days were that you had to have a connection to the market or to have been treated at a hospital near the market. It's a circular argument.

In short, those of us who argue that the pandemic began with a laboratory accident have comprehensively won the debate. I do have some sympathy with the virologists who have waged a four-year battle to suppress, censor and delete all discussion of a laboratory leak. If my livelihood depended on this kind of research, I too would probably find it hard to accept that a lab leak had happened. Scientists, politicians, businesspeople and even journalists have a vested interest in hoping the subject just fades from memory."