By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: they were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. Scientists “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.Ĭontrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been. Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table.įrom early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. So the possibility that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the lab could not be ruled out. Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses. But that seemed not to matter when so much further evidence in support of natural emergence was expected shortly. The wet market connection, the only other point of similarity with the SARS1 and MERS epidemics, was soon broken: Chinese researchers found earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the wet market. The relationship supported the idea that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats, via another animal host, to people. The decoding of the virus’s genome showed it belonged a viral family known as beta-coronaviruses, to which the SARS1 and MERS viruses also belong. This time the intermediary host animal was camels. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002 in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. And having inferred that direction, I’m going to delineate some of the strands in this tangled skein of disaster.Īfter the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market – a place selling wild animals for meat – in Wuhan. But those clues point in a specific direction. So I have only clues, not conclusions, to offer. Each depends on a set of reasonable conjectures but so far lacks proof. It’s important to note that so far there is no direct evidence for either theory. I’ll describe the two theories, explain why each is plausible, and then ask which provides the better explanation of the available facts. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people.
As many people know, there are two main theories about its origin. The virus that caused the pandemic is known officially as SARS-CoV-2, but can be called SARS2 for short. But the science cannot be avoided because for now, and probably for a long time hence, it offers the only sure thread through the maze. I will try to keep this process as painless as possible. I will then try to assess the complex issue of blame, which starts with, but extends far beyond, the government of China.īy the end of this article, you may have learned a lot about the molecular biology of viruses. In what follows I will sort through the available scientific facts, which hold many clues as to what happened, and provide readers with the evidence to make their own judgments. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain: the political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel. Its death toll will soon reach three million people. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. A worker in a protective suit is seen at the closed seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei province, China January 10, 2020.
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