Don’t blame nature if COVID-19 leaks from a lab

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Revelations that the US Department of Energy and the FBI believe the COVID-19 pandemic likely started in a lab in Wuhan, China have brought the prospect of a lab leak back into the news. And now that the possible origins of the virus are once again widely discussed, some scientists are trying to redefine the lab leak and narrow the possible range of scenarios it would describe, in hopes of limiting any potential backlash against research into dangerous pathogens.

For example, Anthony Fauci recently told CNN Jim Acosta that if a virus collected from nature and stored in a lab escapes from that lab, it’s still a natural occurrence. Fauci made a similar comment in May 2020. Asked about the possibility that scientists found a virus in a bat and brought it back to a lab, he told National Geographic it would be a circular argument to blame the virus. emergence on science because it was in the wild to begin with.

One of the strongest proponents of the idea that the pandemic has a natural origin, virologist Angela Rasmussen, obviously agrees. On Twitter, Rasmussen pointed to a CNN report suggesting that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, located a few hundred meters from the Huanan Seafood Market, was studying a variant of the coronavirus at the time of the outbreak. . Unlike the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has long come under scrutiny, the Wuhan CDC, according to Rasmussen, does not genetically manipulate the viruses it stores. Accordingly, this would mean that any virus that escaped from the center was, in his words, a natural virus and those who blame virology for the pandemic would be wrong.

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Early in the pandemic, a similar claim was made by the authors of what became known as the Proximal Origin Paper, which has since shaped much of the public debate on this issue. Its authors argued, based on a comparative analysis of genomic data, that we do not believe that any type of scenario in the laboratory is plausible. But how could genomic data rule out the possibility of a laboratory leak of a virus that had been collected from the wild? While it may look identical to one that appeared in an animal, it’s actually believed to be the result of scientists venturing into distant caves and bringing dangerous pathogens back to a densely populated city.

Columnist Josh Rogin made this point in The Washington Post in April 2020. He wrote that just because the virus that causes COVID-19 was unengineered is not the same as saying it wasn’t. does not come from the laboratory. Meanwhile, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers who advocates for greater oversight of human pathogen research, stressed more than 18 months ago that laboratory origins are not hypothetical. Its multiples. Similarly, a molecular biologist from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Alina Chan, told science magazines Jon Cohen: A lab-related incident can cover a wide range of activities from field work to genetic modification. Ultimately, virtually every possible laboratory scenario involves natural elements because it is nature that scientists study in laboratories.

No one should claim certainty when the evidence remains inconclusive. However, if it all started with researchers dabbing bats in a cave or scientists synthesizing entirely new pathogens with cutting-edge biotechnology, then in both cases the scientists, not the raccoon dogs, pangolins or traders wild animals would ultimately be responsible for the pandemic. After three years in which the lab leak hypothesis has been dismissed as everything from a racist conspiracy theory to a plausible scenario, it’s time we took the wide range of lab incidents more seriously. that may have produced the pandemic and put us at risk of another one.

David Robertson recently completed a Ph.D. in the History of Science program at Princeton University.

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