As the Biden administration intensifies its efforts to track down the source of COVID-19, unanswered questions surround the most hotly contested hypothesis about how the pandemic began: the lab leak theory.
President Joe Biden confronted mounting pressure to probe the theory more seriously by announcing on Wednesday that he asked the intelligence community to complete an investigation into the pandemic’s origins within 90 days. His move came amid a dramatic shift in public opinion about a hypothesis once dismissed by the media as a distraction — only hours after news reports that his State Department had shut down a Trump-era investigation into whether COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
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The most public attempt to look into COVID-19’s beginnings resulted in criticism and only added confusion. Investigators with the World Health Organization in March concluded, despite finding no evidence of natural emergence after testing thousands of animals, the virus “very likely” emerged naturally from an animal. And despite examining very few questions surrounding the lab leak theory, WHO concluded it was “extremely unlikely.”
Nicholas Wade, a retired New York Times science writer who penned the viral Medium essay that revived interest in the lab leak theory earlier this month, said only circumstantial evidence to support the theory has surfaced so far — but that direct proof would need to come from China.
“I think it would have to be information about an experiment being carried on in Dr. Shi’s lab or perhaps in one of the several other virological labs in Wuhan, and we would need to know the genome sequence of the viruses they were studying, and seeing if one was the same as SARS-CoV-2 or very closely related to it,” Wade told the Washington Examiner, using the technical name for the virus that causes COVID-19. “That would be definitive evidence.”
Shi Zhengli has emerged as one of the central figures in the lab leak theory, although her research records remain sealed in China.
Shi spent her career studying coronaviruses in bats and worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on experiments described as testing the epidemic potential of these coronaviruses. In January, the Trump administration’s State Department questioned the “credibility” of Shi’s public assertion that no one from the lab fell ill with COVID-19 ahead of the virus’s spread through Wuhan in December 2019, citing intelligence that suggested some lab workers got sick that fall.
But the precise nature of what Shi and other Chinese researchers were doing in the Wuhan lab remains shrouded in secrecy by the Chinese government, as do conditions at the institute where coronaviruses were being studied. While the institute has high-level safety features, Shi has publicly admitted that some of her coronavirus research was performed in a lab with far more lax safety standards.
A U.S. research nonprofit organization, EcoHealth Alliance, partnered with Shi to steer at least $600,000 from the National Institutes of Health to coronavirus research in Wuhan.
It’s unclear what that money actually funded regarding the lab leak theory.
“The full grant proposal, as is usual in these cases, has not been made public,” Wade said of the experiments conducted through the alliance before the pandemic. “All we have to go on is the abstract of the grant. And if you read these abstracts, it looks pretty certain that some kind of gain-of-function was being performed or could have been performed.”
Gain-of-function research refers to experiments that optimize how infectious a virus is in the lab to predict pandemics and develop potential vaccines.
A summary of a grant proposal from Peter Daszak, EcoHealth Alliance’s president, suggests he intended to test how coronaviruses could jump from bats to humans and how quickly the viruses would spread after making the jump.
But Daszak has resisted releasing the full grants or records related to the strains of virus ultimately used in the Wuhan experiments.
A spokesman for EcoHealth Alliance told the Washington Examiner the group has not received any requests for information from the intelligence community about its work. Asked if the group would cooperate with requests during the Biden administration’s 90-day investigation, spokesman Robert Kessler said, “I can’t speak to a hypothetical.”
Previously, Daszak labeled an attempt from the Trump administration’s NIH to get information about his work “heinous,” “inappropriate,” and “wrong.”
“We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do,” Daszak said. “When you submit a grant, you put in all your best ideas. We don’t want to hand those over to conspiracy theorists for them to publish and ruin and make a mockery of.”
Daszak played a major role in solidifying public perception early in the pandemic that the lab leak theory had no merit. He secretly orchestrated a letter from several scientists in February 2020 claiming, with no evidence, that the theory had been ruled out and that natural emergence was the only plausible explanation.
Daszak also served on the WHO investigative team that dismissed the possibility of a lab accident without pressing Chinese authorities for information that could have informed a conclusion either way.
The NIH’s role in supporting experiments with coronaviruses is another unanswered question.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, acknowledged this week that the NIH did fund some coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab. However, he has denied the EcoHealth Alliance experiments constituted gain-of-function research.
“We had a modest collaboration with very respectable Chinese scientists who are world experts on coronavirus,” Fauci testified Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
Wade said it is possible the experiments ultimately performed in Wuhan by Shi and EcoHealth Alliance fell outside the definition of gain-of-function or that the NIH had no knowledge of what EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted Chinese scientists to do.
“What seems to have happened is that somewhere along the line, the NIH’s wishes were disregarded, and Dr. Shi was, in fact, doing gain-of-function research,” he said.
Without access to the lab or the records of what work scientists there were doing in late 2019, investigators may not be able to determine whether COVID-19 was a product of a bat coronavirus study gone wrong.
In his statement announcing a fresh investigation on Wednesday, Biden noted he “asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts.”
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It’s unclear if this will involve asking the NIH to share the full grant proposals authored by EcoHealth Alliance ahead of the outbreak.
A spokeswoman for the NIH did not respond to a request for comment on whether the health agency intends to participate in the investigation.
