“May you live in interesting times” is considered to be a blessing, or curse, originating from China. The true origin and meaning of this saying are not quite certain.
But the curse of COVID-19 is nearing certainty as to whether it originated from a lab in Wuhan, China. And the Chinese Communist Party has certainly made times interesting — in a cursed sort of way.
Discovering the true origin of a deadly virus such as COVID-19, which is plaguing people with the omicron variant, is important to the healthy livelihood of the global citizenry, now and in the future. So dogged detective work is imperative.
On the trail of the emergence of COVID-19 are genetic engineer Alina Chan and prolific science writer Matt Ridley. Their tracking to date is chronicled in Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
From vast amounts of thoroughly substantiated evidence, the authors contend that “the current circumstances and the sparse evidence available demand that natural and laboratory-based origins are both treated as likely.”
Until mid-2021, more than a year into the worst pandemic in over 100 years, very few people in research labs, academia, government, and the media openly gave much credence to the possibility of a laboratory leak of COVID-19. In fact, based on past experience with the SARS outbreak, at the start of the pandemic neither of the authors thought COVID-19 came from a laboratory leak. Yet their preference throughout was “for a balanced debate that led to the truth.” Their impartiality and careful inquiry eventually led the authors to note that the world “now faces the strong possibility that scientific research, intended to avert a pandemic, instead started one.”
Viral covers the potential origins of the virus from bats living in a copper mine in Mojiang County in southern China through seafood markets hundreds of miles to the north in Wuhan. In addition, various zoonosis hypotheses, historic laboratory leaks, “gain of function” research, clandestine virus sequences, and the role of the World Health Organization are all explored in detail.
Many of the arguments in Viral for and against a lab leak are detailed in two chapters near the end of the book: “Spillover,” positing a direct natural source, and ”Accident,” conjecturing an accidental lab leak. The arguments are presented as they might be in a court case, with the best available evidence submitted for both claims.
The serious sleuthing by Chan and Ridley is summarized in a final “Timeline” section of Viral. The timeline begins in April 2012 with the hospitalization of six men who worked in the bat-infested copper mine in Mojiang County. The timeline ends on Sept. 6, 2021, with the account of new information released by the National Institutes of Health about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s generation of laboratory-engineered viruses with increased pathogenicity.
Viral makes a compelling case for a lab leak quite similar to one made in a book on the same topic published about the same time this year — The Origin of the Virus: The hidden truths behind the microbe that killed millions of people by investigative journalist Paolo Barnard, scientist and physician Steven Quay, and professor of oncology Angus Dalgleish.
The warning from the preface of the Barnard, Quay, and Dalgleish book, which the Viral authors would likely endorse wholeheartedly, is worth repeating: “The authors of this chilling account of events surrounding the worst health crisis in a century firmly believe that unless these facts are further investigated and those responsible are called to account, it is highly likely the world is destined to re-live this catastrophe all over again and possibly much worse.”
Anthony J. Sadar, a certified consulting meteorologist, has researched and lectured on the dispersion of biological agents and co-authored Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry, 2nd Edition (CRC Press, 2021).
