The entire claim for a natural origin can be summed up as follows: genetic manipulation would leave an unmistakable trace of the process imprinted on the genetic code of the virus, and since we see no trace, the virus must be natural. There are two parts to this claim: (1) that the process would leave a trace and (2) that we see no trace of the process. We’ll see shortly that neither part is as clear as it’s presented, but first, where does this claim actually come from?
False consensus
In trying to determine the origins of the natural emergence theory as reported in the media, one winds up in a confusing maze of self-referential loops, all ultimately tracing back to two sources. These two sources are the foundation upon which the scientific consensus rests, a consensus which it turns out sits on a rather soft foundation.
The first source is a letter published in the Lancet by Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance of New York. This letter doesn’t itself contain a technical basis for its assertions, but is instead a consensus piece pulling together the conclusions of a dozen or so papers by prominent virology researchers worldwide.
The second is a letter published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 by a group of virologists out of the Scripps Research Institute. This letter does contain a technical basis for its claim of a natural origin, which can be summarized as follows:
The spike protein structure on the outside of the virus is not optimized to what physical models suggest would be ideal.
If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness, and since SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously seen virus backbone, it cannot have been created in a lab.
There’s a controversial piece by Nicholas Wade, science editor for the NYTimes, that examines these two letters forming the basis of the natural origin theory. It’s a long piece that is worth a read for some of the arguments it makes, but to summarize, rebutting the first claim is trivial since there is simply no reason to assume a lab-made virus would have an “ideal” spike protein structure. An argument could be made that the presence of an ideal structure would have been suggestive of direct genetic engineering, however there are other artificial ways that would create optimized structures in a way that mimics how nature works. More specifically, the structure could have been achieved through a much simpler process called serial passage, which is where a virus is repeatedly passed back and forth between cell cultures in what is essentially ‘directed’ evolution. Each time the virus is passed back and forth in repeated trials, the virtual viral progeny that best expresses a desired characteristic, like increased infectivity to human epithelial cells for example, is selected. Since a spike structure generated by serial passage would be shaped by an evolutionary process, and evolutionary processes rarely generate “ideal” solutions, there’s no good reason to make this assumption. More on serial passage shortly.
The second claim is equally strange, since it makes assumptions that are outside of the scientific realm. Namely, the assumption that a lab wanting to create a pandemic virus would only be concerned with choosing the “easiest” starting point. However, if a lab wanted to create a weapon whose starting point implicated another lab, there’s no reason to assume the easiest starting point would be chosen. It would make more sense to choose a unique virus that the other lab was widely known to be experimenting on as your starting point, in the same way that if you wanted to frame someone for arson, you’d buy the gas canister with their credit card.
While rebutting these two claims isn’t evidence of an artificial origin, it does reveal that the common insistence that genetic evidence “proves” the virus can’t have an artificial origin is entirely unsubstantiated. With the flimsiness of these claims laid bare, Wade is then free to explore the possibility of an artificial origin, which he does with a deep dive into the more technical aspects of the genetic evidence. The spotlight is shone on a feature of the virus called the furin cleavage site, which is an element that is rare in beta-coronaviruses but is present on SARS-2 and happens to make the virus much more infectious in humans than it would otherwise be without it. Is this feature a smoking gun for an artificial origin? Probably not. Is the lack of a smoking gun within the virus’s genetic code proof of a natural origin? Definitely not.
As the essay progresses, the limitations of Wade’s analysis become even more apparent when the only two possibilities he entertains are the virus having a natural origin or the virus being the result of a lab leak from the WIV. As such, given the available evidence, he draws the rather logical conclusion that a lab leak seems most likely.
Understandably, Wade’s lab leak analysis and the similar pieces it sparked generated a flurry of very critical responses. And in most cases, these responses are written by genuine, good-faith scientific communicators bringing reasoned scientific skepticism to a controversial topic that is directly contributing to a rise in anti-asian hate crimes. And while the main thrust of the logic these responses all share is not wrong (that there is no reason to believe SARS-2 isn't the result of a natural zoonosis event), they all suffer from the same overly narrow focus that creates a false dichotomy. The question should not be “is this virus man-made?” The actual question we should be asking, and so far has not been answered, is how can we distinguish between a natural virus we’ve never seen and a natural virus that was weaponized in a lab? In truth, we can’t.
Serial Passage and Gain of Function Research
The process of modifying existing viruses to make them more infectious to humans, ostensibly to better predict future pandemics and prepare mitigation methods, is called Gain of Function (GoF) research.
The common assumption is that making a deadly virus in a lab through GoF must necessarily require genetic engineering and involve direct manipulation of viral genetic code. But the reality is that there is a much more powerful way to change the characteristics of a virus called serial passage. Serial passage involves deliberately exposing certain organisms or cells to a viral pathogen and then repeating the experiment by selecting the most infectious strain that emerges each round, taking advantage of the innate ability of viral pathogens to rapidly mutate. This process is akin to an apple farmer taking cuttings from the best trees and grafting them onto new trees to select for crunchier apples over several generations. Only instead of taking decades as it does with apple trees, viral evolutionary rates can compress the timescale a million fold.
There has been much reporting on the GoF research that was being conducted at the WIV, but what seems to have gone largely unnoticed is that back in the fall of 2017, GoF research quietly restarted after a long pause at another lab on the other side of the world in Fort Detrick, MD. More on this lab in Part 3C.
The ban began back in 2014 after a series of lab accidents at the CDC gave renewed weight to researcher calls to suspend GoF experiments over grave safety concerns. And their safety concerns were well founded. Back in 1977, a strain of H1N1 mysteriously reappeared in the former Soviet Union and China. Careful sequencing of the strain showed that it exactly matched a strain collected in 1950. Why is this weird? Well quite simply, because viruses in the natural world are never static. This is because bodies, the natural containers that viruses reside in, preserve viruses like brains preserve memories: imperfectly and always inducing an accumulation of minute changes over time. The only place that strains are perfectly preserved is in the artificial confines of a laboratory, which is why it’s thought that the 1977 outbreak almost certainly had a lab origin.
GoF research is a double edged sword. In the right hands, it holds the promise of being able to help anticipate the next pandemic and plan defenses, in the same way that meteorologists give people the chance to batten down for a hurricane. In the wrong hands, it can unloose biblical plagues, whether the release was accidental or not.
With significant questions remaining about the natural origin after two full years of study by the world’s scientists, an artificial origin appears to be an equally valid origin theory, and in some ways is a better fit to the evidence. But if the virus truly was artificial, the potential points of origin are certainly more than just the WIV, with several labs worldwide having the capability of producing such a virus. So which artificial possibilities did the media explore?
Media propaganda campaign
For reasons we’ll explore below, the coverage of the lab leak theory by US media can really only be described one way: a propaganda campaign. This propaganda campaign occurred in two waves. The first wave began almost as soon as the pandemic itself in January 2020, before the virus had even reached US shores, when the theory was first floated in a Washington Times article. But it wasn’t until April that the rapid coordinated media campaign really began pushing the Wuhan lab leak theory to the front of the queue, which is when the Trump admin picked up the torch and began to wave it. Mike Pompeo brought the theory into the spotlight when he stated “we are still asking the Chinese Communist Party to allow experts to get into that virology lab so that we can determine precisely where this virus began”. This was followed by an affirmation from Trump that same day when he was asked whether he thought the virus was manufactured in a lab, offering a somewhat less pointed “it seems to make sense”.
But then the theory sort of wallowed and dropped completely out of view, replaced by premature feelings of optimism toward summer containment and signs that the virus was subsiding.
The second wave began when the propaganda campaign dramatically restarted in May of 2021, a few months after Trump left office. It was kicked off with a WSJ article co-authored by Michael R. Gordon, coincidentally the same Mr. Gordon who co-authored the now infamous Iraqi WMD article back in 2002. Some will remember this article as a key piece of now discredited propaganda that helped implant the idea of an impending mushroom cloud in the minds of the American public, building public consent during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. Like a one trick pony, his 2021 article again attributed key evidence implicating the WIV to an “undisclosed US intelligence report”. Four days after this article first appeared, Facebook lifted its ban on posts claiming SARS-2 was man-made.
Can this propaganda campaign be simply shrugged off as the opportunistic mobilization of a relentless corporate media looking for any weakness to exploit against a geopolitical rival? Or is there something more coordinated, determined, and reminiscent of past preludes to war here? Why do ‘unnamed government sources” always seem to be the genesis for waves of renewed interest in the lab leak theory?
While there were many articles during the waves of lab leak mania, they all seemed to rely on the same few common claims, bound together with the clear implication of a Chinese government coverup. And how well did the propaganda work? Check and see how many you believed:
Claim 1: “Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researches fell ill”
This speculation originates entirely from a “fact sheet” issued Jan 15, 2021 by Pompeo’s State Department in which it is claimed that “the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both SARS-2 and common seasonal illnesses.” No evidence for this claim is provided.
Claim 2: “A Chinese whistleblower was jailed”
Li Wenliang wasn't jailed. He was summoned to the police station and questioned.
Dr. Li mistakenly falsely claimed that the new virus was SARS in a private WeChat group. He was summoned to appear before police, who warned him about making false comments, and he returned to work the next day. A few days later he was infected with SARS-2 by an eye disease patient at the hospital he worked at, and was hospitalized a week later.
Claim 3: “All the cases can be traced back to the Wuhan market”
A study by Chinese researchers published in the Lancet of the first 41 hospitalized patients in Wuhan who had confirmed infections found that 13 of the 41 cases, including the first documented case, had no link to the seafood marketplace that originally was considered the origin of the outbreak.
Claim 4: “There is only one lab in the world this could have come from”
There are other labs worldwide that not only have the sophistication required to perform the experiments which could produce the kinds of viruses that could cause a pandemic, but that were actively involved in doing so. Most infamous among them is Fort Detrick, the same lab that was at the center of developing America’s biowarfare program beginning in the 1950s.
Given this campaign, are we to assume that the entire corporate media apparatus is somehow in on a grand conspiracy to knowingly misrepresent the facts? No. Not only would that be impossible to coordinate and conceal, it’s entirely unnecessary. US media rely heavily on official sources. Corporate media today markets itself as independent, but is in reality incredibly compliant. Reporters and editors have been conditioned to uncritically receive and reinforce messaging released by core components of the government like the State Department and the intelligence agencies. And why wouldn’t they be? For their dutiful work, they are rewarded handsomely with official and often exclusive access to sources, giving their brand an air of authority.
But this raises the question: why was the media being wielded to implicate China in a conspiracy in the first place?