Finding the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 is of paramount importance

Why do we not care more about this potential explanation for the origin of the virus, and that it may well have been covered up?

The concept of the rogue state is very much back in fashion again following Russia’s aggressive and inexcusable invasion of Ukraine. We have never been sensitive to the dubious claims of humiliation made by post-Soviet Russia and have been willing to push potential antagonisms to dangerous limits. Criticising their regime is the default.

However, when it comes to China, a peer-level power to the West, the goose’s ears are left unmolested by boos. China is the principal rival to Britain’s most important ally, the United States. Our soft-headed attitude to foreign policy and lack of strategic thinking will leave us unprepared for the imperial nature of Chinese expansionist ambitions, their setting of debt-traps for other countries, and their engagement in industrial scale espionage and cyber warfare.

We stand off them, no more so than in our remarkably cavalier attitude about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Given that millions of people have died globally, and the fabric of society was ripped open by our panicky and chronically disorganised leaders for two years, one would think more effort should be applied to finding some proper answers about how it all started.

Originally the ‘experts’ assured us with near certainty that the wet markets of Wuhan in China were to blame. Much like the other deadly coronaviruses, such as the first SARS (transmitted to humans by civic cats), and MERS (camels on that occasion), accidental zoonosis explained it- that the virus spontaneously jumped from a non-human animal to a human. An exotic kind of anteater, the pangolin, was the suspect under investigation this time, though ultimately the ancestral lineage of all three of these viruses began in the digestive system of bats.

The evidence connecting SARS-CoV-2 with the Wuhan wet market food chain, two years on, is still illusive. The hypothesis that the virus occurred naturally appears to be baseless. When SARS and MERS surfaced, food handlers often had antibodies and the suspect animal populations tested positive. With far more advanced genetic testing, we have not found a single animal to have had SARS-CoV-2, prior to the human epidemic, and that is with tens of thousands of tests having been conducted on the animal population local to the outbreak.

Whilst the wet market explanation is still a possible scenario, in the same district in which the outbreak began there is a laboratory which studies virology, including bat coronaviruses, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is viewed with suspicion by the major intelligence services around the world for a possible connection with SARS-CoV-2.

Despite being dismissed as a conspiracy theory to begin with, by May 2021, even the US President Joe Biden was taking the suggestion seriously that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory, though at the time of writing the jury is still out and it may well be that the origin of the virus eternally remains a mystery.

Laboratory leaks are a regular occurrence. There was a smallpox leak in Birmingham in 1978. There was a foot and mouth leak in Pirbright in 2007. Forty thousand people were infected with the bacteria Brucellosis in 2019 when it leaked from a Chinese lab. On numerous occasions the original SARS virus has infected lab workers, across Asia, even in some of the safest and best run facilities.

The institute doing, by far, the widest research into bat coronaviruses in the world is located in the exact city in which the pandemic began. Bats local to Wuhan do not have viruses like this one, they are brought to the city for research.

And the research they conduct is an ethical minefield. Scientists in Wuhan have been conducting gain-of-function research for the past decade, as has the United States (other than during a brief interlude between 2015 and 2017, when the enthusiasm for it was paused because scientists started to become too good at enhancing the function of influenza).

The aim of gain-of-function research is to augment the biological performance of an organism’s genes (such as the communicability or lethality of a virus), to understand where the next pandemic may come from, and prepare treatments and vaccines ahead of time. The WIV researchers went out into the field to actively seek these viruses out and bring them back to study and amend.

Yet, when a pandemic did emerge, the WIV databases were taken offline, and the Chinese government instructed anyone in the know to clam up. Chinese leaders then told a series of perilous lies to the World Health Organisation, such as the one that said the virus was not displaying inter-human transmission. Enough deception and secrecy for the virus to be exported globally and for the WHO to shower them with praise for their ‘transparency’.

Why do we not care more about this potential explanation for the origin of the virus, and that it may well have been covered up? Everyone wants to move on from the pandemic, and there is a great deal of apathy about it now. Who cares how it started? Well, we are less likely to stop the next one if we don’t find out, and perhaps worse than that, bad actors will see the damage it can do and be encouraged by the glib dismissal of any suggestion that it wasn’t natural. Plus, we surely owe it to the dead. The dark irony is that the research of some of the world’s most eminent and prestigious scientists, which was intended to prevent a pandemic, may have caused one. If it did, the world should be informed.