About That Lab Leak Idea

Supposedly, the “hearing” Rand Paul called this week was to “get to the bottom” of the idea that the Covid pandemic was caused by a leak of an engineered virus from a laboratory in Wuhan, China; that the lab experiments were funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health; and that U.S. officials, led by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci, conspired to cover that up.

That’s the movie plot, Rand. But then again, we live in a world where everyone has watched too many movies and has the attention span of a Tik-Tok video so here we are. Rand Paul knows hardly anyone is going to go through all the pages released of Fauci’s personal notes to see that there is, in fact, no smoking gun there and will just go on believing what they already believed before.

But if you combine history and science, you can see there’s a strong argument that the virus behind the pandemic came about in much the same so many new viruses come about: from a series of jumps from one animal to another and then into humans. In 2002-2004, the first SARS virus nearly caused a pandemic when it jumped from bats to another animal, possibly civets, which were sold as food in markets in China.

Extensive testing showed SARS and similar coronaviruses could infect a wide range of animals and many different researchers had been saying since then that another coronavirus could cause a pandemic.

Here is some more research and a bit more, which, my careful analysis of what’s known as engagement indicates no one who reads this post will click on. And those are people who are actually interested in this stuff.

Coronaviruses are also, of course, among the many causes of what people call the common cold.

In fact, even before the first SARS outbreak, scientists had been worried about a pandemic originating in animals. This would be bird flu – the same H5N1 avian influenza they are still keeping a wary eye on today, in fact. Flu viruses, like coronaviruses, originate in animals. (Not in secret labs, Rand Paul.) There’s lots and lots of evidence to back this up and over the 30-odd years I spent reporting on health and science many different researchers specializing in virology spent many hours out of their busy days explaining to me how they evolve and mix.

There were also researchers who caught and swabbed wild birds and characterized the viruses they found and then explained about them; the epidemiologists who tracked the spread of various outbreaks and epidemics and explained how those happened and the immunologists who studied and explained how the human body responded to various countermeasures such as vaccines and drugs.

It’s very, very interesting and fun to write about. It’s given me and the other journalists who have reported on this stuff a fairly solid understanding of why the World Health Organization and other bodies were strongly predisposed to come down on the side of an animal origin for Covid.

Here’s the study from a bunch of the world’s top virus experts saying SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the pandemic, almost certainly came from animals in a wet market.

There’s a saying: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

This is appropriate for new viruses.

Influenza viruses often originate in ducks. In birds, flu viruses thrive in the gut and the birds poop them out. Ducks live in and around ponds and lakes and rice paddies, and those are conditions that allow the viruses to spread to other birds. Especially in southeast Asia, that also allows the viruses to spread to pigs when the pigs are allowed to wander in and around these sources of water.

It’s why migrating birds can spread them globally.

When these viruses, which are mostly bird-adapted viruses, then infect pigs, they can evolve to become more adapted to mammals. People are mammals. So that’s when new flu viruses then can become more likely to infect people, especially because people interact closely with pigs.

And genetics show that. New influenza strains carry the genes of their ancestors and they have little pieces from birds and pigs from previous years.

The same with coronaviruses. The genetics show they infect a broad range of animals, and they’ve been in a lot of the so-called wet markets across southeast Asia, including one in Wuhan. It’s no more suspicious that there was both virus and a lab in Wuhan, China than it is that there’s both the NIH and a Safeway store in Bethesda, Maryland. (I’ve been to both, numerous times. Is that suspicious?) These markets are everywhere. The viruses are everywhere. And those labs are pretty common, also.

All of these genetics have been shown through science. Not through loud declarations on social media or in Senate hearings. It’s demonstrated through careful study that’s checked and re-checked and replicated until it’s proven to be sound.

This is what I have reported about over the past 30 years or so, and which the scientists I have interviewed have repeatedly shown to be true. I believe them because they have predicted things that then actually happen, like the H1N1 influenza pandemic (luckily mild) in 2009 and then the Covid pandemic (unfortunately catastrophic) that started in 2020.

They admit when they are wrong, like when Dr. Richard Webby said he was shocked that H5N1 influenza could infect cattle or when prominent stem cell researcher Douglas Melton retracted a 2013 study that seemed to show injections of a hormone could stimulate production of insulin-producing cells in mice – pointing to a potential cure for type-1 diabetes.

However, the World Health Organization was especially late in admitting that Covid was airborne and that late admission may have led to many deaths as people failed to mask up. It may also have irreparably damaged trust in public health.

But the admission did come, along with plenty of discussion about how to do better in the future. Smart people learn from their mistakes. And admitting when you are wrong is a sign of honesty. Sticking to your guns even when it is clear you are wrong is not a sign of integrity. It is a sign of stupidity.

The other thing that gives most knowledgeable people trust in the scientists rather than in the attacks of a few politicians? The planning that paid off. The National Institutes of Health, under Fauci’s direction, had invested in the mRNA technology that led to the extraordinarily quick development of a vaccine against Covid.

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It undoubtedly saved lives, despite what the anti-vaxxers in some government positions may say as they try to drag down the actual experts who can point out just how wrong they are. Here’s a report on the mRNA vaccine potential from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

And PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which dates back to the George W. Bush administration and which we can give a lot of credit to NIAID for, also provided a structure for distributing Covid aid – a structure that the first Trump administration failed to make good use of.

And now the current administration has torn almost all of that down – NIH research and mRNA funding in particular, USAID and PEPFAR, and the very research that could spot the next animal source of the next pandemic.

Instead, it and its allies in Congress are busy attacking the science and scientists who have been right over the past 30 years and who had been trying to build up our defenses. That they have not succeeded is not the fault of the science, but the fault of their enemies who have always pushed back and who have, for the time being, prevailed.