ARGUMENT: COVID ORIGINSThe Origin of SARS-CoV-2: Animal Transmission or Lab Leak?
The origin of the virus that causes COVID-19, which spread from China to the rest of the world and has killed millions of people, is a scientific mystery, the answer to which has strong political implications. Gigi Kwik Gronvall writes that “by comparison to past deadly epidemics, what we know about the early days of SARS-CoV-2 is less obscure. Though the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is now the focus of hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives and headlines focused on whether the virus emerged from nature or a laboratory, the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2 is animal-to-human transmission, like most emerging diseases.”
The beginnings of epidemics and pandemics are murky, including for HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and the H1N1 2009 flu. Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, writes in Lawfare that by comparison to past deadly epidemics, what we know about the early days of SARS-CoV-2 is less obscure. Though the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is now the focus of hearings in the U.S. House of Representatives and headlines focused on whether the virus emerged from nature or a laboratory, the most likely origin of SARS-CoV-2 is animal-to-human transmission, like most emerging diseases.
“More than half (66 percent) of the first 41 hospitalized COVID-19 patients had a direct tie to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people. A spatial mapping analysis later showed that hundreds of early cases were also clustered around the market.”
Gronvall continues:
About 10 miles away from the Huanan market, across the Yangtze River, is the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). From the earliest days of the pandemic, this geographic coincidence—a pandemic caused by a coronavirus in the same city as a research institute that studies coronaviruses—was seen as evidence enough that the virus came from a “lab leak.” President Trump even said so. The theory of the laboratory’s potential involvement has gone through many iterations in the popular press and official government documents and communications over the past three years; it has also included character assassinations of Chinese scientists, WHO experts, and U.S. scientists, as well as outright lying, grifting, online hate, and debunked charges of biowarfare. Most recently, the U.S. Department of Energy changed its intelligence analysis of the coronavirus’s origin from being undecided to having a low-confidence assessment that the virus came from a laboratory, sparking a fresh round of headlines about the virus’s origin. Nonetheless, no direct evidence of the laboratory’s involvement in the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has emerged.
