COVID-19 originsDebate over Origins of COVID-19 Continues

At the end of the month, the U.S. intelligence community (IC) will submit a report to President Joe Biden offering the IC’s conclusions regarding the origins of COVID-1. The report is not likely to put an end to the debate, especially since China is refusing access to key materials and personnel.

Pandora Report notes that two recent articles contribute to this ongoing debate.

Dr. Nicholas G. Evans and Anna Muldoon, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reject the idea that a lab accident associated with gain-of-function research experiments caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Gain-of-function research refers to research which modifies biological agents so their activity – for example, virulence – is enhanced or augmented.

The U.S. government did fund experiments which manipulated coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but those experiments do not qualify as gain-of-function research, and there is no evidence that the manipulated pathogens caused the pandemic.

Evans and Muldoon break down the origins of the theory, its many permutations, and why it is an unlikely explanation for COVID-19.

Dr. Andrew Lakoff, writing in Noema, also look into the question of whether COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak, or a natural spillover event in which a virus jumps from animals to humans. The lab leak hypothesis has gained ground in part because scientists have so far been unable to identify the intermediary host animal, an identification which could confirm the spillover hypothesis.

This uncertainty leads to “a situation of diagnostic uncertainty, both about how to attribute blame and about the horizon of future reform.” Lakoff frames this uncertainty as part of a larger question about laboratory safety and the trade-offs between advancing knowledge to protect from future pandemics and the risks associated with intentional or unintentional spillage of dangerous pathogens from research labs.

Pandora Reportnotes on Thursday, remarks from a WHO official added a wrinkle to the ongoing conversation about the origins of COVID-19. In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a joint investigation with China into the virus’s origins. The team’s report, released in February 2021, concluded that a leak of the virus from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was “extremely unlikely” as the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The WHO investigation and report were harshly criticized by experts, who said the report was seriously flawed. he WHO chief has recently commented that a lab leak cannot yet be entirely ruled out as a source of the pandemic because of China’s lack of transparency on the issue.

Now, new commentary from Ben Embarek, the head of the joint investigation, is raising even more questions about COVID-19’s origin story. In an interview for a Danish TV station’s documentary, Embarek expressed concerns about safety standards at a laboratory close to the seafood market where the first human cases of COVID-19 were detected. Embarek claims that the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the [appropriate] level of expertise or safety.” Embarek also said that the possibility of a lab staffer being infected with the coronavirus while collecting bat samples was “likely.”