A journalist at Nature called me in 2017 with the news that China was opening a new Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in Wuhan, one designed to handle the most dangerous pathogens. He asked if I thought China should be allowed to have such a lab and whether it could operate it safely. I replied that China had a right to conduct advanced research, but I worried that operating it safely would require a high-reliability culture—one in which anyone could raise questions about the safety of proposed work and methods. Such transparency, and the ability of junior employees to challenge superiors, runs against the grain of both communism and China’s hierarchical traditional culture.
My skepticism looked prescient when news of Covid broke in 2020, setting off speculation about a leak from the Wuhan lab. Some were surprised that my initial response was that the virus probably didn’t come from the lab. Many prominent scientists and public-health officials said the same.
There are many reasons why science and scientists can get things wrong. The most obvious is the need in urgent situations to make recommendations with imperfect data. In such cases, scientists have to rely on what information they have. That’s what happened with me. Early prepublished data indicated that the first reported cases were from the Wuhan wet market. A novel virus is unlikely to make the leap from animal to human multiple times, so—Occam’s razor—if the index cases were all related to the market, then it, not the lab, was the likely source.
Soon thereafter, data emerged from flulike-illness surveillance networks indicating that the outbreak started earlier than the reported wet-market cases—as far back as mid-November 2019. Thus, the known wet-market cases weren’t the index cases we had thought, and a lab leak was a possibility.
There were several ways in which an accidental lab leak could have happened. People collecting bat viruses to study them might have handled them with safety protocols appropriate to animal viruses rather than potentially human viruses. The lab might have been doing gain-of-function research—making the pathogen capable of infecting new species, more infectious or able to cause a worse disease—to create better vaccines or treatments. Viruses replicate only in the cells of other organisms, so if scientists at the Wuhan lab were propagating animal coronaviruses in…
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