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Five reasons the Covid pandemic almost certainly started via Wuhan lab leak, according to Harvard researcher
After more than four years and at least 25million lives lost globally, the world still doesn't know with certainty how the Covid pandemic began.
Was it the result of an accident at a Chinese lab that had shady ties to the military and is one of the premier coronavirus hubs in the world, as the FBI believes?
Or was it the result of a freak 'spillover' event from an infected animal at a slaughter market, where exotic animals were kept in squalid conditions?
A lack of direct evidence on either side - such as a credible whistleblower who worked at the lab or identifying the host animal which passed the virus to humans - has allowed the debate to rage on, with a recent analysis concluding there was a 70/30 chance of Covid being lab-made versus natural.
Now, a fresh analysis of the data from a Harvard-based molecular scientist has outlined five reasons Covid was most likely manufactured by Chinese scientists.
Dr Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the book Viral: The search for the Origin of Covid-19 outlined five reasons why the pandemic likely stemmed from a lab accident in China
The analysis was published in a rare pro-lab leak piece in the opinion paper of The New York Times, which has historically strongly maintained the theory was far-fetched.
Dr Alina Chan said the location of the outbreak relative to the coronavirus lab, the unique makeup of the virus, previous research conducted by the WIV, lax biosafety protocols and lack of evidence the virus is present in animals all point to a lab leak.
The molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is also the co-author of the book Viral: The search for the Origin of Covid-19, said if the virus did escape from a lab it 'would be the most costly accident in the history of science.'
Her first point is the location of the initial epicenter.
The Covid pandemic began in Wuhan, a bustling metropolis of 11million people.
More importantly, it is home to one of the foremost coronavirus research labs in the world, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The lab, where Covid is believed to have originated, also has connections to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Researchers there were working with viruses that were distant relatives of Covid around the time of the outbreak.
And viruses most closely related to Covid-19 are present among bat populations living approximately 1,000 miles from Wuhan, but they do not exist in nature in other parts of China researchers have studied.
In 2018, scientists sought to create a novel virus with features that closely match those of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, which some say serves as a blueprint for Covid - and the resulting pandemic
Second, Dr Chan highlights how US and Chinese researchers sought to create a Covid-like virus months before the pandemic as part of a project called DEFUSE, which experts said made the 'lab leak almost certain.'
Reported previously by DailyMail.com, records - obtained by FOIA requests - laid out a plan to 'engineer spike proteins' to infect human cells that would then be 'inserted into SARS-Covid backbones' at the WIV in December 2018.
It proposed engineering high-risk coronaviruses of the same species as the original SARS to preempt a human spillover and develop vaccine technology and strategies.
The researchers sought to synthesize spike proteins with furin cleavage sites that had been designed to bind to human receptors more easily.
The furin has been one of the focal points of debate about Covid-19's origin, with some experts claiming it could only have been acquired through lab experiments.
Ultimately, the application was denied by the US Department of Defense, but critics said the plans laid out in the proposal serve as a 'blueprint' for how to create Covid.
Previous collaborations between WIV and EHA also included collecting and experimenting with viral samples from bats and other animals, as well as sick people living near those infected animals or wildlife trade, Dr Chan added.
Additionally, WIV conducted 'risky' research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious and transmissible.
In her third point, Dr Chan outlines the inadequate biosafety conditions WIV researchers worked under that 'could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious' as Covid-19.
Biosafety has four levels, with 1 being the most relaxed and 4 being the strictest.
In the US, scientists work with SARS-like viruses under BSL-3 conditions, which require face masks and enhanced body coverings.
However, BSLs are not internationally standardized and requirements can vary.
Dr Chan claimed WIV scientists worked with SARS viruses under inadequate biosafety levels, at level 2, which does not require face coverings and allows for experiments to take place in the open air.
SARS-CoV-2 is effectively transmitted through the air.
Documents released in November show US researchers sounded the alarm over such concerns three years before the pandemic, but were ignored or censored.
The records show how an NIH official raised serious concerns about the WIV's plan to engineer Ebola strains in 2017.
The lab was found to have a 'serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate.'
However, an unnamed official, from the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was run by Dr Anthony Fauci at the time, was instructed to erase the safety failures in her report to avoid angering China.
Dr Fauci, who has long favored a zoonotic origin, testified in front of a Congressional subcommittee this week and has now drastically toned down his stance on the lab leak, saying he has 'kept an open mind' and the theory could be true.
Additionally, the proposal for the DEFUSE collaboration grant stated Wuhan would conduct its experiments under BSL-2, which would make it 'highly cost effective.'
And in what Dr Chan calls an 'alarming detail,' one of the scientists working with Dr Shi became sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In Dr Chan's fourth argument, she points out the hypothesis that the pandemic started because of animal spillover at the Huanan Seafood Market 'is not supported by strong evidence.'
Because initial thinking was the virus spread from the market, scientists were unlikely to investigate for cases that were located far away or not linked to a person connected to the market.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is at the center of the Covid-19 lab leak theory
Led by Dr Shi Zhengli, known as bat lady because of her extensive work on bat viruses, scientists had been working with coronaviruses for decades
A recently published paper entitled Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic counter(S)? previously published literature pushing for a zoonotic origin.
Dr Chan writes virologists and scientists 'convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human super-spreader event and a natural spillover at the market.'
When the outbreak initially began, Dr Shi worried the virus could have come from her laboratory and spread among the public.
Existing viral genetic sequencing show all known Covid cases most likely stemmed from a single source and the outbreak at the market occurred after the virus had already been circulating among people.
Additionally, there has not been 'a single infected animal' confirmed at the market or in the market's supply chain.
Lastly, Dr Chan writes: 'Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.'
In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists have been able to prove natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence that link an infected animal to an infected human.
For both the 2002 SARS outbreak and the 2012 MERS outbreak, infected animals were found, people with the earliest known cases had been exposed to animals and variants of the virus were detected in animals.
However, none of these things were true when it came to Covid-19.
But while Dr Chan writes investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with Covid, a September 2023 report published in Nature found a strain of coronavirus harbored in pangolins, the rare animal originally thought to be the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, was nearly identical to the one that infected humans.
In the newly-published study, which was conducted between 2016 and 2017, scientists collected samples from 20 different bat species located 994 miles and 620 miles away from the Covid-19 pandemic epicenter of Wuhan
Based on the findings, some experts theorized the first cases of Covid likely jumped from pangolins to immunocompromised people, giving the novel virus ample opportunity to mutate and replicate until it reached its full pandemic potential.
And in November, Chinese scientists found another bat coronavirus - TyRo-CoV-162275 - that possessed a furin cleavage site and was up to 98 percent identical to coronaviruses found in pangolins.
However, Dr Chan said leading experts agree Covid required 'little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans... The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.'
Though she still writes 'several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible and we still don't know enough about the full extent' of WIV's virus research.
Ultimately, Dr Chan wrote, the Covid-19 pandemic could have resulted from 'any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year.
'But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.'