A reporter’s investigation into the origins of Covid-19

Jordan Sometimes, not often, but sometimes the difference between conspiracy theories and theories can be difficult to define. And that’s even more true when the topic is as critical and as politicized as the origins of COVID-19. If you rewind to the early days of the pandemic when we knew far less about the virus than we know now, there was a conspiracy theory making the rounds that the virus did not develop in animals and then move to humans at wet markets, that it instead was created in a Chinese lab and let loose upon the world. This theory was incredibly damaging. First, because you might remember how quickly the very worst people seized on it and the immense damage that that did.

Trump Clip It’s not racist at all, no. Not at all. It comes from China.

News Clip 1 Hundreds gathered in downtown Vancouver this afternoon for a rally against anti-Asian hate. It comes after racist and hateful crimes towards Asian Canadians have been on the rise during the pandemic.

Testimonial When they walk on the Street, they don’t feel safe anymore. Especially women and the children.

Jordan But that wasn’t the only problem. The conspiracy theory, which had little hard evidence and a lot of vicious speculation behind it, politicized any sort of real investigation into how exactly this pandemic began. And that is an investigation that hundreds of scientists say needs to happen. In fact, there’s at least one journalist who has done a lot of this work already. No, COVID was not set loose from a lab on purpose. It was not created for this with any intent by anyone. That’s ridiculous. That’s conspiracy. But as today’s guest argues in her new book, the idea that this virus was being studied in a lab in Wuhan and somehow escaped containment is a plausible argument that gets lost in the rabbit hole’s that some people go down. So what is the case for a lab origin of Covid-19? What do and don’t we know about that? What’s left to find out?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Elaine Dewar is a Canadian investigative journalist. She is the author of several books, including her newest On The Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An investigation . Hello, Elaine.

Elaine Hi.

Jordan Thank you so much for joining us today. I think the first question I’m going to ask is probably what everybody wants to know, is what made you decide to go deeper and investigate the origins of covid 19?

Elaine Well, it’s a complicated kind of back story, but it starts with my mother, who died in November of 2019, just as this pandemic was beginning and whose life was entirely shaped by the previous awful pandemic. The one of 1918-19. Her mother died from the flu in 1918, one day before her first birthday, and she didn’t realize that her stepmother was not her natural mother until she was 14 years old and somebody popped the secret. And the fact that a secret had been kept from her about her origin and her mother’s death from the flu for 14 years by everybody she cared about, threw her for the rest of her life. And probably is the reason why I became a journalist, because secrets were something that I felt the need to bust.

So as soon as you know, TV started picking up on what was going on in Wuhan in early January, I started watching it with great interest. And as I was reading my Globe and Mail on a daily basis, I started watching the numbers jump around as to how many people were sick. And I started hearing very important personages in China saying, ‘not to worry, it’s not really contagious between people. It’s a mere nothing.’ But of course, the papers and social media were telling a very different story. So for any journalist, that kind of contradiction between what officials say and what the facts say is like an open door saying, ‘Come here, find out what the heck is going on.’ So that’s how I got started.

Jordan When you began to look at it, what was the predominant origin story of this virus and how quickly when you started digging into it, did you realize there might be something else at play?

Elaine Well, it’s really interesting because at the end of January, so after the lockdown in Wuhan, after China finally owned up to having a problem and our government was saying the risk for Canadians is low while they are building these huge hospitals out of nothing in ten days flat in Wuhan to deal with the number of patients they were having. The first learned Journal papers started being submitted about the 20th of January and by the 30th or the 31st Science Magazine, which is one of the leading journals for General Science, published a story in which it said two contradictory things, one that the Chinese officials were being incredibly cooperative this time versus SARS in 2002, where they hid it for months. But also there was a suggestion that was made by an American scientist by the name of Ebright, who said, you know, this shouldn’t be coming out of Wuhan. This can’t just be from bats or animals, which was the suggestion from the beginning. It doesn’t make sense that you’d have that in a city of 11 million people. However, it does make sense that there are these two labs that have been studying bat coronaviruses for 17 years, which are both located in and around central Wuhan. You really have to consider a lab leak.

So immediately there was a huge reaction, I would say, especially in the United States, where people who had been working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, where these bat studies were taking place and had been funding their research, are suddenly putting forward letters to The Lancet , which is another famous science Journal. And were sending letters to the White House saying no possibility at all of a lab leak. Anybody who puts that idea forward is a conspiracy theorist. This is obviously a spillover from animals. So you have, on the one hand, serious scientists saying, geez, it could be a lab leak. The other hand, you have serious scientists who have an interest in working with a certain lab in China doing their darndest to just quash that story before it gets out of the gate. And that’s the way it went for the next six to eight months, a constant hammering that anyone who even suggested a lab leak possibility was a conspiracy theorist, and it was obvious it had to be a spillover directly from an animal or indirectly through a second animal to human beings.

Jordan I want to ask you about that reaction, particularly in the United States, because I think that when this was going down and COVID-19 was hitting America really hard, there was a sense that to question the official origin story because of all the really nasty racist stuff that was coming out of the Trump administration was kind of tantamount to joining in on that side of the criticism. And therefore, you couldn’t really question it strictly on the facts without being kind of accused of trying to drum up anti-Asian racism.

Elaine I think that was the feeling in the media, but that feeling was fed very deliberately by people who had vested interests, and it took journalists quite some time to figure out who was who and what those interests were.

Jordan That’s really interesting. Why don’t we back up a little bit then, and sort of tell me where the investigation starts. I understand the way you look at it, it goes back to 2012.

Elaine Exactly. And that part of the story did not emerge into public view until sometime in July. Well, June and July of 2020. I found out about that part of the story when a publisher friend of mine sent me a link to an organization called BioscienceResource.Org, which publishes something called Independent Science News. And they presented a thesis which was known as the Latham-Wilson thesis, after the people who wrote it, who had discovered through their various connections that there had been written in China in 2012, a master’s thesis on the illness and death of miners who had been working in a mine in Mojiang County in Yunnan, clearing it of bat feces. The mine was heavily infested with bats. Three miners went in. Within days, those three miners became extremely ill. Three more miners went in to take their places. Within days, they became extremely ill. Three out of six died, and the doctors treating them were bewildered because they tried everything. They tried antifungals. They tried antivirals. They tried antibiotics. Nothing seemed to work, but it seemed to them that the most obvious possible cause was a SARS-type Coronavirus that the miners may have picked up in that mine.

They sent samples of what was in the miners lungs to the Wuhan Institute of Virology because Shi Zhengli, known in China as the bat woman had been studying bat-borne coronaviruses ever since the SARS epidemic of 2003. That lab had the largest single collection of those kinds of coronaviruses anywhere in the world, and had done various genome sequences of what they’d found. And so the samples were sent to her lab for identification. ‘Can you find in these samples something in the way of a Coronavirus or something that can explain why these miners are ill?’ Shi Zhengli never published a word about what was found in those samples, absolutely nothing. And yet by the time the samples arrived in her lab, it was possible to do something called new generation sequencing, which makes it pretty easy to find a full genome sequences. Even when you can’t actually extract living virus, you can still get the genome sequence and compare it to others that you know. Not only did she go back to that lab with her students over the course of four or five years, at least seven or eight times to get samples from fecal remains from bats and bring that back to the lab, but various other military and civilian investigators went to that lab, too.

So to jump to now, a fellow who is anonymous, whose name online is The Seeker, discovered that master’s thesis in which the physician pretty much declares that, in the opinion of the physician, those miners were suffering from a coronavirus. And he also unearthed a PhD thesis that was done a few years later, which basically confirmed that the samples had been sent to Wuhan, confirmed that they were probably coronavirus. And yet when Shi Zhengli was asked by Science about that situation, her answer was that the miners died of a fungal infection. There is absolutely no evidence that they died of a fungal infection. In fact, there’s evidence that they did not die of a fungal infection. So those who were thinking about a lab leak, who saw that kind of very deceptive behavior on the one hand, and the failure to publish what must have been extremely important data. You know, when you lose three out of six, you’ve got a virus that is both infectious and really pathogenic to humans. It would be ridiculous for a person who is spending their life trying to find exactly that kind of virus spilling over to humans not to have done immediately serious work on what those miners were suffering from. So the investigation takes off from there.

Jordan Where does it go next? I know that there is a Canadian connection here, and I’m going to ask you to maybe piece that in, which dates back to right before the start of the pandemic. And then we’ll talk about how the theory has evolved as the pandemic has.

Elaine The Canadian connection is both direct and indirect. So we have in Winnipeg, something called the National Micro Biology Laboratory , which is part of a larger unit which studies human pathogens that can only be studied in labs of very high containment. So what’s called a biosafety level 4 lab. In addition to studying human pathogens, another section of that institution studies animal pathogens. Back in 2003, when the SARS original virus was making its way to Canada and other places in the world, two Chinese scientists who had come to Canada, I believe in 1996 or 1997, named Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng. Were working with the leaders of the NML. Keding Cheng was working with Francis Plummer, who was the director of the lab, and in June of 2003, Xiangguo Qiu was hired by the lab as a biologist. Both of them had backgrounds that didn’t really fit with the NML. Xiangguo Qiu was a medical doctor and an immunologist. Her husband is a proteomics expert. Neither one of them have PhDs, and yet almost immediately Xiangguo Qiu started working on Ebola and monoclonal antibodies to deal with Ebola in that lab. We have no idea why she was interested in Ebola as opposed to the previous study she’d done on blood cancers. But nevertheless she worked her way up through the system.

By 2014/2015, Public Health Agency of Canada was created by the Harper government to have control over how we study and how we deal with human pathogens in Canada. And so it became the agency in charge of of the National Microbiology Laboratory and its partner. And at that point Keding Cheng had already come to work within the lab and Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were also teaching a bunch of Chinese students at the University of Manitoba. The Chinese students turned out to be members of the Chinese military. A couple of papers were published early on, which clearly showed those military affiliations. Later published papers didn’t show those affiliations directly. And the papers I found included very interesting papers with George Gao, who’s head of the CDC now in China, and later on, a person by the name of Chen Wei, who is a major general in the People’s Liberation Army, China’s leading expert on Ebola and leading bioweapons expert. So the NML, because it deals with pathogens that are extremely dangerous and for which we may not have any vaccines or any treatments, therefore a level four containment lab, requires its employees to have secret security clearance, which is not so easy to get.

Somehow, Chinese military scholars found their way to that lab, worked on very important papers with leading members of that lab, which were published in plain sight. And yet no one is able to explain how those people found their way into the lab and particularly how it is that even after Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were marched out of that lab in July of 2019, they continued to do work and published using data acquired in that lab, along with Chen Wei the major general.

CBC in 2019 and 2020, by doing access to information applications, discovered that there was a very strange relationship between Xiangguo Qiu and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the putative center of the lab leak theory. She began going there to help them develop their own level four to get people trained up to work in it. That level four was not able to import things like Ebola to China for study until the end of 2018. By the end of the first quarter in 2019, the Winnipeg lab had sent 15 strains of Ebola plus an even worse virus called Nipa to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for study. No one has ever explained why that was done, why it was necessary to be done why that was done without what’s called a material transfer agreement. And shortly after that, within months, those two are marched out of the lab and their security clearances withdrawn.

They had also done papers with Shi Zhengli, the Coronavirus expert, so very rapidly as the pandemic developed and people began to develop various theories, including conspiracy theories about how and where this virus came from, a rumour began to circulate that in that shipment from the NML to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, there must have been a SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus. So when I started investigating, I’m picking up this stuff on the Internet, and I was also interested in the safety of biosafety level four labs in general. I started to have a look at that and to see whether it was even remotely possible that there had been that kind of connection. What I discovered was that as far as Public Health Agency of Canada’s response to my application for information was concerned, there had never been a transfer of a SARS-CoV-type virus to Wuhan. Ebola, yes, SARS-CoV-2, No. But still, that question is exploding in my head and everybody elses is after. Why on Earth is Canada’s one level four lab dealing with a major general of the People’s Liberation Army, who, by the way, works out of the WIV and worked out of the WIV to make a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. And why is Xiangguo Qiu going five times to the WIV to work in that lab? What the heck was she working on? Have I made the connection for you?

Jordan You have. And before I get you to sort of put all the dots together, I’m not going to ask you to give away the whole book here. Obviously, I can’t wait for people to read it. But I do want to ask you, because you’ve mentioned online conspiracy theories a couple of times. I know I’m familiar with your work as a journalist, and probably a lot of our listeners are, but this is a complex theory, and it involves a lot of behind the scenes things that can’t be corroborated. And I’d love it if you could just try to explain a little bit about your methodology and how this investigation is different from, to be frank, the type of stuff that floats around on Reddit and especially at the beginning of the pandemic, was being spread online.

Elaine So when I set out to do this and somehow my publisher decided that I wasn’t completely nuts and this could be done and should be done. The question was, how do you do it? Because pandemic lockdown, nobody’s getting on a plane, nobody’s going to their labs, nobody’s answering their phones, nobody’s even answering their emails. So it became obvious to me that I’d have to sort of channel I.F. Stone, the great American journalist who found his stories, not by sitting in bars and doing interviews, but by reading public documents.

The great virtue of science as a practice is that information is publicly available. People who are doing experiments, write them up, hand them into a peer-reviewed Journal, and eventually that Journal will publish that paper if it deemed to be publishable. So what I did was follow the publications. Nowadays because things are so much faster than they used to be when there was only a peer-reviewed journal to read. We also have what are called preprint sites where people who have finished a paper that they think is really important, post it to that preprint site before a peer review Journal has taken it on and decided to publish it. And so the preprint sites really drove a lot of fascinating information as it was pouring out of labs all around the world. So what I did was read that. I wasn’t interested in a conspiracy theory other than was there any information that led to a preprint Journal or led to a peer-reviewed Journal or led me to people who I could speak to, who had done those papers, and that, I think, got me to a very reliable a pile of evidence, the probabilities of which, point to a lab leak.

Jordan Let’s pretend we’re at a dinner party or trapped in a stopped elevator or whatever.

Elaine No, not that one. I don’t want that one!

Jordan No, especially not now.

Elaine Definitely not now.

Jordan But let’s pretend we’re doing something other than this that forces you to talk to me for a very short period of time. And you mention, ‘oh, by the way, I have a working theory for how COVID really became a pandemic.’ Can you connect the dots quickly and kind of give me that movie pitch that elevator pitch of what your theory is about how this happened?

Elaine This goes against every journalistic principle I have, but I’ll try. 2012: six miners get sick, three die. Their samples are sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world, and leading experts on how to study them, and doing gain of function experiments on them to see if we could make them more infectious to human beings than they might have been to the bats in which they originated. Those samples are sent to the WIV, which publishes not a word about them, because whatever they found was really bloody important. By 2012/2013, President Xi Jinping is now the leader of China and has said that civilian and military researchers must work together. And what are they working on? They’re working on bio technologies that may be advantageous to China as a nation and may be advantageous to China protecting itself from bioweapons created by others.

So what I think happened was: lab gets the samples, genome sequences get run. Perhaps no actual virus is isolated until later, but eventually it is. It’s experimented on. It proves to be dangerous. And eventually it leaks into a researcher who walks out of that lab in Wuhan and it’s suddenly spreading among human beings. There’s your elevator pitch.

Jordan Do you think that… because I’ve watched this, I don’t want to call it a debate, necessarily because it’s more just a number of theories. But…

Elaine No, it’s a debate.

Jordan Is it?

Elaine Oh, yeah. Science is not a series of facts pegged to the ground. It’s a series of facts pulled out of different methods in which people argue about meaning at every turn. It’s an argument.

Jordan So given that then, who’s winning this argument now? And my most important question and I won’t keep you here forever, because I know people want to read the book, is will we ever, can we ever definitively figure out what happened here?

Elaine Well, China has done its level best to prevent that, which is a real problem. I mean, from the beginning, they first suppressed evidence or information about this virus circulating in Wuhan. When they couldn’t do that, then they suggested, well, maybe it doesn’t transmit between humans, when they couldn’t do that, and they had to do a lock down, things began to change. And when the WHO tried to get investigators in to find out where it might have come from, China said no bloody way. And they had then negotiated for a whole year before there could be any inquiry at all into origin. All of the effort of that inquiry went to the spillover suggestion for which they came up with zero evidence and no evidence at all was distributed or looked at or inquired into relating to a lab theory. So no, I don’t think we’re ever going to get a ‘here it is, nail it to the ground.’ Unless somebody walks out of that lab with lab notes or somebody demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 is actually moving around in the following bat in the following place. And here’s how we can trace how it moved from that bat into a human population.

So what we’re left with is a notion from law courts, civil trials, in which we don’t ever prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. But we arrive at the preponderance of evidence, and that’s about the best we’re going to get here.

Jordan Do you think the preponderance of evidence will ever publicly come around to, ‘yes, this was a lab leak’ to the point where other governments view it that way?

Elaine I think all the governments already do.

Jordan Really?

Elaine I think a number of people are coming to that conclusion. Yes.

Jordan Why aren’t they saying that?

Elaine Well, do you want to pick a fight with China?

Jordan We just did.

Elaine We just did and it was three years of hell.

Jordan Yeah, that doesn’t bode well for the future of foreign policy, but also the future of infectious diseases.

Elaine Never mind that, how about the future of science? Because what needs to be said here is that the major science journals participated in the way China was trying to craft a narrative here. They participated in refusing to publish papers that might have led in a different direction. And that is far more serious, from my way of thinking, than anything else about this story.

Jordan Have you heard anything since you’ve written this book from people at those journals?

Elaine No.

Jordan They won’t engage with it?

Elaine No, they don’t even answer basic questions.

Jordan Elaine, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. I hope everybody gets a chance to dig into the book.

Elaine My pleasure.

Jordan Elaine Dewar, the author of On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: an Investigation The author of several other books as well.

That was the Big Story. For more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. I’m sure our mentions will be in great shape after this episode. You can always talk to us via email at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com Email [click here!].

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