Will we ever know Covid-19’s origin story?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Last week we marked the third anniversary of the world shutting down at the onset of this pandemic. We have learned an awful lot in those three years about things like reproduction value or infection, fatality rate, the state of our healthcare systems, mRNA vaccines, and countless. Epidemiological terms that I wouldn’t have been able to pronounce in 2019, but there’s still one big question out there with no consensus even three years later. Where did COVID 19 come from? As much as theories from scientific theories to intelligence theories to straight up conspiracy theories have evolved along with the virus, the two main possib. Have never changed. It came from nature or it escaped from a lab. Recently, a major US department reached a low confidence conclusion that the virus was indeed the result of a lab leak. At the same time, new genetic samples seemed to point to its origins in Chinese raccoon dogs. So what does the latest evidence tell us about this virus and where it came from? Will we ever conclusively be able to answer that question, and if we ever do, what would it actually change, if anything? I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Umair Irfan is a correspondent at Fox. He writes about climate change, COVID 19 and energy policy. Hey Umair.

Umair Irfan Hey, thanks for having me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Where I want to start, and I know the theory that Covid came from a lab has been around for years already. But for those who aren’t familiar, could you give us the kind of nuts and bolts version of the current theory of the lab leak?

Umair Irfan In its simplest form, this is the idea that the virus that causes Covid 19, SARS COV-2. Was originally being studied in a laboratory somewhere in Wuhan, China, and then escaped to the laboratory by infecting a scientist or through some breach in the infection protocol, and then from there ignited the pandemic. The core of it has stayed largely the same. I think some of the political valence around it has shifted quite a bit. When it was brought up initially, you know, in the early stages of the pandemic, especially here in the United States, there was sort of a political effort to blame China, and then there was sort of a reflexive pushback on that as well, that a lot of people saw this as a way for the Trump administration to try to dissuade and, and push back for its mishandling of some of the early stages of the pandemic as well. And, so it was really hard to disentangle, you know, the political forces behind this versus the actual scientific discussion. There were also some allegations, completely unfounded, that this was, you know, something that was engineered in a laboratory, right? That this was something that was deliberately made worse or was potentially part of a bioweapons program. There has been no evidence to date of any of those claims, but, um, at it, in its simplest form though, the idea that this was a virus that was being studied in a laboratory. Is the more plausible and the simpler version of the claim. And that’s one where some intelligence agencies here in the United States seem to think has some credibility not to go over the same ground again.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Uh, but since we just did it for the Lab League, can you quickly give us the nuts and bolts of the natural origin theory?

Umair Irfan Um, and has that changed at all, or are we still dealing with like the wet market that we heard about right back at the beginning?

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Well, the idea is that potentially the virus may have jumped from an animal into humans. And the reason why a natural origin appears to be a a an important possibility here is that, you know, almost every other virus we know has come to humans from being spread via animals through, um, animals that we keep through agriculture, you know, things that we farm, but also through exposure to wildlife as well. And we’ve seen this pattern emerge before with. Previous iterations of Coronaviruses as well. So a lot of people suspected initially that this was likely the same scenario here. Now in China, there’s also the, the added factor that there are these wildlife markets. There’s a pretty robust wildlife trade in China that also goes on in major cities. And the idea was that essentially an organism that was infected with SARS-COV-2, or a progenitor or an ancestor, was exposed to humans in a crowded environment where the conditions may not have been completely sanitary, and then that allowed the infection to ignite.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings How come we haven’t been able to pin down either of these theories after three years? What piece of the puzzle are we missing?

Umair Irfan The main thing is we don’t have an ancestor of sars-COV-2, a thing that gave rise to it. Either the virus itself in another animal or something that this current version of the virus evolved from, I would, I would caution a little bit of patience. You know, when it comes to tracing the origins of viruses, that can actually take decades. You know, it took 10 to 15 years to find the origins of the original sars.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Okay.

Umair Irfan And three years out, um, you know, may not be enough time, but at the same time, it also might be too much time has gone by because some of the initial evidence around the earliest cluster of cases has also been basically eliminated, you know, the market where the initial outbreak occurred, the Wuhan seafood market has been closed down, the area has been scrubbed clean. So there’s very little in the way of forensic evidence that you can get from there. And then similarly with the laboratory, you know, the discussion around it has also, you know, raised the hackles of the Chinese government and they’ve shut down outside investigations and closed off cooperation with their scientists and have closed their books to this as well. And so a lot of the main pieces of evidence that we would need to conclusively close the gaps here on both the lab leak and the natural origin spillover have been lost to time. And we are going to need a lot more circumstantial evidence to try to figure out where this came.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So what’s changed in terms of our intelligence on this, um, in the past month or so here?

Umair Irfan You mentioned there are agencies in the United States that are, that are making some findings though. Uh, I guess we should be careful to note that they are not conclusive. Yeah, that’s right. When, uh, president Biden took over. Back in 2021, he ordered a 90 day sprint where he’s told basically every intelligence agency in the US to examine where SARS COV-2 came from the initial report that came out back in August, 2021 was inconclusive. Since then, several of these agencies have kept looking into it and have come out with conclusions to varying degrees. The strongest conclusion came from the FBI, which said that with medium confidence. Thinks that the virus originated from a laboratory. Other intelligence agencies have said that they favor a natural origin with medium to low confidence. And then most recently it was revealed that the US Department of Energy weighed in and said that they had low confidence that it perhaps originated from a laboratory. So mixed results around from the different agencies looking at different bits.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings In this context, what does a finding of low confidence means?

Umair Irfan It sounds like it means they found the opposite if you take it at face value. Right. It’s really hard to parse this because this is also, you know, intelligence jargon and we don’t know the exact evidence that they were looking at right now. CNN reported that the Department of Energy’s assessment was actually not based on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was the main lab that was suspected of being the origin of the lab leak, but rather the, uh, wuhan. C so a separate laboratory in the same city. So it’s, it’s not quite clear exactly what pieces of evidence these agencies are drawing on and how they’re weighing them, but, uh, a low confidence just seems to indicate that, you know, as best as they can tell, they, they’re in favor of this particular explanation that this originated from a laboratory, but it’s not something that they’re gonna hang their hat on, that essentially that, you know, they’re, they’re open to being proven wrong. And that if you take this in context with what the other intelligence agencies have found, looking at different bits of evidence, then perhaps. Overall picture is still pretty murky.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Is it usual to have various, intelligence agencies or departments, on totally opposite sides of something like this?

Umair Irfan I’m not super familiar with how, you know, intelligence assessments are conducted generally, but it wouldn’t, surprise me that different intelligence agencies come to different conclusions. You know, the US Department of Energy, for instance, has a lot of background in science, right? They run the National laboratory system here in the. But they also do a lot of biology research and because they’re part of the national security state, they also do a lot of studies and analysis of other countries laboratories as well, which is one of their undercovered underreported missions at that agency. Then you have other, um, agencies that have signals, intelligence, they can listen into classified, um, you know, phone calls and emails and intercepts that they may be drawing on that kind of information as well. And so that’s the thing that, that makes this a little bit hard to sort out, is that different groups are looking at different pieces of evidence that are, you know, within their respective wheelhouses. And it’s when you pull them together that you get sort of a more comprehensive picture. But now that you have different agencies on different sides of it, it’s really hard to actually come to a definitive conclusion one way or another. And that’s why the US officials the most senior. Like the US National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, have said that, you know, their position officially is that it’s still inconclusive.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What about the scientific community? I realize that’s an incredibly broad term, but is any sort of consensus on, on one side or the other, emerging from there? And, you know, what are those questions like?

Umair Irfan Uh. It’s hard to say that there’s a consensus. I mean, this has been just as a contentious, issue among scientists as it has been among policy makers. Right? And, uh, there are some scientists that are very entrenched in their views at this point, on one side or the other. In general though, as I mentioned earlier, that like we’ve seen viruses spill over from animals into humans before. This is a known pattern of exposure to viruses. This we’ve seen epidemic and pandemic viruses emerge through this route. So, simply by playing through history, we know that this is a potential way that this could have happened. Now, the laboratory research though, that’s something of a fairly new element because we haven’t had this sophistication and this level of, you know, virus research being conducted until very recently that, um, now more countries have this level of capability and they can do, um, more research with these viruses and modify them in ways that previously we couldn’t before. And so this is uncharted territory where we don’t fully know the full risks of what’s possible here. And some researchers say that this is a possibility that we should keep open. I tend to, from talking to the scientists that I’ve talked to, you know, I, I tend to split the difference here. And essentially just say that both of these scenarios seem plausible. I wouldn’t say equally plausible. But they’re, they’re plausible enough that both possibilities we should take seriously and that we should take measures to prevent both scenarios from occurring again.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So you mentioned that we haven’t found the ancestor that may be responsible for this virus, but, uh, recent genetic analysis, uh, which was covered by Katherine Wu in the Atlantic last week seems to. That the virus might have been present in raccoon dogs in the Wuhan market? Is that the missing link you’re talking about or uh, is that more circumstantial evidence?

Umair Irfan It’s more circumstantial evidence, but it is more evidence what the research team reports is that. They found positive samples of the coronavirus that were taken from the Wuhan market around the time of the initial outbreak. Also had DNA n associated with these animals. Now, it doesn’t mean that these, uh, raccoon dogs were the vectors for the virus that they were actually infected themselves, but it shows that they were in very close proximity to the virus when the initial outbreak occurred, and so it shows that there were likely animals that were associated with the initial transmission of this, uh, outbreak.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings So we don’t know if it evolved in them or if they were just, uh, part of the infected, I guess, what are the caveats here? Right?

Umair Irfan You know, this is not saying that they found an infected raccoon dog or that they found an ancestor of the virus in this animal. What they’re saying is that when this initial outbreak occurred, In the vicinity alongside people. There were also other animals that were being traded in this market, specifically this raccoon dog, which previously we didn’t know was in that vicinity at the time. So, you know, we talked about, uh, the Department of Energy and kind of a low confidence finding. Um, on the other side we have this news is, is this the thing that’s more likely to. Towards a natural origin, or are we still just, you know, putting apples versus oranges. This is another dot that we can connect to form the picture, but it’s not enough to fully resolve exactly what happened here. I mean, again, what we would really need is some example of a virus. An ancestor to sars-cov-2 found in an animal.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Umair Irfan Or an infected animal. And at this point, you know, we’re just not gonna get a smoking gun. The smoke has long faded away and the guns have all been destroyed. So right now what we’re trying to do is still piece together bits of circumstantial evidence and some of the surrounding information that we have from their initial stages of the pandemic.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings What’s at stake? And I’m not picking either side. If we could definitively learn where this virus came from, what would that change in terms of how we move from here on out?

Umair Irfan Um, in terms of biosecurity and the precautions we take, it wouldn’t change much, but, I mean, the politics of this are still pretty important.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Yes.

Umair Irfan You know, the Chinese government, were they actively covering up a leak or were they just simply trying to cover up an outbreak that they lost control over in both scenarios, you know, what would’ve happened if they were in fact more open and actually called for help early on in the early stages? Could we have potentially avoided some of the worst impacts of this pandemic? You know, with that level of hindsight that that’s kind of important to assess perhaps from a liability perspective, perhaps from a political perspective, but also just generally figure.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Like what is the best course of action if something like this happens again in the future?

Umair Irfan So I wouldn’t say that it’s a completely irrelevant question. I mean, some, some people have said that or that, you know, it’s not important. I think the politics here really do matter How we engage with other countries. Doing this kind of research going forward is going to be a critical element of how we reduce the risk. And so figuring out where this comes from is also an important scientific question because then we can figure. What are the other likely roots of potential exposure? And then perhaps take more aggressive steps to close those off. I mean, the obvious thing that pops up to a layperson, I think when we talk about the lab leak theory is this is scary.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings This could be happening anywhere. Why are we even doing this in the first place? And how dangerous is it?

Umair Irfan Studying viruses in laboratories is pretty important. I mean, this is how we learn to counter viruses.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Umair Irfan And so it, it makes sense that there are scientists all around the world that are studying them. I mean, we have virus research laboratories all over the US and in major cities as well. There are virus research laboratories in New York City. But the question then is what is the scope of the research that you’re doing? One of the big issues that was raised here was, you know, whether this laboratory was doing what’s called gain of function research, right? This is a specific type of virus research where you actually enhance the capabilities of a virus. The logic here is that if you can capture changes, potential dangerous changes in a virus, in a laboratory, you can begin to counter them before they emerge in the wild. That basically you can do this in a controlled setting and then begin building up your countermeasures. Before potentially an outbreak occurs naturally, the risk, of course, is then you’re dealing with a more dangerous virus than you have in nature. And if that virus escapes the laboratory, then you know you’ve created the very problem that you were trying to solve and get ahead of. And so there are some researchers that are saying that we should have a moratorium on this or that we should explicitly ban this kind of gain of function research. But more generally, there are also people saying that, you know, we should be more transparent about the kinds of virus research we’re doing more generally, that the solution to sunlight that uh, more countries should be more open about the kinds of science that they’re doing with what kinds of viruses and that they should make their, uh, facilities more open and transparent and allow other researchers to come in and investigate as well, which is kind of counter to what the Chinese government has been doing in response to the pandemic, which is shutting things down and making their scientists not available to discuss this with other research.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I guess if you look at the timeline of, uh, discovering viral origins, as you mentioned, we’re still in the relatively early stages, but just, you know, given what you’ve told me about the market being totally scrubbed no access to the lab, like what are the chances we ever know? It seems to me like most of the potential for that is long gone. What could still happen to break this open?

Umair Irfan I mean, I think one thing that could happen is that, you know, through virus surveillance, that if scientists are still going out there or still looking at natural reservoirs of this virus and looking at potential relatives of this virus that exist in nature, they may be able to find a potential transmission route.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Mm-hmm.

Umair Irfan uh, the closest relative of sars COV two that we found to date was found in a bat population in Laos, which is about 1500 miles away from Wuhan, where the initial epidemic happened. And so the question then is like, how. It crossed that divide, if that was indeed where the original virus came from. Right? Or maybe scientists find a population of bats closer to the city that was somehow exposing people, or an intermediate animal that the virus jumped from bats into another animal, into humans. So connecting those dots. I mean there, there’s a lot of animals in the world. There’s a lot of potential roots of exposure and you know, closing off different pathways through the process of elimination. And then maybe cataloging all the different variants and versions of the, the family tree of this virus could eventually reveal a more plausible root for exposure. And then on the other hand, maybe there could be a whistleblower in China who may have, you know, access to this information, right. And may have more details about what actually happened or have documented the fact that this virus may have been studied at the laboratory. To date, we don’t have any evidence that this particular virus or any ancestor of this virus. Was being studied in this laboratory, but also we don’t have a lot of insight into the research that was going on there as well.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings The last thing I wanna ask about is just, uh, the politicization around the origins of this in general. And, you know, we, we talked about it, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. Does this new evidence, and here I can speak to the genetic analysis or we can speak to the Department of Energy findings, will it sway anyone one way or another, or is this just like two camps locked in?

Umair Irfan Yeah, unfortunately, it does seem like there’s a lot of motivated reasoning going on, and I think a lot of people have kind of aligned with one view or the other based on their priors, based on their political alignments, and it’s really gonna be hard to change people’s minds one way or the other. Again, we’re not gonna have a definitive answer, we’re not gonna get the smoking gun that would actually, you know, answer this once and for all. And so looking at these bits of evidence, how people piece this together really depends on their own personal backgrounds and their own personal worldviews, and that’s unlikely to change with more evidence.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings I guess we’ll wait and see, uh, what evidence we find next and we can debate it all over again. Umair, thank you so much for this. It’s good to be caught up on the latest science on this.

Umair Irfan Thank you for having me.

Jordan Heath-Rawlings Umair Irfan a correspondent at Vox. That was the big story. For more head to the big story podcast.ca, you’ll find other episodes. In fact, you will find dozens and dozens of episodes about Covid 19. I know. Shocking. If you want to share your theory, scientific or conspiracy, you can write to us hello at the big story podcast.ca. You can also call us and leave a voicemail, 4 1 6 9 3 5 5 9 3 5, and you can get this podcast wherever you like to get ’em, whenever you like to get ’em. And when you do, make sure you rate and review. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.