The quest for truth-in-COVID did pick up some steam in late spring 2021.
Not about the vaccine, though.
About the origins of the virus.
From the first days of the epidemic, strong circumstantial evidence suggested Sars-CoV-2 had leaked from a Chinese lab. Both the virus itself and the facts around its emergence pointed to human intervention.
Wuhan, the city of 10 million people where the first cases were found, is home to China’s most important viral research laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute aggressively researched bat coronaviruses, which China had viewed as a serious risk since the original SARS outbreak in 2003.
In 2017 the institute opened China’s first Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. Level 4 labs are the most secure available, designed to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola. But just months after the lab opened, U.S. State Department officials visited and reported in a cable to Washington that the new facility was at risk of a serious accident. They found “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The troubled lab was located only miles from the first cluster of cases in central Wuhan. And it had worked with a virus very similar to Sars-CoV-2 known as RaTG13 (or RaBtCov/4991), which had been found in a cave in 2013 after several miners working there became seriously ill with pneumonia.
That cave—like other caves that had large numbers of the bats that were the original animal hosts for naturally occurring coronaviruses—was nowhere near Wuhan. It was located in southern China, several hundred miles away. And the Chinese couldn’t trace a chain of human transmission from that region to Wuhan. They had reported no early cases in the villages and cities around the caves, or between the caves and Wuhan.
Early on, Chinese and international reports had offered a different potential explanation for the fact Sars-CoV-2 had emerged first in Wuhan. They linked the outbreak to a large “wet market” there. Wet markets, which are common in China, sell wild and domesticated live animals for slaughter. An NPR reporter visited a similar market in Hong Kong and reported that “it’s quite obvious why the term ‘wet’ is used. . . . The countertops of the stalls are red with blood as fish are gutted and filleted.”
But the theory was discounted within months, because Chinese researchers could not find Sars-CoV-2 in tissue samples of animals taken from the Wuhan wet market.
Meanwhile, from the start of the epidemic, Chinese authorities at every level behaved as if they had something to hide. Sending police to silence Li Wenliang, the Wuhan doctor who in late December 2020 had first warned about the new pneumonia, was only the first step.
An Associated Press investigation in June 2020 found that China had “sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome, of the virus for more than a week after three different government labs had fully decoded the information. . . . Chinese government labs only released the genome after another lab published it ahead of authorities on a virologist website on Jan. 11.” The next day, China shut down that other lab for “rectification.”
Beijing also told the World Health Organization it did not believe people could transmit the virus to each other. Five days later, with hospitals in Wuhan filling, China reversed course and acknowledged that people could and did spread Sars-CoV-2.
Still, China refused to give the WHO detailed data on COVID patients for another 10 days, according to the Associated Press investigation. Nor would it let international experts visit Wuhan to see what was happening firsthand. On February 7, the New York Times reported, “C.D.C. and W.H.O. Offers to Help China Have Been Ignored for Weeks: Privately, Chinese doctors say they need outside expertise. But Beijing, without saying why, has shown no interest so far.”
Finally, three days after that article, China allowed an international team inside its borders.
At best, China’s attitude revealed badly misplaced national pride. Through 2020 and into 2021, long after the virus had become a far larger problem in the United States and Europe than in China, the People’s Republic continued to stonewall.
In January 2021, more than a year after the coronavirus first emerged, China finally allowed a WHO team of scientists to speak to researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology for an investigation. But the inquiry faced such severe Chinese-imposed restrictions that no one expected it to investigate aggressively.
A Novel Virus Made More Dangerous
Meanwhile, Sars-CoV-2 itself had several characteristics that suggested it might not be entirely natural.
From the start, it was both remarkably communicable and surprisingly stable, as if it had been optimized to infect humans. Throughout 2020, it hardly mutated. (The sudden acceleration in variants came alongside widespread vaccinations, and viral mutation is a known risk of vaccinations.)
At the same time, it turned out that civet cats and many other possible “intermediate hosts” for the virus didn’t seem vulnerable to Sars-CoV-2. For other coronaviruses, including the original SARS and MERS, intermediate hosts had provided a crucial link between the bats that had originally hosted the virus and humans. The lack of a plausible intermediate host was puzzling.
Further, the genome of Sars-CoV-2 contained a very unusual sequence that made it more dangerous, the “furin cleavage site.”
A May 2020 article in Nature highlighted the power and danger of furin cleavage:
Robert Garry, a virologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, estimates that [the site] gives SARS-CoV-2 a 100–1,000 times greater chance than SARS-CoV of getting deep into the lungs. ‘When I saw SARS-CoV-2 had that cleavage site, I did not sleep very well that night,’ he says.
But bat coronaviruses generally do not have furin cleavage sites, raising the question of how Sars-CoV-2 had acquired its own. RaTG13, the virus that the Wuhan Institute had admitted working with, was the closest known viral relative of Sars-CoV-2, but by virology standards it was still relatively distant, and it lacked the furin cleavage site.
One possible answer for how the virus could have added the genes necessary to make the furin cleavage site lay in what scientists called “gain-of-function” research. The phrase is euphemistic, bordering on Orwellian.
In plain English, it means altering a virus’s genetic code to make it more dangerous.