Viral review – was Covid-19 created in a lab?
Viral not only delivers a comprehensive overview of the Covid-19 global crisis, but sets today’s events in the context of the past. This book concludes that to ensure a safer future, we need to not only understand the myriad research initiatives being carried out across the planet – some in dodgy, but ill-regulated laboratories – we need open frameworks to allow a proper assessment of the deluge of scientific information flooding into the public domain.
It has been thus for decades. What is truly unique about Viral is that the diligent authors have dug deep into science lab water-cooler chatter. In today’s media, that means narrating – sometimes wild – assertions, reporting even dubious bloggers. Always, unsupported statements are acknowledged as such. The point is that, validated or not, these have an impact on thinking and policy.
While some research results may seem unconnected, lay readers – this reviewer – will gain an unexpected insight into the academic turmoil in which viral research is carried out. Any illusion that we are in the hands of well organised “experts” is shattered. At last, we are allowed to “smell the coffee”.
Sometimes detail overwhelms. I needed to read some passages over. Although it often veers towards a laboratory-generated source, the book honestly reaches no firm conclusions about the origins of the Covid pandemic. However, the book does reinforce the complexity of the uncertain issues mankind faces, with Covid-19 and any other future pandemics.
The strapline under the title, The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, is a bit of a misnomer. Successful searches are well organised, and the ground is allocated and quartered. Searchers advance in careful lines poking at the undergrowth to rootle out the smallest piece of evidence. Our authors illustrate that whatever “process” there was, it was not organised. They take readers on a whirlwind super tour of Covid’s Yellow Brick Road.
Traipsing into the unknown, we start the Covid search for the viral wizard in a bat-infested Moijang copper mine in 2012, referenced in a Twitter post in 2020 by an anonymous, influential poster – the Seeker. Then we are taken to studies of bat guano in Thai caves in 2006/7 – published in 2013.
No one knows how many miners worked in the Moijang mine, but six were admitted to a hospital six hours drive away in Kumming, rather than two much closer facilities. What illness they had contracted isn’t said. But in 2013 a student, Li Zu, referenced in a thesis “The Analysis of Six Patients with severe pneumonia caused by Unknown Viruses”. This is a backstory missing in other narratives.
It is what “the Seeker” found in 2020. Co-author Alina translated the “critical parts” within days “with increasing distress” on behalf of the suffering miners, struggling against “Covid-like” symptoms many years ago. It is an illustration of warning signs callously ignored.
To their credit, despite this constant disclosure of “Aha!” facts that singly may or may not amount to a hill of beans, the authors resist the temptation to suggest they amount to a smoking gun. In short, Covid-19 may have come from a Wuhan laboratory or the anus of a Moijang bat. No one really knows.
This book was obviously timed to meet a swell tide of public interest and would perhaps have benefited from tighter editing. But readers need it now, mid pandemic, and will enjoy surfing along on our authors’ breathless chase.
Having started in the copper mine, Chapter Two deals with viruses in general. There is a slowing of tempo. We now have a matter-of-fact narrative of the progress of virus research, starting with the work of June Almeida, who pioneered the imaging of virus particles at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, using an electron beam microscope.
There follows an exceptionally readable section on nanoparticles, the importance of genetic decoding, the identification of individual Covid strains, ending with an interesting rhetorical question, “Do deadlier or milder viruses spread better?” The conclusion is that viruses that kill their hosts too quickly don’t succeed, and evidence is adduced from previous pandemics to support the argument.
Then, back to the chase, moving on to the “Wuhan Whistleblowers”. We arrive at the infamous Seafood Market, the centre of much controversy. Readers of a queasy disposition should pass over this chapter quickly, especially if visiting Wuhan for a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast. The diet of the good folk of Wuhan include, “beaver, ferret badger, hare, muntjac deer, domestic cat (in their thousands), hog-badger, raccoon dog and Himalayan palm civet. Yum!
At all costs, avoid the Dragon-Tiger-Phoenix soup. Even chrysanthemum petal flavouring cannot disguise the fact that it is made from civet meat and snake. And don’t touch the Pangolin. Many are former lab animals sold illegally into the food chain for massive profit. This is colour writing at its best —TripAdvisor 5 Star rating.
The conclusion is that back in the day of SARS (2003) most of these animals tested positive for SARS viruses. We are guided to assume there is a read-across to Covid, which may or may not be the case. This and the following chapter, “The Pangolin Papers”, would make interesting stand-alone essays.
Chapter Seven is a useful history of laboratory leaks involving coronaviruses dating back to Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing in 2003/4, comprehensive and presented in a sharply focused writing style. It is genuinely shocking how often containment has been breached and how bungled attempts at cover-ups have failed.
Segue to Chapter Eight, “Gain of Function”, which explains what is going on in these labs. More blasé readers may not share my surprise at the scale of dedicated efforts by state actors and private agencies to manipulate viruses to enhance their functions, including ease of zoonotic transmissibility from animals to humans. I found the exposé frightening.
That said, the authors reach a sober conclusion. “We think the allegations that SARS-CoV-2 virus is a bioweapon or a vaccine trial that went wrong are a distraction”. No smoking gun, yet.
Chapter Nine, “The Furin Cleavage Site”, is an engaging tutorial in biochemistry that will come as a revelation to the lay reader, as it did to this reviewer. Furin is the protein that is “doing steady work every minute of every day, going around cleaving proteins in two to change their shapes, the better to enable them to do their myriad different jobs.”Furins change the receptors on a virus enabling it to bind more easily to cells. They are responsible for increasing the potential for Covid transmission, and Viral is worth buying to read this chapter alone.
“Popsicle Origins and the World Health Organisation”, Chapter Eleven, brings us back to the less analytical land of scientific derring-do, including fascinating narratives of Tweet and counter-Tweet from the Grand Poo-Bahs of science’s beaux monde.
The closing chapters return to the possibility of accidental release and a responsible retreat to the safe ground of “doubt”. “There is hope that some of the few people who hold pieces of the puzzle within China’s borders will one day, even if decades later, be able to illuminate the story of how SARS-CoV-2 found its way into Wuhan.”
It is as close to a smoking gun as our authors ever manage to get. They could have been more explosive, but their credibility would have been undermined. As it stands Viral is a timely contribution to debate on global pandemic management, its failures and, if lessons are learned, the potential for a better way.