State of Mankind

‘It All Began in China’
—Book Excerpt From ‘COVID-19: The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic’
Barry Cooper
Marco Navarro-Génie
April 9, 2021 Updated

Timelines associated with the spread of COVID-19 have changed over the past several months and, with new information, may change again in the future. There seems to be widespread agreement in publicly available sources that individuals with odd flu-like illnesses were observed in China as early as August 2019. Nothing was confirmed until a 70-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease was diagnosed in late December 2019 in Wuhan. According to the Lancet, which, despite recent irregularities, remains a flagship English-language general medical journal, the symptoms of this first patient presented around Dec. 1, 2019. There also seems to be agreement that by late 2019 the “novel” coronavirus had jumped from an animal to a human being; this is called a zoonotic transmission. At this point, narrative agreement breaks down. Some observers said the transmission from an animal, not yet specified, to a human took place in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, also in Wuhan. It was called a “wet” market not simply because it sold slaughtered live seafood that requires water to live. It was also the site of the live slaughter of pangolins, wolf pups, hares, snakes, raccoon dogs, porcupines, badgers, pigs, chickens, and peacocks.

A second narrative began with the infection of the wife of the patient with Alzheimer’s who showed symptoms of pneumonia at the end of the first week in December. She was then hospitalized in an isolation ward. She had no known history of exposure to the Wuhan wet market. Some observers then turned their attention to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, some 12 kilometres away from the market. Others looked at the even closer (280 metres) Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The Wuhan virology lab, which happens to have close ties to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, was built by a contractor for the People’s Liberation Army and is associated with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences. It was intended to be a top-level security laboratory (as well as a top-secret one) that would be capable of handling safely the deadliest human pathogens. The Chinese certified it as meeting Biosafety Level Four, the highest security rating available, but many scientists outside China viewed this information skeptically. In 2017, an article in Nature raised questions about the safety protocols in Chinese microbiology labs, adding historical weight to the possibility that the virus may have escaped from the Institute of Virology into the human population that frequented the market.

In January 2018, the United States sent scientists with diplomatic status to visit the Hunan virology lab. They discovered that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats could interact with the human receptor for SARS coronavirus, which “strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases.” The Americans also found that the lab personnel did not follow or practice Level Four security protocols but were closer to Level Two.

The Institute of Virology was controversial for another reason. Virologist Shi Zhengli was nicknamed the “bat lady” for directing a team that had accumulated an extensive collection of coronaviruses from the bat caves of southern China. She has also conducted experiments on bat viruses “to find out how they might mutate to become more infectious to humans.” These experiments are called “gain-of-function” or GoF experiments. As the name implies, they are intended to generate viruses that may be more pathogenic and/or transmissible than wild viruses or even to generate viruses with attributes that do not exist in nature. That such experimentation is controversial is an understatement. For that reason, the United States has banned GoF experiments from time to time and they have not been conducted in the Winnipeg lab. They were reinstated in the U.S. on Dec. 19, 2017 after having been discontinued since October 2014.
Epoch Times Photo
A medical staff member tests a paramilitary police officer for COVID-19 in Shenzhen, China, on Feb. 11, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Shi provided a different account. For context, two matters should be borne in mind. First, the Wuhan Institute has been studying bats and bat diseases for a quarter-century. At the time, they were concerned with discovering the origins of SARS-1. It turned out that the cross-species infection from bats to humans was discovered relatively early. The Chinese scientists eventually traced the origin of the SARS-1 virus to a cave in Yunnan province, over 1,200 kilometres south of Wuhan. The nearest relative to SARS-CoV-2 is also a coronavirus that the Wuhan lab isolated from a horseshoe bat found in Yunnan in 2013. This virus, then called RaTG13, shared 96.4 percent of its genome with SARS-CoV-2. The 3.8 percent of genetic difference is equivalent to between 20 and 50 years of natural evolutionary change. But, as we shall see, that is not the whole story. In any event, how a bat in Yunnan led to an infection in Wuhan has yet to be definitively accounted for. The second contextual factor is the adversarial geopolitical relationship between the United States and China. Specifically, Shi said that President Donald Trump “owed us an apology” for suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan lab.

On July 15, 2020, Shi emailed Science with a reply to a series of written questions. When asked if a bat “in or close to Wuhan” might have infected someone, she said that she favoured the theory that the virus spread through an intermediate host. She did not speculate on what that host might be, but others have mentioned pangolins, which are found in southern China, are also smuggled into China from Southeast Asia, and are sold for food and traditional medicine in the Wuhan wet market. Nor did she indicate whether any zoonotic transmission took place in Wuhan or elsewhere. She did, however, repeat the observation of an Australian expert on virus evolution noted above, that the divergence in genome sequence between SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 was between 20 and 50 years of natural evolution.

To be continued on next post