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‘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

However, as just noted, that was not the whole story. Both Shi and the American Defense Intelligence Agency (ADIA) said that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not genetically engineered. The Americans also said that there was “no credible evidence” that the virus was intentionally released as a biological weapon. The Wuhan lab was, however, capable of conducting cut-and-paste genetic engineering experiments and evidently, in 2015, took a piece of SARS-1 virus and replaced it with a piece from a SARS-like bat virus to make it infectious for humans. However, such changes are easily detectable, “like a contemporary addition to an old Victorian house.” The Americans’ conclusion, that it was not intentionally released is, obviously, speculative: that there was no evidence of such an action is not evidence of the absence of action. That the Chinese denied doing so was entirely to be expected.

There remains yet another problem: about a third of the original cluster of Wuhan cases had no exposure to the wet market, which meant that COVID-19 was already spreading through inter-human contact. Here is where the circumstantial evidence regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology needs to be considered. First, as part of an international program, partly funded by the United States, the institute had been undertaking GoF research. As noted, such research is controversial, especially when conducted in labs with less than stellar safety records, including those in the U.S.

One explanation involves the technique used in GoF experiments often called “animal passage.” In 2010, a Dutch virologist, Ron Fouchier, was working on a flu virus called H5N1. It was mainly transmitted by humans handling infected birds and was often lethal. Fouchier wondered what it would take to change H5N1 into a virus more easily transmissible among humans and conducted his GoF experiment using ferrets, not cell cultures, to mutate H5N1. Ferrets are, with respect to viruses, genetically close enough to humans so that if a mutated H5N1 virus could be transmitted between infected and uninfected ferrets, the same thing would likely be possible between humans. The mutation occurs naturally in the ferret’s body: infect the first animal with pure H5N1, wait till it gets sick, and then infect a second one with a nasal swab, then a third, and so on. With each iteration, the genetic content of the virus is slightly changed. After the 10th iteration of the animal passage, Fouchier observed that an infected animal could transmit the virus to another one in an adjoining cage and not through a direct swab. Animal-passage techniques employed in a GoF experiment, again to state the obvious, can eventually produce a novel and, for that reason alone, a dangerous virus.

Fouchier claimed the GoF experiment was essential to demonstrate causal relations among genes, mutations, and disease. Thus, it was useful for the preparation of future anti-viral medicines. For whatever reason, by 2020 animal-passage GoF experiments had become both widespread and routine; most were conducted in BSL-4 labs, though Fouchier’s was rated at BSL-2. According to Colin Carlson, an expert in emerging infectious diseases at Georgetown University, such GoF experiments helped virologists isolate and classify SARS-CoV-2 shortly after it appeared. Others, notably Richard Ebright at Rutgers, disagreed. Granted, animal-passage GoF experiments, like so many other technical activities, have dual uses. In terms of the accumulation of circumstantial evidence of such GoF activity in the Wuhan lab, however, the important thing is that, compared to cut-and-paste genetic engineering, animal passage experiments are much more difficult to detect. To revert to the Newsweek image, they are like new Victorian replica additions to an old Victorian house.
Epoch Times Photo
People line up to be tested for the COVID-19 in Daxing district, Beijing, China, on Jan. 26, 2021. (Stringer/AFP via Getty Images)

Consequently, animal-passage techniques results are often indistinguishable from the evolution of a virus in the wild. A bat-sourced coronavirus passing thorough 10 ferrets would be difficult, to say the least, to distinguish from a naturally evolved one. It’s possible that the Wuhan lab never undertook animal-passage GoF experiments, though this seems highly unlikely. More credible is the notion that such experiments were routinely but secretly conducted. Perhaps more interesting is another consideration. Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research published a widely cited account in Nature Medicine that argued “that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct of purposefully manipulated virus.” The authors went on to discuss “two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2.” The second, natural selection in humans following a zoonotic transfer, is less significant than natural selection from an animal host prior to a zoonotic transfer.

The authors do admit that “in theory, it is possible that SARS-CoV-2 acquired … mutations … during adaptation to passage in cell culture,” but the evidence of SARS-CoV-2-like viruses in pangolins “provided a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation” of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired its new transmissibility features, namely inter-human infection. The authors did not consider the possibility of animal passage in a laboratory. But as Ebright noted in an email to Newsweek, mutation in a laboratory using animal-passage GoF techniques is “identical apart from location” and human intervention, from wild “pangolin-passage” scenarios. Ebright thus concluded that Andersen’s reasoning was “unsound” because there was no reason to favour wild-pangolin over other laboratory-based animal-passage events.

To summarize: the Wuhan Institute of Virology was in possession of the virus RaTG13, which shared 96.4 percent of its genetic material with SARS-CoV-2. A 3.8 percent genetic divergence may provide a challenge to an animal-passage bridge, but it would be far more likely than a natural evolutionary series of mutations. Second, the denials Shi published in response to questions Cohen raised in Science were, as Ebright said, “formulaic, almost robotic, reiterations of statements previously made by Chinese authorities and state media.”

Accordingly, they should be given the same validity as bestowed upon Chinese authorities and state media.

Indeed, politics as much as science has informed any accounts of the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that cast the slightest doubt on the official Chinese version.

Copyright Frontier Centre for Public Policy with authors’ permission. Excerpt from “COVID-19: The Politics of a Pandemic Moral Panic.”

Barry Cooper, Ph.D., is a political science professor at the University of Calgary. Marco Navarro-Génie, Ph.D., is a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and president of the Haultain Research Institute.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/it-all...c_3769619.html