Lab-leak theory reminds of Iraq war

The debate over whether SARSCoV2 the virus which causes Covid19 got leaked from Chinarsquos Wuhan Institute of Virology has been revived with renewed vigour over the last one month It is vital for our future to know how the virus originated yet the rekindling of the debate appears as choreographed as the 200203 campaign asserting that Iraqrsquos Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction WMDsConsider this In March a World Health Organisation WHO report concluded that the laboratory origin of the virus was ldquoextremely unlikelyrdquo and that it was ldquolikely to very likelyrdquo to have jumped from wildlife to people a process known as zoonotic spillover On May 13 18 prominent scientists accused the WHO of not giving a ldquobalanced considerationrdquo to the lableak and zoonotic spillover theories on the virusrsquos origin Nothing unusual that for experts seldom agree on issues bereft of solid evidence as is true in the case of SARSCoV2But then the American media cited intelligence sources to say researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen ill and required hospitalisation before the first case of Covid19 was reported This suggested the virus had a lab origin which was also insinuated by Dr Anthony Fauci Director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases NIAID in sharp contrast to his earlier positionThe lableak theory gathered tremendous momentum on May 27 when American President Joe Biden said he had asked the countryrsquos intelligence community to report to him in 90 days with a definitive conclusion about the origin of SARSCoV2 Sure enough as in the past British newspapers taking Americarsquos lead quoted their countryrsquos spies to say the leak from the Wuhan lab was ldquofeasiblerdquo Since then there has been an explosion of stories on amateur sleuths who surfed the internet to gather evidence backing the lableak theoryRewind to February 5 2003 when then Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that Hussein possessed WMDs Powell said ldquoWhat we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligencerdquo London parroted Washingtonrsquos line even though international weapons inspectors had by then failed to unearth WMDs in Iraq The US invaded devastated and occupied Iraq but never found WMDsThis is not to diss the bewilderment of scientists over the origin of SARSCoV2 Viruses usually jump from animals to humans through an intermediary host and undergo several changes in their structure before they become lethal This was how the SARS1 and MERS pandemics were triggered In a piece in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Nicholas Wade pointed out that the SARS1 virus jumped from bats to civets and underwent six changes before it became a mild pathogen in people The virus underwent another 18 changes before it infected the world It took scientists four months to track down the intermediary host species for SARS1 and nine months to do the same for MERS for which the camel was the bridge to humansFor a virus whose prehistory is still unclear SARSCoV2 seems to have come readymade for humans The link between the animal and the human is missing because as some scientists suggest SARsCoV2 could have been cooked in a labmdashand inadvertently leaked into the world For decades virologists worldwide have been manipulating the genes of viruses to increase their infectivity for humans These experiments called lsquogainoffunctionrsquo are undertaken to predict the possibility of viruses becoming deadly pathogens and the knowledge gained is used to produce vaccinesBoth American and Chinese scientists have been together in this endeavour Faucirsquos NIAID funded the Wuhan Institutersquos Shi Zhengli for carrying out gainoffunction experiments on bat viruses precisely of the kind that could have produced SARSCoV2 There have also been instances of lableaks around the world It could well have happened in Wuhan in 2019There are many scientists who insist the virus could have had only a natural origin It is important for us to know the origin because as Kristian G Andersen wrote in Nature Medicine ldquoIf SARSCoV2 preadapted in another animal species then there is the risk of future reemergence eventsrdquo What can happen to the world is in a way dependent on ruling out the lableak theoryIn March the US alleged China notorious for its secretive ways was not sharing data with the WHOrsquos investigators Among them was Dominic Dwyer who dwelt upon the RaTG13 virus which is closest to SARSCoV2 and speculated to have been tweaked in Wuhan in a piece he wrote for The Conversation ldquohellipAll the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus RaTG13 They hadnrsquot managed to grow it in culturerdquo Dwyer wrote Are the Chinese speaking the truth Well it is also true that a country cannot prove it does not possess something which it actually does not have Nobody believed Iraqrsquos disavowal of having WMDsmdashcertainly not journalists whom spooks had also convinced that Hussein had a double So whenever Hussein was sighted the media would say it could not confirm whether it was the real Hussein or his double A Hussein double was never found Therein lies a lesson on what not to do in seeking out the origin of SARSCoV2The writer is a senior journalist Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper