Covid-19 is arguably the biggest story of our lives. It brought the world to a halt and has so far killed over 6.7 million people and infected over 67 million. Yet more than three years after it first emerged, we don’t know the answer to one basic question — how did Covid-19 originate?
VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley documents the search for the answer of this question.
“How the Covid-19 pandemic started may be the keenest mystery of our lifetime…If we do not find out how this pandemic began, we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start,” note Alina and Matt in the prologue.
Alina, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, had published a study with her colleagues in May 2020. The study noted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19 disease, resembled the late stage SARS-virus —which caused the 2003 SARS outbreak— and appeared to be pre-adapted to infect humans. It further noted that the virus could also have originated in a lab. Matt, a veteran science writer, read the study and began conversing with Alina on the subject that those conversations led to the publication of VIRAL.
In 14 chapters, Alina and Matt chronicle efforts underway to understand the Covid-origin, the efforts to scuttle calls for a proper investigation of Covid-origin, and they also give us a crash course in virology.
Alina and Matt’s book does not start at Wuhan in 2019 where Covid-19 first emerged, but in copper mines in China’s Yunnan province where six miners were infected with a mysterious SARS-like disease in 2012 — four of whom died. Chinese virologists, including from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), visited the mine to collect virus samples. One of these was named Bt/CoV/4991 — this is central to the story. In February 2020, WIV researchers noted that SARS-CoV-2 was 96.2 per cent similar to a bat virus named RaTG13.
VIRAL co-author Matt noted that the entire internet had no mention of RaTG13. After weeks of research, scientist Rossana Segreto reported that RaTG13 and Bt/CoV/4991 were the same. The Chinese scientists only confirmed it in July — after more than seven months of Wuhan outbreak.
This is the first instance of Chinese cover-up that Alina and Matt highlight. The story keeps getting murkier from here.
In the next chapter, the authors give a crash course in virology. Readers seeking quick answer to the question of Covid-origin might want to skip it but reading the chapter is essential to understand the full picture. It’s a complex scientific subject and you need to know the basics. Alina and Matt break down the complex science for the layman. In chapters 3-6, they further detail the Chinese cover-ups — how the authorities snubbed and punished whistleblowers and how data was peddled without context to push a variety of conclusions, such as how the virus could have come from the Wuhan seafood market or from pangolins. The claims peddled as gospel truths at the time and accepted uncritically by most of the world are as hollow today as they were then.
Alina and Matt devote a full chapter to laboratory leaks. The very idea that Covid-19 could have originated in a lab offends several scientists who say it cannot happen. In VIRAL, the authors show it can happen and underscore that it has happened throughout the past decades. They list the instances of pathogens leaking from labs in China, Singapore, and the United States, and several accidents in labs over the years. They highlight that biosafety is not as tight as some elite scientists would want you to believe.
While much of the first half of the book is full of context and background with present-day Covid-19 appearing to be on the margins, it’s critical to understand to read this part as much of the mainstream reporting on Covid-19 in general and Covid-origin in particular has reproduced scientific statements without nuances or any background and context. The first half also prepares you for the second half, which reads like a whodunit.
The chapter of gain of function (GOF) research is critical to the question of Covid-origin. The GOF research refers to the research in which pathogens —a virus or bacteria— are given new abilities by a number of methods such as genetic editing. This often results in pathogens improving their infectious abilities. Alina and Matt document the long history of GOF research on coronaviruses. Summing up the debate on GOF research, they write, “Scientists debating the issue crystallised into two camps, one asserting that such experiments must continue to help the world prepare for pandemic, the other arguing that the experiments might themselves trigger pandemics and should cease.”
Despite the promise, years of such research didn’t help in preventing the Covid-19 pandemic. But did it help cause it? There is a whole chapter to it and that’s the two-part climax of the book. In two chapters titled Spillover and Accident, Alina and Matt explore the cases for natural- and lab-origin of Covid-19 respectively. They make the case as advocates and present arguments, facts, and possible trajectory of outbreaks, and leave it for the judge —the reader— to form an informed judgement. It might frustrate some readers that VIRAL passes no judgements of its own but that was never the intention of the book. Alina and Matt had taken up the job to document the search for Covid-origin and call for a serious investigation of both the natural- and lab-origin.
They write, “Our preference throughout was for a balanced debate that led to the truth, not for a victory for one side or the other. The world now faces the strong possibility that scientific research, intended to avert a pandemic, instead started one; that all that collecting of viruses and sampling of bats in remote caves — and then hiding the specimens in secret databases — had put humanity in harm’s way.”
However, Alina and Matt make one thing clear. The burden of proof is no longer on those calling for an investigation of the lab-origin of Covid-19. After all, while there is no smoking gun evidence for lab-origin, there is absolutely no evidence for natural-origin as well. The circumstantial evidence, however, makes a strong case for lab-origin.
Alina and Matt note, “Given the powerful circumstantial evidence that Wuhan was not a particularly likely place for a natural epidemic of a SARS-like virus to begin, but an obvious one for a laboratory-leaked one to start, it is surely reasonable to expect both hypotheses to be put to a similarly rigorous test.”
The epilogue of the VIRAL perhaps sums up the authors’ hopes. Titled Truth will out, the epilogue notes that there were efforts throughout 2020 to highlight the case for a lab-origin and underscore Chinese cover-ups, but the mainstream never accepted that view. It was not until 2021 that the question of Covid-origin got serious attention. With governments not mounting the kind of investigations that they can and the quest to unearth the Covid-origin left to internet sleuths, scientists, and investigative journalists,
VIRAL is the story of this quest which is a must-read to know how a small bunch of people are pitched against the opacity of the Chinese state and barriers by elite scientists to search for the answer to one basic question — from where did Covid-19 come?
(VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 was written by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley and was published by 4th Estate, an imprint of the HarperCollins in 2021. The updated edition was released in 2022.)
