Lab Leak or Wet Market? Why the Origins of COVID-19 Matter

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Well, the new COVID variant is fueling a resurgence of the virus as it continues to evolve. But three years on, we still don’t know how the pandemic started. Author and journalist, David Quammen, investigated its unknown origins in his latest article for “The New York Times” magazine. And he joins Walter Isaacson to discuss the potential theories.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And, David Quammen, welcome to the show.

DAVID QUAMMEN, WRITER, “THE ONGOING MYSTERY OF COVID’S ORIGIN: Thank you, Walter. It is good to be with you.

ISAACSON: So, you’ve written this great piece exploring the ongoing mysteries of COVID’s origins. You know, I followed you for a long time, ever since you wrote “Spillover” about 10, 12 years ago, about how viruses can transmit from animals. Tell me how you’re thinking has evolved in the past year on whether this coronavirus was a lab leak from the Chinese lab or whether it was a spillover from animals in the marketplace in China.

QUAMMEN: Well, my thinking has evolved with the increase of data, the increase of scientifically published research and analysis on the various different hypotheses. There are — as you know, there are three hypotheses that have been bandied about for the origin of this virus, SARS-CoV-2. Did it spillover from a wild animal into the human populations or was it engineered through some sort of a nefarious research program to harm humans and released either intentionally or by accident after having been engineered, or was it a virus that was being worked on in a laboratory, possibly for legitimate purposes, and then accidentally leaked from a lab? As you mentioned, I’ve written in the past about how frequently and with what consequences viruses’ spillover from wild animals. It happens all the time. And most of the new — the diseases that we’ve seen in the last 50 years have happened that way. But there was arguments that this might have spilled over from a lab, and I agreed with those who said, we need to keep our minds open about that until we have more evidence. And there has been increasing argument about that. There has been increasing public embrace of the lab leak hypothesis. And yet, I saw no increasing evidence for it. I really saw no positive evidence at all. And so, I wrote this piece because I was puzzled by this conundrum, why is it that the preponderance of evidence seems to be on the side of natural origins, but the preponderance of public opinion is on the side of lab leak?

ISAACSON: Well, let me push back a bit. I mean, if it were indeed a spillover from a natural animal, that is just evolved, why haven’t we found the animals or even traces of the animals that could’ve been the intermediate steps?

QUAMMEN: Yes, that’s a good and important question. Three and a half years have gone by and the animal or animals from which the virus closely resembling this may have spilled over haven’t been found. The animal hasn’t been identified. But to take that as significant or even suspicious requires an ignorance of the history of emerging viruses. As I say in the piece, finding the animal host, the natural animal reservoir of the original SARS virus from 2003, that took 15 years. Marburg virus spilled over into humans back in 1967 and it took 42 years for science to identify the natural host of that, the Egyptian fruit bats. Ebola first filled over — was recognized in humans in 1976 and we still don’t know what the natural host of the Ebola virus is. So, if you are lucky, you can solve that mystery in a short time. And that’s happened with some of these natural viruses. But if you’re not lucky, it can take decades.

ISAACSON: But wait, if this were just an innocent thing like a spillover from natural causes, why have the Chinese been, you know, so difficult, so hard at giving evidence of what they were doing in that Wuhan lab where they were indeed experimenting on viruses?

QUAMMEN: Well, you’re right, the Chinese lack of transparency, constraints on information imposed by Chinese officialdom at the local to provincial and the national level have deprived us of important evidence. Important evidence that may have supported any of these — those three hypotheses I mentioned. That’s a real problem. We have needed more information from the Chinese, and we haven’t gotten it. Chinese scientists, some of them, have risked their careers and even their freedom to share information with their western scientific colleagues. But Chinese officialdom has stopped the flow of evidence in a way that has contributed to suspicions about Chinese motives. I point out in the piece, though, that Chinese officialdom would have an incentive to cover-up evidence of a lab leak. But Chinese officialdom would also have incentive, motive to cover-up evidence of a spillover from illegally traded wild animals in the Huanan market in the City of Wuhan. So, Chinese intransigence, lack of transparency, lack of cooperation is an important factor, but it doesn’t really prove one hypothesis versus another.

ISAACSON: Wait a minute. Wouldn’t they have a much more incentive to cover-up evidence that it was a lab leak and things they were doing in a lab and they were unsafe that they did, I think, than if it came from an animal? I know they’d have an incentive on both, but, whoa, the incentives would be pretty strong to cover-up a lab leak.

QUAMMEN: Well, they would be, yes. But they’re strong also to cover-up a market leak. There is a $70 billion trade in wild animals — living wild animals captured from the wild, and some of them raised in captivity. $70 billion trade in China of wild animals for food, for fur, and for traditional Chinese medicines. So, I suppose you could say, you know, the devastation that has happened to the human population around the world, millions, millions of dead and many more millions sickened, that’s a huge incentive for the Chinese to say, it wasn’t us. It’s not our fault. Whether or not it’s a matter of research in a laboratory that led to a lab leak or this trade in wild animals, either way, it seems to me that there’s great incentive for a cover-up.

ISAACSON: One of the things fueling a lot of the controversy are things like the fact that through the EcoHealth Alliance, the labs were funded in China, and then it involved even, through the EcoHealth Alliance, some national institutes of health grants in the U.S. government. One of the people involved in that is a Chinese scientist, and you’ve talked to her, Dr. Zhengli Shi. And was doing some these this research that did get this funding. Explain to me what she told you.

QUAMMEN: I spent two hours on a zoom call with Zhengli Shi, and she told me, among the other things, we were not working on this virus in our laboratory. She makes her living and has for 15 years by studying coronaviruses carried by wild animals, in particular bats, and identifying which ones present a threat to humans. And she writes papers saying, we should be concerned about these coronaviruses in bats. That’s how she makes her living, that’s how her career advances, that’s what her passion is, to warn the world about viruses, particularly coronaviruses carried by wild animals, particularly bats that could be dangerous to humans. So, it was natural for people to say, well, you’re studying these viruses, maybe you leaked this virus from your lab. She rushed back to her lab from a conference in Shanghai. She looked through her notebooks, she talked to her people, just to confirm that now — at that point, they had a genome sequence of this virus. So, they knew what it looked like, you know, in great detail. She looked at her records and she told me and she told me and she told Jon Cohen, a very respected reporter for the Journal of Science, that this virus was never in her laboratory. She had never worked on this virus.

ISAACSON: But wait. Don’t we have some evidence that people in that lab may have gotten infected?

QUAMMEN: That’s an accusation that was made in an article that was put up on Substack just a few weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago, by three authors, and they said there are three scientists who were working in Zhengli Shi’s lab. One of them is a fellow named Ben Hu, H-U, who was the first author on some of her important papers from back in 2017 and 2018. And they said, we have evidence, but we can’t tell you what it is, from government sources that Ben Hu and these two other people were sick in November 2019 with corona virus like, COVID like symptoms. This was published. It made a big splash. And then, within a few days, Ben Hu came forward from China. And in an e- mail to Jon Cohen, of the Journal of Science, said not, only was I not sick in November, and certainly not sick with COVID like symptoms, that just didn’t happen, but I was tested for COVID antibodies in March 2020 and I tested negative. So, that was a very inflammatory assertion about Ben Hu and these other two people that has been refuted by Ben Hu.

ISAACSON: As you write about in your piece, there’s a very famous scientific article early on called proximal origins. In other words, there’s a group of scientists who said, how did this thing originate?

QUAMMEN: Right.

ISAACSON: And that essay, that scientific journal piece pretty much said that it really looks like it was a problem from a spillover from a marketplace, that it had natural origins. And that was pretty convincing. It convinced me. It convinced a lot of people. I know you supported it. But since then, we have seen some things that, at least, I found troubling, and you write about them in your piece, which is all these e-mails among those scientists and the text messages in which they say, hey, we are being pushed into this a little, and Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the U.S. government are kind of encouraging it. What do you make of that?

QUAMMEN: All of that revolves around a phone call, a conference call that occurred on February 1, 2020. The authors of that scientific article, Eddie Holmes, Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Ian Lipkin, and Andrew Rambo were conferring with one another from different parts of the world, trying to figure out what the genome of this virus told them about where it may have come from. And they found two peculiar features, unexpected features. One called a receptor binding domain that allows the virus to latch on to a cell and infect it, and the other is a thing called a furin cleavage site which allows the virus to penetrate the cell, insert its genome. They were unexpected. So, these five fellas were saying, where do these things, these features come from? And a fellow named Jeremy Farrar, a public health official, head of a vast foundation, a health research foundation, Wellcome Trust, convened this phone call, and there were more than a dozen people on this call, including Tony Fauci, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, including the scientist I just mentioned and a number of other scientists. So, the arguments about whether these fellows were manipulated, were pressured to call this a natural spillover revolved around that phone call. And I’ve talked to all five of those scientists about the phone call, I’ve talked with Tony Fauci about the phone call, I’ve talked with some other people who were on the phone call. International scientists, such as Christian Drosten in Germany and Marion Koopmans in the Netherlands, and they were discussing this question of where this virus came from, where these two features came from. The critics say that Tony Fauci and Francis Collins pressured these people to say it was a natural spillover and not a lab leak. I don’t find that persuasive at all, partly because I don’t see how Tony Fauci or Francis Collins are going to pressure an internationally renowned scientist who is British Australian working in Sydney, Australia, Marion Koopmans is in the Netherlands, Christian Drosten is in Germany. There is no leverage there. These people are not functioning off of NIH grants the way American —

ISAACSON: But aren’t a lot of the other scientists on that paper functioning off of NIH grants?

QUAMMEN: Some of them certainly are, absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And that is what has given momentum to that accusation, that argument.

ISAACSON: I mean, after your piece came out, I thought it was a pretty good piece. I even mentioned it on social media, and the comments were just devastating, that you were faking things. Why have we become so polarized on this and so many other issues?

QUAMMEN: Well, to some extent, I think it’s politics. Attitudes towards China. But it’s not just that. It’s — and I say this in the piece. David Relman said to me, when you sow the seeds of distrust in a population, you will find those seeds will grow, distrust will grow, and you will have a problem with cynicism among your population, among your citizenry. And we have that now. Not just in the U.S., but in a lot of countries around the world, countries — other countries where people favor the lab leak idea too. We have a cynicism about government, about government secrecy. Some people have a cynicism about experts in general, anyone that we’re obliged to call a doctor or a professor and who maybe wears a white jacket on television, oh, that guy is not going to tell me what I should think about this. So, there is that climate and there is that eagerness to create melodramatic scenarios that involve good guys versus bad guys and secret powers moving in the background, and that goes back to our feelings about the assassination of John Kennedy in ’63. We’re still arguing about that. We’re still — some people, many people still want to believe that was a conspiracy. There is this desire for the dramatic explanation that involves good guys and bad guys and conspiracies and hidden forces and dark states and deep states, all made worse by social media.

ISAACSON: And finally, why does it matter?

QUAMMEN: Oh, that’s an important question. Yes. Some people say it doesn’t matter. People are dying. We need to deal with this pandemic. Why does it matter where it came from, where this virus came from? It doesn’t matter, Walter, absolutely, because research priorities around the world, pandemic preparedness, public health preparedness, and the public’s feelings about science in general, trust for or lack of trust for science all depend on us answering this question, the origins of this devastating virus. Where did it come from? And how can we avoid letting it happen again, what happened to us with this one? We need to know.

ISAACSON: David Quammen, thank you so much for joining us.

QUAMMEN: Walter, thank you. Pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for your interest.