Why the COVID-19 Lab-Leak Theory Has New Credibility

MICHAEL HOLMES, ANCHOR: Turning now to China where Xi Jinping has now formally secured a record-breaking third term as president. That makes him the longest serving head of state of Communist China since it was founded in 1949. The origin of the coronavirus pandemic is among a host of issues driving a wedge in between China and the West. This week, U.S. government insider, Jamie Metzl, warned lawmakers on Capitol Hill not to dismiss the idea that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. Metzl speaks with Hari Sreenivasan now about what could have sparked the pandemic.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Michael, thanks. Jamie Metzl, thank so much for joining us. Just earlier this week, you testified in front of the House Select Committee on the origins of the coronavirus. Why is it so important to get to the bottom of that question?

JAMIE METZL, GEOPOLITICAL ANALYST AND ATLANTIC COUNCIL SENIOR FELLOW: Thanks so much, Hari. It’s three years after the start of this terrible, deadly pandemic, 20 million people are dead. And understanding what went wrong must be the foundation of our efforts to shore up our vulnerabilities and make sure this never happens again. We’re entering a new era of synthetic biology where we can imagine pandemics much deadlier than COVID- 19. And if we don’t fearlessly understand what went wrong and fix our biggest problems, future generations or even ourselves a few years from now are going to be saying, why didn’t you do the hard work now when you could have?

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the quotes that you had in your testimony said, there is no smoking gun proving a lab origin hypothesis, but the growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests a gun that, at the very least, is warm to the touch. What leads you to that conclusion?

METZL: It’s really a growing body of circumstantial evidence. I, as you know, had those suspicions earliest on. But right now, the pandemic, it started in Wuhan. We know that the ancestral origin is a virus, that was living in horseshoe bats, these kinds of horseshoe bats aren’t in Wuhan. It’s more than 1,000 miles away from their natural range. What you do have in Wuhan is China’s first level four virology lab with the world’s largest collection of coronaviruses that was doing highly aggressive experiments inserting what are called fear in cleavage sites. Basically, the cellular machinery allowing viruses to infect humans in SARS-like viruses. And lo and behold, we have the only known SARS-like virus ever that has this human specific fear in cleavage site that doesn’t show up in Southern China where you think something like this might if it evolved naturally. But in Wuhan, of all the places in the world, I just think the overwhelming circumstantial evidence weighs in favor of a possible research-related origin. But we need a full investigation. And if there is additional information that convinces me otherwise, I’ll happily change my view.

SREENIVASAN: So, right now, that theory is then bolstered by yet another U.S. agency. The Energy Administration came out and said that they had, with low confidence, an idea that this is what might have happened. Now, what’s strange, I think, for Americans, is why there are so many different agencies that have such different views on this. I mean, the degree of confidence or, you know, should I believe the FBI, should I believe the Department of Energy, should I believe the NIH, or the CDC? Some of those agencies say that this is zoonotic or that it came from an animal to humans and it wasn’t maybe from the lab.

METZL: Yes. So, a few really critical points there. First, it’s highly significant that the U.S. Department of Energy shifted its view, overtime, from thinking what probably comes from nature to it probably comes from the lab. Most people think that the Department of Energy is kind of like the electric company. But the Department of Energy oversees the 17 U.S. national laboratories, it’s one of the largest employers of scientists in the world, including some of the most significant scientists, including biologist in the world. So, that’s very significant. The United States has many different intelligence agencies, and we want them all to be digging. There’s a little bit of an overhang of the intelligence failures preceding the Iraq War that have instilled a level of caution in many of our intelligence agencies. But the basic fact of the matter is that China has done everything possible to prevent the kind of full investigation that’s required, they’ve destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned Chinese journalist for asking the most basic questions. They have a gag order on Chinese scientists. They’ve prevented international investigations. So, we’re trying to piece together a story while China is aggressively trying to cover up that story. In my mind, that’s a piece of evidence itself. We don’t want — as we experienced in Iraq, we don’t want our intelligence agencies jumping to conclusions, prematurely. But what we do want is them to be digging aggressively as we move to try to get the right answer.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the time and place of when this theory gained traction. I mean, you were one of the first people to talk about this as a possibility. But really, two and a half years ago or so, when that thought and idea came into the public sphere it was outright rejected by some scientists, but it was also looked at through a very political lens. What kind of damage did we do to ourselves?

METZL: So, you’re absolutely right. When I started making this case, I really started looking in late January of 2020 while on January 24, 2020 there was a very important paper in the British journal, “The Lancet,” which showed more than a third of the earliest cases of COVID-19 were people who had no exposure to the seafood market in Wuhan. And then, in early 2020, I started making this case. But in the early days, in February and then March in 2020, there were these high-profile letters, one in “The Lancet” and then, another in “Nature Medicine” calling people like me who are raising really essential, just common-sense questions about endemic origins, conspiracy theorists, for not falling into line for this unproven hypothesis that it came from nature or from a market. And it was really just very discouraging at that time. And so, there was just a small handful of us, and we just didn’t want to be bullied into silence or submission. So, we worked extremely hard. And I — over the course of that year, I reached out to so many science editors and journalists and government officials around the world, saying, hey, you’re missing the story. Here’s the evidence that I’m compiling. And it was really in early 2021, when that story started to break our community, which others have called the Paris Group, we issued open letters that were featured in pretty much every major newspaper around the world. There started to be more of an open conversation, and I think the world has started to shift to the point of yesterday, in these hearings, where there was complete consensus among the congressional representatives, everybody agreed that a lab origin was a very credible hypothesis. So, that — now, that issue is almost won, that it’s a credible hypothesis. But we still need a comprehensive investigation with as much access as possible, full access to all the relevant data.

SREENIVASAN: So, how much of this was perhaps because of one of the messengers or proponents of the idea being former President Donald Trump? You know, because he had coded his words and phrases about this virus in language that so many people found detestable and racist, you know, and that this — also, this theory that it came from the lab, started to attribute something that was unpalatable to political opponents?

METZL: Yes. So, I’m a progressive Democrat. I was a fierce critic of President Trump. I was completely unhappy and vocally so with a lot of what President Trump did and said, and I completely distrusted his motives. But as a thinking person, I didn’t think the appropriate response to that was to feel, well, if Trump says something, then I need to say and believe the opposite. And so, for me, when I started looking at this, I was seeing a story that just coincidentally was connected to what — I mean, in the earliest days until March of 2020, Donald Trump was effusive in his praise of Xi Jinping. And when things started to go south, that was when the story changed. So, obviously, I didn’t trust those motives. But my view was, well, let’s just try to get to the right answer regardless of the politics. But I know that friends of mine reached out to me and said, what are you doing? Your narrative is supporting Donald Trump? And I kept saying, this isn’t about Trump or anybody else, millions of people are dying, this is about getting to the right answer. But I do think that also, the mainstream media got into this habit that I think became a little bit lazy. Well, Trump says something, and then, we have a fact check story which says, here’s what Trump said and here’s why it’s lying, and we’re going to add this to the list that “The Washington Post” and others were keeping up whatever tens of thousands of outright lies. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, in my view, in his totally inappropriate and probably even at that time uninformed way President Trump said something that just happened to be possibly true, and he said it in a terrible way. And that’s why, I think, this tribalism of how we think, how we process information, how we presented formation is really dangerous because if we all just become mirror images of the opposition, we are in danger and our democracy is in danger.

SREENIVASAN: You also testified next to Dr. Redfield who ran the CDC under the Trump administration. I mean, how have you found this kind of bipartisanship?

METZL: There’s — it’s a situation in many ways of strange bed fellows. But I think people of all political persuasions who are dedicated to finding the right answer are kind of on the same side. There’s no doubt that there is a lot of politics associated with this issue. But over the course of the last three years, I’ve collaborative with people on the left, people on the right, with the Democrats, with Republicans. One of my closest interlocutors is United States Senator Roger Marshall from Kansas. Senator Marshall and I disagree on a whole lot of topics. But on the issue of should we or should we not dig to find out how COVID-19 began, we are surprisingly and very much on the same page, not to mention that we are both Kansas City Chiefs fans.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that a commission like this is going to be able to get to that core question about origins without the cooperation of China?

METZL: I don’t know the answer to that question. I certainly know that if we don’t investigate, we’ll likely not get the answer. If we do fully investigate, we may get the answer. And in addition, we will establish the principle that it’s just not OK to have, in many ways, a political pandemic and then, just prevent an investigation. And the reason why I call this a political pandemic because for those of us who think a research related origin is more likely and even for the people who believe that a market origin is more likely, there is no doubt that the suppression and the aggressive suppression of information, particularly in the early days by the Chinese government, is what allowed a stove fire to become a kitchen fire, to become a raging global inferno.

SREENIVASAN: Regardless of where the investigation goes in the context of this specific pandemic, there is no question that researchers in China contribute to the global community of science, whether it is about virology, about agriculture, about physics, et cetera. And you mention that, you know, we still need to have those relationships, we can’t — the price of that can be silence. Explain.

METZL: Yes. So, I exactly as you said and as I said in my congressional testimony, scientific collaborations with amazing scientists in China and around the world are absolutely essential. When somebody gets a world-class treatment for a terrible disease like cancer or so many other things, we are benefiting from science everywhere. And we really need to continue to treasure those relationships and invest in them and build them. But let’s just say hypothetically that collaboration with and small-scale funding of Chinese scientists may have contributed in some way to this terribly deadly pandemic. We can’t let the answer be, we should just shut down scientific collaboration. We need scientifically collaboration. We just need stronger and better safeguards to make sure that that collaboration and science itself is as safe as possible.

SREENIVASAN: You know, in January, there was an expert panel with the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and they voted to try to create stricter rules for virus research. And I’m wondering whether, regardless of the outcome of this investigation, is there some way that the planet of scientists and people who do this type of research can agree on figuring out safety measures to prevent something like this from happening again? I mean, this — in a way, this was a relatively tamed virus compared to what could have been released.

METZL: Yes. So, there is no doubt that our world needs stronger biosafety and biosecurity systems, structures and norms. There is no doubt that we need stronger treaties and that we need to come together to do those things. But there is a reason why we investigate — fully investigate plane crashes. It actually matters how a specific plane crashed in our prioritization of our responses. And furthermore, if we don’t establish the principle of transparency and accountability today, there’s really no way we are going to establish that principle for tomorrow. And right now, the situation that we’re in is everybody around the world is totally dependent on the norms and cultures and regulators in some country. Pick Kyrgyzstan or any country, and that’s just crazy. We live in an interconnected global world but we need to have systems and structures and norms that protect everybody everywhere.

SREENIVASAN: So, what we do next? I mean, how do we prevent the next one and not just prevent the pandemic, but prevent this same type of thinking from allowing us to get to the bottom of whatever happens?

METZL: Well, exactly as you said, COVID-19 was a terrible crisis, but it was also a warning that something worse could happen. It could be just around the corner. And that’s why we need to fearlessly follow the evidence and understand what went wrong, not just the origins in question, but what went wrong across the board. And then, we need to work to aggressively lay a foundation for next steps. That’s why I’ve called for a U.S. national COVID-19 commission. But this isn’t and can’t be just a U.S. issue, this is a global issue. We have — the World Health Organization is an incredible organization, but it has a tiny budget, a very weak mandate and all — other kinds of problems. We need a stronger W.H.O. We need an international plan. But as I said earlier, it cannot be that we just say, oh, we are going to move on from COVID-19. We are not because it’s politically so sensitive and difficult, we’re not going to ask most basic questions about how this crisis happened. That’s like flying planes after a crash without trying to figure out what went wrong and whether other planes have the same vulnerability.

SREENIVASAN: Jamie Metzl, thanks so much for joining us.

METZL: My pleasure.