Why the vindication of the lab leak theory for Covid's origin is partly good news

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. Nowhere else in the world was there a laboratory doing exactly the right kinds of experiments on exactly the right sequences in exactly the right genes of exactly the right kind of virus at exactly the right time and at exactly the wrong biosafety level. The evidence for a natural spillover has stubbornly refused to appear: no infected animal turned up in any of the 40,000 markets selling live animals in China, let alone the one in Wuhan.

Paradoxically, this is partly good news. It explains why this virus – unlike every zoonotic spillover – was highly infectious from the start and impossible to contain. It was already trained on human genes. Zoonotic spillovers such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Hanta and others tend to cause dangerous illness but not be very infectious and are soon controlled by contact tracing and quarantine. Lab leaks, of viruses honed on human receptors, are likely to be much more infectious from the start. And we can stop lab leaks happening. All we have to do is cease doing foolish experiments of dubious value on dangerous pathogens. Full stop.

It is worth reflecting on why so many people have a vested interest in resisting the conclusion that it was a lab leak. Some do not want to upset the Chinese government. They look at the way China retaliated against Australia just for calling for an investigation into the origin of Covid. Some do not want to tarnish the reputation (and funding) of science.

Others had been hoping to turn the pandemic into a fable about humankind’s brutal rape of Gaia. Environmental alarmism is a lucrative business and this was grist to their mill.

Even if ‘wet’ wildlife markets and smuggled pangolins were exonerated in this case, they argued, and the outbreak came from some direct contact with bats, the moral lesson was ecological. Deforestation and climate change had left infected bats stressed and with nowhere to go but towns. Or it had driven desperate people into bat-infested caves in search of food or profit."

"In July 2020, 17 scientists, including Dr Peter Daszak, who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was keen to exonerate his friends there, wrote an article in Science magazine insisting that the main lesson of the pandemic was that deforestation must cease: ‘The clear link between deforestation and virus emergence suggests that a major effort to retain intact forest cover would have a large return on investment even if its only benefit was to reduce virus emergence events.’

There were three problems with this argument. First, there is no ‘clear link’ between epidemics and deforestation. Aids, Sars, Mers, Ebola, Nipah, Hendra, Zika — none of these virus outbreaks has been plausibly linked to forest clearance, let alone as the major cause of them. Second, deforestation has not only ceased in southern China but went into rapid reverse a generation ago. There is more forest every year. Third, people encounter bats less, not more, than they did in the past. Urbanisation has drained rural villages of people and given them other ways of making a living than cutting trees or catching bats."

"tree cover has increased by 2.24 million km².’ That’s 7 per cent more forest globally than in 1982."

"Countries like Bangladesh have been rapidly increasing their tree cover. As for China, it is reforesting as fast as anywhere on the planet. ‘China alone accounts for 25 per cent of the global net increase in leaf area with only 6.6 per cent of global vegetated area,’"

"So if going into a cave was all it took to start a coronavirus pandemic, the odds are it would have happened eons ago. There are, however, three new reasons that people go into caves today: tourism, collecting bat guano, and science. The abandoned copper mine in Yunnan where the closest relative of Sars-CoV-2 was found is an unnatural, man-made tunnel, not an example of pristine nature. After guano-shoveling-miners got ill there in 2012, the only visitors to the site, as far as we can tell, were scientists, mostly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology more than 1,000 miles away. They not only went into the mine, disturbing the bats; they also captured them in nets, swabbed their rear ends for viruses and took them back to Wuhan labs. Now that’s encroachment."