lab leak

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

Off the drawing board, away from the theory, that central problem of uncontained technology holds even with the best of intentions. GOF research is meant to keep people safe. Yet it inevitably occurs in a flawed world, where labs leak, where pandemics happen. Regardless of what did happen in Wuhan, it’s still grimly plausible that such research on coronaviruses was taking place and leaked. The historical record of lab leaks is hard to overlook. * * * — Gain-of-function research and lab leaks are just two particularly sharp examples of how the coming wave will introduce a plethora of revenge effects and inadvertent failure modes. If every half-competent lab or even random biohacker can embark on this research, tragedy cannot be indefinitely postponed.

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To reiterate: these risks are not about malicious harm; they come from simply operating on the bleeding edge of the most capable technologies in history widely embedded throughout core societal systems. A lab leak is just one good example of unintended consequences, the heart of the containment problem, a coming-wave equivalent of reactor meltdowns or lost warheads. Accidents like this create another unpredictable stressor, another splintering crack in the system. Yet stressors might also be less discrete events, less a robot attack, lab leak, or deepfake video, and more a slow and diffuse process undermining foundations. Consider that throughout history, tools and technologies have been designed to help us do more with less.

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The disease hit young people hardest, a possible sign they had a weaker immunity than those around a few decades earlier. Theories abound over what happened. Had something escaped from the permafrost? Was it part of Russia’s extensive and shadowy bioweapons program? To date, though, the best explanation is a lab leak. A version of the earlier virus likely somehow escaped during lab experiments with a vaccine. The epidemic was itself caused by well-meaning research intended to prevent epidemics. Biological labs are subject to global standards that should stop accidents. The most secure are known as biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs.

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by Scott Gottlieb
Published 20 Sep 2021

Department of State, “Ensuring a Transparent, Thorough Investigation of COVID-19’s Origin,” press release, January 15, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210116020513/https:/www.state.gov/ensuring-a-transparent-thorough-investigation-of-covid-19s-origin/; Wuhan Institute of Virology, “French Prime Minister Visits Wuhan P4 Laboratory,” press release, February 27, 2017, http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ne/201802/t20180208_189991.html; and NBC News, “Meet the Press—May 30, 2021,” May 30, 2021. 51.Natasha Loder, interview with Peter Daszak and Filippa Lentzos, Babbage from Economist Radio, podcast audio, April 14, 2021. 52.Filippa Lentos, “Natural Spillover or Research Lab Leak? Why a Credible Investigation is Needed to Determine the Origin of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1, 2020. 53.Reference to Josh Rogin, Chaos Under Heaven, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). 54.Katherine Eban, “The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins,” Vanity Fair, June 3, 2021. 55.Natasha Loder, interview with Peter Daszak and Filippa Lentzos. 56.Yi Fan et al., “Bat Coronaviruses in China,” Viruses 11, no. 3 (2019): 210.

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If a virus has been manipulated, whether by a seamless method where a characteristic is deliberately inserted into the virus’s genetic sequence, or by serial passage through cell cultures, there’s probably no way of knowing for certain in this case simply by evaluating the virus’s sequence.48 These are all speculations, of course, and critics of these theories sometimes blame those who advance them for imprecision, but the concerns that a lab leak could have been the origin of COVID persist largely because the Chinese government has withheld information that could help put such theorizing to rest. For some observers, the question becomes: When do too many coincident facts become hard to overlook? Adding further weight to the theory that there was a connection between the lab and the epidemic were persistent concerns that the WIV had poor controls.

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“The Chinese increasingly cut them out and made the oversight impossible,” one former US official told me, “so the French eventually withdrew those people.” It was around 2017 that the WIV was also believed to have begun conducting classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military.50 In an effort to dismiss the plausibility of a lab leak being the original source of SARS-CoV-2, the WHO team would cite the WIV’s stringent controls in its higher-security (BSL-4) labs. The WIV’s careful handling of specimens made an accident implausible, the WHO team argued. “It was a very well-run lab,” said Dr. Peter Daszak, one of the WHO team members.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

* * * While there are still many unknowns, a year later the consensus of both American intelligence agencies and the broader medical community is that it’s very likely COVID-19 originated not at a wet market, but at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Soon after President Biden came into office, the Trump administration’s investigation into whether the Wuhan lab leaked the virus was shut down. But by May 2021, Biden announced with great fanfare he was ordering America’s intelligence agencies to investigate the lab leak theory. The same day Biden relaunched the investigation, Facebook announced it would no longer censor posts discussing whether the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab, as it had been doing for a year. PolitiFact, which had sanctimoniously made “coronavirus disinformation” its lie of the year, ended up retracting it’s harsh “pants on fire” fact-check on Dr.

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The Washington Post responded to the interview by accusing Cotton of fanning “the embers of a theory that has been repeatedly disputed by experts.”179 Worse than that, the Post excoriated Cotton for something he never asserted, claiming that Cotton had said the virus was a bioweapon engineered and deliberately released by the Chinese. This is not what Cotton said, and one of the experts quoted by the Post to “debunk” Cotton would later acknowledge on Twitter that Cotton had been clear in his remarks and that Cotton was correct to suggest the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan “cannot—and should not—be dismissed.”180 Even though the virus caused millions of deaths and catastrophic damage to the global economy, Trump said at his home in Mar-a-Lago in May, “I never thought China did it on purpose. I thought it was done out of incompetence and I may be wrong because they were the biggest beneficiaries.

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And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.” Other journalists still couldn’t bring themselves to consider the possibility that Trump had been vindicated. Apoorva Mandavilli, one of the New York Times reporters on the COVID beat, was not happy the truth was coming out. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here,” she tweeted that same week Karl begrudgingly credited Trump. The final indignity came in June, when BuzzFeed obtained over three thousand pages of emails from Dr. Fauci through a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails detailed the country’s top infectious diseases bureaucrat’s thoughts on the handling of the pandemic, and the emails revealed top government officials had been disingenuous in their messaging to the public, as had been long suspected.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

If I’m honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview: the pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten on the ass for it. Then, as time went on, and the “lab leak theory” became a key talking point from people like Wolf and Bannon in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons, along with plenty of anti-Asian racism, there seemed to be further reason not to take another look at the facts. Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking for months because we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her.

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Russia accused Ukraine … “mirror imaging”: “Putin Accuses Ukraine of ‘Dirty Bomb’ Plans, Says Risks of World Conflict High,” Reuters, October 26, 2022; “Ukraine Says Russian Troops Will Fight for Key City as Proxy Government Flees,” New York Times, October 24, 2022. feigning outrage … gloves-off U.S. interference: Julian Barnes, “Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says,” March 16, 2021; Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. to Back Yeltsin If He Suspends Congress,” New York Times, March 13, 1993. “lab leak theory”: Rob Kuznia et al., “Weird Science: How a ‘Shoddy’ Bannon-Backed Paper on Coronavirus Origins Made Its Way to an Audience of Millions,” CNN Politics, October 21, 2020; “His Glory Presents: Take FiVe w/ Dr. Naomi Wolf,” His Glory, July 28, 2022, at 28:54. Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly … linked with cancer: Zach Boren and Arthur Neslen, “How Lobbyists for Monsanto Led a ‘Grassroots Farmers’ Movement Against an EU Glyphosate Ban,” Unearthed, October 17, 2018; “IARC Monograph on Glyphosate,” WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer; “Roundup Weedkiller ‘Probably’ Causes Cancer, Says WHO Study,” The Guardian, March 21, 2015.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

This new and deadly virus – much deadlier than Covid-19 – took more than a year to trace back to its animal origin, which turned out to be the dromedary camel.11 Thankfully, while MERS was dangerous, it was not especially infectious, meaning that in the decade since its discovery, it has killed fewer than 1,000 people. We are not, at the time of writing, entirely certain that Covid-19 emerged from an animal reservoir, but researchers suspect that the virus may have emerged from bat populations. Even the ‘lab leak’ theory, which argues that the disease may have escaped from an infectious disease facility in Wuhan, doesn’t rule out the pathogen having originated in animals. The challenge of animal reservoirs is that we can neither control them nor predict what will emerge from them. The next disease to cross the barrier might be relatively innocuous (on a global scale, though not an individual one), like MERS, or a global catastrophe, like Covid-19.

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‘Preppers’ are a predominantly US group who believe some form of societal-ending event is nearby, and so like to stock up on supplies and ammunition. 4. Chad P. Brown and Melina Kolb, ‘Trump’s Trade War Timeline: An Up-to-Date Guide’, www.piie.com, 21 June 2022. 5. Amy Maxmen and Smriti Mallapaty, ‘The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know’, www.nature.com, 8 June 2021. 6. ‘The territorial impact of COVID-19: Managing the crisis and recovery across levels of government’, www.oecd.org, 10 May 2021. 7. Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington and Edward Hurcombe, ‘“Corona? 5G? or both?”: the dynamics of COVID-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook’, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, November 2020. 8.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37 For two helpful overviews of the evidence for and against, see Amy Maxmen and Smriti Mallapaty, “The COVID Lab-Leak Hypothesis: What Scientists Do and Don’t Know,” Nature 594, no. 7863 (June 8, 2021): 313–15, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3; Jon Cohen, “Call of the Wild,” Science 373, no. 6559 (September 2, 2021): 1072–77, https://www.science.org/content/article/why-many-scientists-say-unlikely-sars-cov-2-originated-lab-leak. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38 James Pearson and Ju-Min Park, “North Korea Overcomes Poverty, Sanctions with Cut-Price Nukes,” Reuters, January 11, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-money-idUSKCN0UP1G820160111.

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The company used a wide range of advanced AI tools to design and optimize mRNA sequences, as well as to speed up the manufacturing and testing process.[35] Thus, within sixty-five days of receiving the virus’s genetic sequence, Moderna dosed the first human subject with its vaccine—and received FDA emergency authorization just 277 days after that.[36] This is stunning progress, considering that before COVID-19 the fastest anyone had ever created a vaccine was about four years.[37] As this book is being written, there is ongoing scientific investigation into the possibility that the COVID-19 virus might have been accidentally released after genetic engineering research in a lab.[38] Because there has been a great deal of misinformation surrounding lab-leak theories, it is important to base our inferences on high-quality scientific sources. Yet the possibility itself underscores a real danger: it could have been far worse. The virus could have been extremely transmissible and at the same time very lethal, so it is not likely that it was created with malicious intentions.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021

Eddie in Sydney would be working when Kristian in California was asleep, and vice versa. I didn’t just feel as if I was working a 24-hour day – I really was. On top of that, we were getting phonecalls through the night from all over the world. Christiane was loosely keeping a diary and recorded 17 calls in one night. It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and go back to bed. I’d never had trouble sleeping before, something that comes from spending a career working as a doctor in critical care and medicine. But the situation with this new virus and the dark question marks over its origins felt emotionally overwhelming. None of us knew what was going to happen but things had already escalated into an international emergency.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order
by Colin Kahl and Thomas Wright
Published 23 Aug 2021

Jennifer Hansler and Devan Cole, “Pompeo Backs Away from Theory He and Trump Were Pushing That Coronavirus Originated in a Wuhan Lab,” CNN, May 17, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavirus-wuhan-lab/index.html.   65.  “Coronavirus: Trump Stands by China Lab Origin Theory for Virus,” BBC, May 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098.   66.  Abul Taher, “China Lab Leak Is the ‘Most Credible’ Source of the Coronavirus Outbreak, Says Top US Government Official, amid Bombshell Claims Wuhan Scientist Has Turned Whistleblower,” Daily Mail, January 2, 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9106951/Lab-leak-credible-source-coronavirus-outbreak-says-government-official.html; “China Demands Evidence from US Following Adviser’s Hype on ‘Wuhan Lab Coronavirus Leak’ Conspiracy Theory,” Global Times, January 4, 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1211768.shtml.   67.  

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

But in his view, something that had even a tiny chance of saving the lives of the trillions of people who might live in future generations could be more valuable than alleviating suffering today. His top priority was pandemic preparedness. “We should expect that pandemics will get worse over time and more frequent, just because of the possibility of lab leaks,” he said. “This has a nontrivial chance of destabilizing the world if we don’t get prepared for it.” * * * — BANKMAN-FRIED SPOKE LIKE he really believed he could save the world. But it seemed like his philosophy would justify doing almost anything to make money. I wondered where he would draw the line.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

Wrobel, et al., “SARS-CoV-2 and bat RaTG13 spike glycoprotein structures inform on virus evolution and furin-cleavage effects,” Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, July 9, 2020. 96 percent of its genome: Shi-Hui Sun, et al., “A Mouse Model of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Pathogenesis,” Cell Host & Microbe, July 8, 2020. common ancestor: Jon Cohen, “Trump ‘owes us an apology.’ Chinese scientist at the center of COVID-19 origin theories speaks out,” Science, July 24, 2020. The NIH: Nicholson Baker, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” New York magazine, Jan. 4, 2021. collected about 15,000: Nurith Aizenman, “Why The U.S. Government Stopped Funding A Research Project On Bats And Coronaviruses,” NPR, April 29, 2020. “alive and well”: Betsy McKay and Phred Dvorak, “A Deadly Coronavirus Was Inevitable. Why Was No One Ready?”

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

Soon after the containment of that 2007 outbreak, there was a third outbreak, just a few weeks later, from the very same lab. The lab had failed to comply with the government’s conditions for resumption of their vaccine production and once again leaked foot-and-mouth into the environment.28 These are not isolated events; in fact, uncontrolled pathogen escapes are almost commonplace. In one of the deadliest confirmed lab leaks on record, over one hundred people died after being exposed to anthrax 836, the most powerful strain of anthrax in the Soviet bioweapons programme, in April 1979.29 A technician in a covert anthrax-drying plant in the city of Sverdlovsk removed a clogged filter without replacing it. He scribbled a note for his supervisor but forgot to record it in the logbook; his supervisor didn’t find the note and started up the plant, and anthrax escaped through the filterless vent and was carried to nearby buildings by the wind.30 In another instance, in 1971, a woman on an environmental research ship in the Aral Sea was exposed to a strain of smallpox that was probably used in a nearby bioweapon field test.31 The strain had been designed to be highly virulent and possibly vaccine-resistant, and it was aerosolised so that it could travel across large distances.32 While she was still asymptomatic, she returned to her home city of Aralsk, where nine others subsequently became infected, including a woman and two children who then died.33 Soviet officials locked Aralsk down, incinerated several properties, and vaccinated the entire population of fifty thousand people, preventing a larger outbreak of one of the deadliest viruses in the world, but perhaps only narrowly.34 Similarly, smallpox leaked from virology labs not once but three times in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022

The third pause in genetic engineering took place more recently, in 2012, when a few dozen scientists became alarmed at the direction being taken by their research on the extraordinarily dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus, which they were manipulating in order to prepare for future pandemics. That self-imposed moratorium lasted about eight months and, as at Asilomar, was similarly resolved through the adoption of new safety procedures, which arguably saved us from an accidental lab-leak pandemic that would have dwarfed COVID-19. However, those procedures were not globally binding – different countries have different biosecurity standards, some of which may lead to disaster in the future. Both the recombinant DNA and the H5N1 research pauses were widely accepted and observed. The most recent call for a research moratorium, focused on heritable human gene editing, has not been met with such unanimity.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT an inadvertent leak: Lima, “Facebook No Longer Treating ‘Man-Made’ Covid as a Crackpot Idea.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT seriously at the highest echelons: Julian E. Barnes, “Intelligence Review Yields No Firm Conclusion on Origins of Coronavirus,” New York Times, Aug. 27, 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/politics/covid-origin-lab-leak.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Musk bought the company: The hypocrisy is also clear in the actions of Musk himself, who suspended the accounts of several journalists for allegedly putting him in danger by sharing his location, despite there being no evidence that any of them did so. Paul Farhi, “Musk Suspends Journalists from Twitter, Claims ‘Assassination’ Danger,” Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2022, www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/12/15/twitter-journalists-suspended-musk/.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

At one extreme was clearly harmful medical misinformation, such as touting quack cures and practices that could kill people. But Weiss found that Twitter was too willing to suppress posts that did not comport with official pronouncements, including ones on legitimate topics for debate, such as whether mRNA vaccines caused heart problems, whether mask mandates worked, and whether the virus emerged from a lab leak in China. For example, Twitter put Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya on the Trends blacklist, which meant that the visibility of his tweets was curtailed. He had organized a declaration by some scientists arguing that lockdowns and school closures would be more harmful than helpful, a controversial view that turned out to have some validity.