 Where did the virus that changed the world come from? For a long time, the prevailing theory was that wild animals like bats sold at a wet market in Wuhan, China had started the outbreak. One of the first scientists to question this narrative was Botao Zhao, who on February 6th distributed a paper arguing that the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. The author pointed out that there was no evidence that the vendors at the wet market in Wuhan sold bat meat. On the other hand, there were two research labs studying bat-borne coronaviruses located in Wuhan, where a virus could have accidentally infected workers, causing them to spread the disease to the general public. Botao Zhao withdrew the paper two weeks later, after Chinese authorities declared that the lab leak theory had no merit. China is being accused of censoring critical data about the coronavirus. The renowned law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Xu Jiangrun, is known to be missing after publicly condemning Chinese President Xi Jinping for failing to contain the spread of the virus at an early stage. The Chinese government proceeded to clamp down on research into the virus's origins. New regulations restricting the publication of research about coronavirus. Any paper that traces the origin of the virus should be strictly managed. To this day, the Chinese government won't allow outside researchers to test blood drawn from employees of the Wuhan lab, who may have been among the first humans infected with COVID in November of 2019. According to the official record, they were hospitalized with a pneumonia-like disease. There's no proof that the virus originated from a lab, but there's also no proof that humans first became infected by eating bat or exposure to pangolins, a theory that was treated as unimpeachable fact early in the pandemic. A group of scientists signed a statement published in the Lancet denouncing speculation about non-natural origins of the virus as conspiracy theories. Only after some emails became public, did it become clear that the scientists who brought his colleagues together to co-sign the Lancet statement was Peter Dajak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit that secured U.S. government funding for controversial research on bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dajak also co-authored a June 2020 op-ed in The Guardian, headlined Ignore the Conspiracy Theories. Scientists know COVID-19 wasn't created in the lab, without disclosing a potential conflict of interest. Media coverage following the publication of the Lancet letter overwhelmingly framed discussion of the lab leak hypothesis as conspiracy theory. That episode does not reflect well on scientists. Science writer Matt Ridley says that Anthony Fauci's private emails, which were made public through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that behind the scenes scientists were taking the lab leak theory seriously all along. A number of leading virologists were talking to each other and were saying to each other, we think this might look a bit like a virus that's been engineered in the laboratory. And then they all got on a phone call with Anthony Fauci. And at the end of that phone call, they all did a very rapid vault fast and started writing articles almost immediately. And in the case of Peter Dazak, the fact that he had orchestrated the letter was not at all clear until emails were leaked does raise very serious concerns that Dr. Dazak needs to answer. I've tried to correspond with him numerous times. I've never yet had a response. Dajak also didn't reply to Reason's interview request. Ridley has co-authored Virol, a new book about the ongoing hunt for the origins of the coronavirus. His writing partner is Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard scientist Alina Chan, one of the earliest and most outspoken public skeptics of the natural origin hypothesis. She says that when she and her colleagues published a preprint questioning the consensus that she hadn't been aware of the Lancet letter organized by Dajak, but that she believes it could have had a major chilling effect on the scientific discussion in those early days. So they're saying that anyone who's saying that this virus didn't come from nature is a conspiracy theorist. People when they read this letter they might have thought, then I'm not going to put my neck out there to say that this might have come from a lab. Chan, a molecular biologist, argued in the paper that because SARS-CoV-2 was so well adapted to humans, there was reason to be skeptical that it had recently come from an animal. If it had recently come from bats or pangolins, she would have expected the virus to have been rapidly mutating in the early days of the pandemic to become better adapted to human tissue. For me, the light bulb moment was when I read in the news that the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 appeared genetically stable. Chan credits this insight partially to her experience living through the SARS outbreak of 2003, which she lived through in Singapore. In that situation, in that outbreak, the virus had rapidly picked up dozens of mutations in the early three months of the outbreak. In comparison for SARS-CoV-2, there were few of these mutations, so it suggested to me that this virus had already picked up many useful mutations for infecting and transmitting amongst humans prior to its detection in December 2019. Another major difference is that during the 2003 outbreak, authorities discovered previous SARS infections among animals being sold at markets in South China within a couple of months. That's not the case with SARS-CoV-2, despite initial suspicions that a seafood market was to blame. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, even though the first cluster of cases identified was at a seafood market, they never found any signs of animals that were infected by this virus. So up till today, there's no sign of an animal that was ever infected by SARS-CoV-2 and then gave it to humans. When the World Health Organization sent a team to investigate the virus's origins in January 2021, EcoHealth Alliance's DAJAC was the only American member included. The team dismissed the lab leak hypothesis before WHO leadership later backtracked. The findings suggest that the laboratory incident hypothesis is extremely unlikely and to explain the introduction of the virus into the human population and therefore is not a hypothesis that will suggest, that will implies to suggest future studies. DAJAC granted an interview to 60 minutes following that trip to Wuhan and suggested that farm animals were the likely culprit. But there's no direct evidence that any of those animals were actually infected with the bat virus. Correct. Now what we've got to do is go to those farms and investigate, talk to the farmers, talk to their relatives, test them, see if there were spikes in virus there first. So the team doesn't actually know if any of the farmers or the truckers were ever infected. No one knows you. No one's been there, no one's asked them, no one's tested them. That's to be done. There's a detail that emerged after the 60 minutes report that Ridley would like DAJAC to explain. Recently leaked documents show that EcoHealth Alliance applied for a research grant related to inserting what's called a furan cleavage site into SARS-like coronaviruses. This very furan cleavage site makes SARS-CoV-2 highly infectious in humans and it's what distinguishes it from any SARS-like coronaviruses yet found in the wild. The grant request was rejected, but did the Wuhan laboratory engage in this research even without funding from that grant? DAJAC may be able to help answer that question. The fact that that is probably the feature that makes the virus sufficiently infectious to start a pandemic means that it is a highly important thing. So you would think that a scientist who knew that he had put in a grant application in 2018 to put furan cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses and admittedly been turned down at the Wuhan Institute of Virology would volunteer that information early in the pandemic so as to help us understand this new virus and understand where it might have come from. Ridley and Chan also find it suspicious that when China's premier bat coronavirus expert and DAJAC's collaborator in Wuhan published her complete analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, she neglected to mention this highly unusual furan cleavage site. But DAJAC told 60 Minutes that the WHO did look into the lab lake theory. You're just taking their word for it. Well what else can we do? There's a limit to what you can do and we went right up to that limit. We asked them tough questions. They weren't vetted in advance and the answers they gave we found to be believable, correct, and convincing. But weren't the Chinese engaged in a cover-up? They destroyed evidence. They punished scientists who were trying to give evidence on this very question of the origin. Well that wasn't our task to find out if China had covered up. It was the behavior of someone who was trying to ensure that one message got out and not another which is fine if you're a politician or you know some kind of opinionated person and scientists should be allowed their own opinion. But it's not fine if you are being asked to be part of an objective international investigation with privileged access. After the 60 Minutes interview, leaked documents showed that EcoHealth Alliance worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to make several bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses and even MERS more infectious to human cells. Chan and Ridley say that when they started writing the book, they didn't have a strong view about which theory was correct. But these recent revelations have shifted their thinking in favor of the lab leak theory. In light of grant proposals and reports released within the past few months, Chan wrote on Twitter, we know novel SARS-like viruses were being synthesized and engineered at unprecedented scale. That changed my mind completely. So knowing that there actually was a plan, a pipeline, a protocol for doing this work in 2018. So now for me genetic engineering is very much on the table. It's not just a one out of 10,000 chance that this might have happened if it came from a lab close to 50-50 percent chance that it happened. This question was at the center of a heated exchange between Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul over possible NIH funding of so-called gain of function research, which involves purposely making a virus more infectious to humans. Making animal virus and you increase the transmissibility to humans, you're saying that's not gain of function. That is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. There will be responsibility for those who funded the lab, including yourself. I totally resent the lie that you are now propagating, Senator, because if you look at the viruses that were used in the experiments, that were given in the annual reports that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible. No one's saying those virus caused it. No one is pledging that those virus caused the pandemic. What we're alleging is the gain of function research was going on in that lab and NIH funded it. Get away from it. It meets your definition and you are obfuscating the truth. But much of the blame for the devastating scope of the pandemics as Ridley rests on Chinese authorities who punished ophthalmologist Li Wenlang, who tried to get the word out about the emergence of a new SARS-like virus. The government successfully kept human-to-human transmission of the disease under wraps for weeks, maybe longer. Why was there such angst and secrecy even at the hyper-local level from the very beginning? Communist regimes tend to be secretive. There tends to be an assumption that you don't talk about things unless you're allowed to, rather than the other way around. But Xi Jinping is a much more dictatorial and authoritarian ruler than his media predecessors. And by 2019, it was more and more the case that scientists in laboratories and doctors in hospitals were under orders not to communicate with the outside world about things that the regime might not want them to. Very significant attempts to punish and suppress the release of information about the epidemic that was developing in Wuhan. Did that play a part in the epidemic escaping and getting to the rest of the world? And turning into a pandemic, you bet it did. If on the 27th, 28th of December, when alarm bells were beginning to ring in hospitals in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities had said to the world, we've got a problem in Wuhan, we're going to do our best to stop it, then we probably could have pinched this in the bud before it got out of the city of Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology houses samples of RATG-13, a bat virus that is one of the closest known genetic matches to SARS-CoV-2. But to this day, information about other coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab haven't been released, so we don't know if the lab was working with a virus that's even more closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The lab's public database of viral samples could hold some answers, but it was taken offline in February and had been modified in December, which we know because of work by DRASTIC, the dedicated research and scientific team investigating COVID-19. A decentralized group of volunteers that compile and analyze open source material and leaked documents to investigate the origins of COVID. They are the heroes of our book. Once I realized that it's being completely, it's been just created without any evidence, I just couldn't, you know, stay silent. Yuri Dagan is a biotech entrepreneur and one of the founding members of DRASTIC. It was just a group of like-minded people on Twitter who got into like really huge long threads on Twitter on some things like, where's the Smojiang mine or what is RATG-13? And at some point we just went off to a private group which was called DASTIC's Fan Club because we were all pretty much all of us were blocked by Peter Dastak at some point. A key revelation uncovered by the group was that the Wuhan Institute of Virology Database was first taken down in September 2019, three months before the pandemic became public. A description of the database was modified on December 30th, 2019, the day Dr. Xi told Chinese state television that her lab first obtained the samples of the virus in Wuhan. Wuhan scientists accessed the database a few times before it was permanently removed in February 2020 for alleged security concerns. For them to take it down is very suspicious and of course she's generally the explanation that she took it down to prevent hackers from attacking it is complete bullshit because it was a public database to begin with and what's she afraid of? A member of the DRASTIC team also discovered that the Wuhan team had collected key samples including one of the virus's closest known genetic matches from a mine where some workers had fallen sick and died after clearing out bat droppings. Chinese authorities have denied outsiders any access to examine the mine. Though there's mounting circumstantial evidence to support the lab leak theory, most government officials still maintain that the natural origin hypothesis is more likely. A US intelligence report declassified on October 29th said four intel agencies had low confidence that the virus most likely emerged in nature. One agency had moderate confidence that it leaked from a lab and analysts at three agencies remained unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information. The report did conclude that SARS-CoV-2 was unlikely to be a biological weapon. NIH director Francis Collins who didn't reply to our interview request told computer scientist and podcast host Lex Friedman in early November that he's open to the lab leak hypothesis but still believes strongly that the virus is of natural origin. Is there a reasonable chance that COVID-19 leaked from a lab? I can't exclude that. I think it's fairly unlikely. I wish we had more ability to be able to ask questions of the Chinese government and learn more about what kind of records might have been in the lab that we've never been able to see but most likely this was a natural origin of a virus probably starting in a bat perhaps traveling through some other intermediate yet to be identified host and finding its way into humans. Between July 2020 and January 2021 an international team of scientists captured bats in Laos carrying a newly discovered coronavirus that's the closest known genetic match to SARS-CoV-2 even closer than the virus held in the Wuhan lab which some say supports the natural origin theory but Ridley Chan and Dagan point out that it lacks the crucial furan cleavage site which they suspect was inserted in a lab. Supporters of the natural origin theory point out that no smoking gun virus has yet been found in the version of the Wuhan database uncovered by Drastic but Chan points out that this version of the database is years out of date because the Wuhan researchers generally don't enter new viruses until they've had a chance to sequence and publish studies about them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology Database is still inaccessible. We only see viruses have collected up to 2016 so we have barely any concept of what viruses and sequences they might have found after 2016 in the years leading up to COVID-19 so without access to that information becomes very difficult for us to to guess whether or not they might have found the precursor of SARS-2 in the labs and we're working with it. Of course also would love to get that database or at least part of the data from the database that's been deleted and to see all the unpublished sequences. I definitely don't want to stop biotechnology. I think CRISPR gene editing is a fantastic tool for medicine for agriculture for conservation for all sorts of things. The overwhelming majority of work in this field has benefited mankind including the development of the messenger RNA vaccines that have saved millions of lives in the last year. But Ridley says that scientists should come together to set ethical guidelines that prohibit dangerous types of research such as experimenting on bat viruses to make them more infectious to human cells in large urban environments after harvesting them from caves far away from human population centers as this China produced documentary shows researchers doing some of them without proper protective gear. Going out and harvesting viruses in wild places and with pandemic potential and bringing them back to cities to work on them probably isn't very sensible it's like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match as somebody put it. So if we could get the US, the UK, Australia, Japan, other major countries to sign a treaty saying when there's an outbreak in our country we promise to open up as far as possible and tell you everything we know then the very fact that some countries won't sign that treaty will itself put pressure on them that's kind of the way the atomic energy authority international atomic energy authority evolved and I think that's what we should be looking to achieve. How optimistic or pessimistic are you that we ever will get to the truth of the matter here? I'm generally optimistic I think truth will out here it may take a long time I notice that the fall of the Soviet Union did lead to significant revelations about biological accidents there for example anthrax I think therefore it may take a change of regime in Beijing before we find out more but I think there are people who know what happened whatever it happened you know even if it's just what happened in a market there are people who know and I can't help thinking that at some point we will be able to find out who they are and ask them even in a regime as repressive and controlling as China's so I hope we do find out there are plenty of people who say it's too late we've lost the chance we'll ever find out I'm not one of them at least not yet