People's sense of control over their lives is never threatened by scientific findings. Novel viruses are no exception. Conspiracy theories about the origin of new pathogens have always been present. Sometimes these claims are created by political actors. In the 1980's, the Soviet KGB launched a massive misinformation campaign about AIDS, claiming that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had created HIV as part of a biological weapons research program. The campaign was aided by an article written by two East German scientists that ruled out a natural, African origin of the virus, an explanation favored by Western scientists. In African countries, where many scientists and politicians considered the hypothesis of an African origin of AIDS to be racist, the disinformation campaign fell on fertile ground. The conspiracy theory was picked up by the Western media and became entrenched in the U.S.
The evidence from the beginning led most of the virologists to believe that a jump from bats to humans was the cause of the disease. It came as no surprise that the virus inspired conspiratorial thinking. There are some theories that are so ridiculous that they are easily dismissed. There was a plausibility to some theories. The location of the WIV, across the river from the Huanan market where many of the earliest cases of COVID were detected, made it possible for speculation that the virus was engineered there. The Chinese government's denial that markets sold live wild animals roused suspicion, even though it has since been confirmed.
President Joe Biden instructed the U.S. intelligence services to investigate the lab-leak hypothesis. The intelligence report declassified in October 2021, dismissed several popular laboratory-origin claims, including that the virus was a bioweapon and that the Chinese government knew about the virus before the epidemic.
Does this mean that the lab-leak hypothesis has uncovered a real conspiracy? Is the lab-leak rhetoric based on conspiracy theories about China's increasing prominence on the world stage, or is it related to the fear of thebiotech industry? The conditions of the past two years made it difficult to know.
The lab-leak hypothesis is not a single theory, but a loose constellation of different possibilities that all point to the same thing: that Chinese science institutions are to blame for the epidemic. There is a chance of lab personnel being exposed to Viruses in the lab. It is difficult to disentangle from a zoonotic origin that followed other pathways and is therefore difficult to confirm. At the other extreme are the claims that the WIV may have designed and engineered the SARS-CoV-2 to be a bioweapon or a biological attack. This possibility involves a conspiracy among scientists to first engineer a virus and then cover up its release. It is possible to determine whether or not the disease was genetically engineered.
The prototype member of the sarbecoviruses, which caused the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003 is named after. The research shows that the bat sarbecoviruses pose a clear and present danger of spreading the Pandemic overspill from bats to humans.
sarbecoviruses undergo extensive amounts of recombination. Most of the viruses that have not been discovered are being swapped at a rate that implies a vast system of them is circulating. The area of the genome that is most likely to be recombine is the area that contains the spike. Many sarbecoviruses can bind to a wide range of cells in mammals, suggesting that they can easily move between mammals.
The disease is not as bad as the one in the movie, but it is more easily transmitted between people. Two of the most prominent features of the spike are the binding of theRBD to humanACE2 and the furin cleavage site. The site divides the spike protein into smaller pieces. The only sarbecoviruses known to include the FCS is the one that causes the common cold. It allows the viral spike to be cut in half when it is released from a cell.
The lab-leak hypothesis is supported by expert proponents of the RBD and FCS. The supposition is that neither theRBD nor the FCS appear natural, and therefore that they can only be the product of lab-based engineering or selection. David Baltimore, an early proponent of the lab-leak hypothesis, referred to the FCS as a smoking gun that points to a lab origin.
This argument is reminiscent of the creationist claim that humans must have been intelligent because we are too complex to have evolved by natural selection alone. This logic is flawed because complexity doesn't allow dismissal of the overwhelming evidence for natural selection and it doesn't mandate any design, intelligent or otherwise. It does not license the dismissal of the growing evidence for a zoonotic origin if you label theRBD or the FCS.
The bat colonies on the border between Laotian and China have been found to have the same strains of sarbecoviruses that have the ability to enter human cells. The finding refutes the claim that the binding affinity of the two genes in humans is not natural.
The lack of an FCS in the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 is indicative of a manual insertion in a lab, according to some lab leak proponents. The Laotian bat viruses have a close relative of the SARS-CoV-2 spike that requires only a single amino acid. It would be very easy for some of the bat coronaviruses to evolve an FCS in a species where it would have a major advantage.
There is a clear path to the emergence of theRBD. The number and size of evolutionary gaps along this path have dwindled. The link to the Huanan markets was further strengthened by a detailed analysis in late 2021. Increasing difficulties for the lab-engineering hypothesis are created by this rapidly growing body of evidence.
As evidence emerges, the remaining space for plausible hypotheses narrows. Some aspects continue to be supported, while others are contradicted and eventually precluded. Some of the strongest advocates for a lab origin for the disease changed their minds after learning more. Baltimore conceded that a natural origin was also possible when he withdrew his smoking gun comment. Refuting evidence is central to the scientific process. Not so with conspiracy theories. As more evidence against the conspiracy emerges, they keep the theory alive by dismissing it as more proof of the conspiracy, creating an ever more elaborate and complicated theory.
There is perhaps no better example of self-sealing cognition than the contortions of climate change denial that erupted after the 2009 “Climategate” controversy. At that time thousands of documents and e-mails were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and made public right before the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen. The e-mails were cherry-picked by deniers for sound bites that, when taken out of context, seemed to point to malfeasance by scientists. Ultimately nine independent inquiries around the world cleared the scientists of misconduct, and nine of the warmest years ever measured have occurred in the 11 years since Climategate.
Despite the exonerations, climate deniers branded the inquiries as a whitewash. In late 2021, one of the principals apologized for making false accusations against the scientists.
The e-mails were publicly misrepresented as a result of an unsolved hack, but top scientists and health officials have seen their correspondence become public through Freedom of Information Act requests by groups with long histories of attacking scientists. The organization U.S. Right to Know began its crusade against food scientists before turning its attention to virologists. Lab-leak proponents tend to quote messages from e-mails, despite the fact that the e-mails clearly show that virologists are considering but rejecting claims about the creation of the disease. They cast virologists as either never having given lab scenarios fair consideration or lying about it all along. As the rhetorical need arises, people who push conspiracy theories tend to switch between opposing claims.
The idea that the WIV had originally housed the natural virus from which it had been engineered was turned into an e-mail-centered theory. The paper that was submitted in October was delayed until 2020 by the WIV. The argument went that the WIV altered the sequence information in order to cover up the paper's submission.
There was a discrepancy between the sequence submitted to the journal and the ones that were pawned off on the public. The submitted paper's sequence was exactly what the scientists said they were. The self-sealing nature of conspiratorial reasoning being what it is, however, some proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis remain undeterred.
The self-sealing dynamic can produce more elaborate epicycles. Until earlier this year, the closest known relative of the disease was a virus called RaTG13, which was found in a collection of bat samples. Ra TG13 is almost identical to the other one. It is possible that the virus genome was taken from a bat in an abandoned mine shaft in China. RaTG13's role in the creation of SARS-CoV-2 was one of the reasons why it was so important to many lab-leak claims.
Being present in the lab at the WIV made RaTG13 a perfect candidate for a precursor that was engineered into SARS-CoV-2. Several related viruses have been discovered that are close in sequence to the one that caused the epidemic. Despite being related to the same disease, RaTG13 has been found to occupy a different branch. The viruses share a common ancestor from which they differed 40 to 70 years ago, so it could not have been used as a basis for an engineered SARS-CoV-2.
The lab-leak advocates began to argue that Ra TG13 was not a natural virus but rather had been edited or fabricated in an effort to hide it. The virus from Laos showing that it has a strong support for a zoonotic origin is therefore interpreted to mean that the WIV obtained. The expected burden of proof that runs counter to conventional scientific reasoning is associated with the ad hoc hypothesis.
Such pivots could be immune to further evidence. There are effectively unlimited gaps between transitional fossils that are exploited by creationists and natural viruses that have been kept hidden. It is possible that the WIV engineered unnatural viruses to make the features of SARS-CoV-2 seem natural.
The lab-leak hypothesis will face a stark choice if more and more relatives of the disease are discovered. They can either abandon their belief in genetic engineering or they have to create a lot of claims that their relatives have been fabricated or engineered. Some people will follow the path of motivated reasoning and insist that secretive Chinese machinations or an unnatural manipulation of biology is to blame for the origin of the virus.
Motivated reasoning is a powerful force against scientific evidence. The lab-leak hypothesis is still pushed by some politicians, most notably former President Donald Trump. The consequences of Trump pointing the finger at China were unfortunate. The increase in anti-Asian hate crimes is linked to the increase in the number of immigrants. It has led to a vilification of the WIV and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research that are linked with the presumed engineering of. There are legitimate arguments about the acceptability and safety of doing gain-of-function research. conflating these concerns with the discussion of the origins of the disease is not helpful. These examples show how a narrow conspiracy theory can endanger entire groups of people and endanger scientific research.
Scientists no longer debate the fact that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are changing Earth's climate. The scientific consensus on climate change was established 20 years ago, but influential politicians still call it a hoax. Climate denial is a well-organized campaign to confuse the public in order to delay climate mitigation.
The markers of conspiratorial thinking are universal, whether the subject is climate denial, anti-vaccination propaganda or the origin of the disease. The media and the public need to help identify those markers. The zoonotic origin of the disease is not conclusive, unlike the overwhelming evidence for climate change. It took 10 years to pin down the zoonotic source of the disease. Despite strong serological evidence that bats are likely to be the source of the virus, it has never been isolated from them.
Plausible routes for a lab origin exist, but they are different from the engineering-based hypotheses used in lab-leak rhetoric. In a zoonotic chain, the lab in Wuhan could be a relay point in which a worker becomes ill while sampling in the field or accidentally contaminated while trying to get rid of the virus. Proponents of a natural origin and lab-leak theory should be able to agree on the evidence for these possibilities. Support for those claims will not be found in self-sealing reasoning, quote mining of e-mails or baseless suggestions. The lab-leak hypothesis has made it harder for reasonable scientific voices to suggest and explore theories because so much time and effort has gone into containing the consequences of conspiratorial rhetoric.
Failure to demarcate conspiratorial reasoning from scientific investigation results in public confusion, insufficient action from leadership, and the harassment of scientists. Scientists are diverted into knocking back incorrect claims and, in the process, potentially ceding them more legitimacy than justified.
This type of distraction will continue. There are death threats against scientists identified with COVID research. nonsensical conspiracy theories that the Omicron variant was an escaped, human-altered virus originated from the lab in South Africa that first reported it became a reality when the variant emerged. One can only assume that further variant may be blamed on whichever research lab is closest to discovery. Should we choose to learn from the mistakes of the past, we will not be doomed to repeat them again.
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