The Preponderance of the Evidence

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Richard Muller and Steven Quay lay out their case that COVID-19 emerged due a a leak from a laboratory associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

A coronavirus adapts for its host animal. It takes time to perfect itself for infecting humans. But a pathogen engineered via accelerated evolution in a laboratory using humanized mice would need no additional time after escape to optimize for human infection. In their Nature Medicine paper, Mr. Andersen and colleagues pointed to what they considered the poor design of SARS-CoV-2 as evidence of zoonotic origin. But a team of American scientists mutated the stem of the coronavirus genome in nearly 4,000 different ways and tested each variation. In the process they actually stumbled on the Delta variant. In the end, they determined that the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen was 99.5% optimized for human infection—strong confirmation of the lab-leak hypothesis.

SARS-CoV-2 contains a key mutation: the “furin cleavage site,” or FCS. This mutation is sufficiently complex that it couldn’t have been the result of spontaneous changes triggered, for example, by a mutagen or radiation. It could, however, have been inserted by nature or by humans. In nature the process is called recombination—a virus exchanges chunks of itself with another closely related virus when both infect the same cell. The National Institutes of Health database shows no FCS in more than 1,200 viruses that can exchange with SARS-CoV-2.

As the Intercept recently reported, a 2018 grant proposal—written by the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nonprofit, and submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa—contained a description of proposed experiments that would involve splicing the FCS sequences into bat viruses so a research team could look for changes in infectivity. Darpa opted not to fund the grant, but the absence of the FCS in related coronaviruses, together with the apparent desire and capability of scientists to make such an insertion, strongly argues in favor of the laboratory origin thesis.

Based on the scientific evidence alone, an unbiased jury would be convinced that SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus escaped after being created in a laboratory using accelerated evolution (a k a gain of function) and gene splicing on the backbone of a bat coronavirus. Using standard statistical methods, we can quantify the likelihood of the lab-leak hypothesis compared with that of zoonosis. The odds enormously favor a lab leak, far more significantly than the 99% confidence usually required for a revolutionary scientific discovery.

I don’t know whether SARS-CoV-2 was released by an inadvertent leak from a laboratory, emerged naturally from animal hosts, or was carried to the Earth on a meteorite. I have long argued for civil suits claiming damages from the Chinese government and enterprises partially or wholly owned by the Chinese state on the grounds that the rules under which civil suits proceed are different than those in the scientific world or in the criminal courts. All that is needed to prevail is a preponderance of the evidence and, like Mssrs. Muller and Quay, I think the preponderance of the evidence supports the lab leak hypothesis. What supports the natural host theory is previous experience and theory or, said another way, there is no actual evidence supporting it. If you can think of a better way to encourage the open participation of the Chinese government in the search of its origins, I’m open to it. I think it would provide a powerful incentive—trillions of them in fact.