Premium Episode 129: Lab Leak Hypothesis feat Dr. Alex Greninger (Sample)
We spoke to a clinical pathologist and the assistant director of the clinical virology lab at University of Washington Medical Center. The topic this week is the lab leak hypothesis - which has recently seen a revival in public discussion.
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SOURCES:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-man-made-491053
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-broad-institute-coronavirus/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-epidemic-draws-scrutiny-to-labs-handling-deadly-pathogens-11583349777
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-wuhan-wet-market.html
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/covid-19-lab-leak-natural-market-theory-conspiracy-theory-1176213/
https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210217/The-origin-of-SARS-CoV-2-furin-cleavage-site-remains-a-mystery.aspx
https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 129 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Lab Leak Hypothesis episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Field, and Travis View.
There's a good chance that at some point during the pandemic, a family or friend sent you a wild article or blurry JPEG about COVID-19.
It may have been a fake cure, or a preventative technique, or even a claim that the numbers of deaths had been exaggerated, or an explanation that the virus doesn't exist at all.
Some of these ideas can be traced back to cynical political figures like Donald Trump, the broader GOP in its media sphere, or even Koch-style deregulators.
At the grassroots level, this has been met with the spread of COVID denialism and the organizing of mass protests and anti-lockdown gatherings, etc.
But broader geopolitics have also interacted with how we talk about COVID-19, and who we blame for its death toll and disruption to our lives.
I'm speaking, of course, of the never-ending Cold War.
In this context, blaming China is actually strategically useful, just another prong in a both covert and public effort to undermine the perceived foe.
Lab leak theory The idea that the virus may have been accidentally released from a laboratory was, during the Trump era, widely derided by the liberal and mainstream media as a conspiracy theory.
But now that Biden is president, we are seeing not just a resurgence of lab leak theory, but a concurrent effort by the new administration to escalate the perceived conflict between the United States and China.
Taking into account all of these complex layers, we've set out to explore the lab leak theory in this episode with the help of our guest, Dr. Alex Grenninger, a pathology lab scientist and the assistant director of the Clinical Virology Labs at the University of Washington Medical Center.
To date, we do not have a complete, definite account of the origins of COVID-19 and the virus that causes the illness, which is called SARS-CoV-2.
Which is disappointing to me because I rely on science to give me some sense of stability in this chaotic world, and right now, science is letting me down.
There's just too much uncertainty for me, personally.
Join the club.
The most popular theory is that the virus originated in wildlife before spreading to humans.
This kind of animal-to-human transmission is called zoonotic spillover.
Researchers have some leads that support the natural origin theory.
Bats are known carriers of coronaviruses, and scientists have determined that the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is most similar to two bat coronaviruses called RATG13 However, the genome of RATG13 is only 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2's genome, which means that the specific precursor of the virus isn't yet known.
Fortunately, scientists have found another clue while observing the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2.
Now, when you look at pictures or drawings of the coronavirus and you see those little protrusions that are coming out of, like, the sphere of the virus, Those are called spike proteins and they form the crown which give the coronavirus its name.
I actually did not know that it was called that because it's got a little crown.
So it's a king is what you're saying?
Yes, it's a king virus.
So the presence of these spike proteins is what allows these viruses to penetrate host cells and cause infection.
Scientists found out that the receptor-binding domain of these spike proteins in SARS-CoV-2 is closely related to an entirely different coronavirus found in Malayan pangolins.
And pangolins are these critters that kind of look like small anteaters with scales.
Huh.
So for this reason, scientists hypothesize that the new coronavirus moved through bats and then pangolins before jumping to humans.
I'm told that this is a good working theory.
This is basically what they came up with in the early days.
The problem is that scientists have yet to find a definite smoking gun, such as a pangolin virus that has all the right SARS-CoV-2-like elements put together.
We only have hints and clues from SARS-CoV-2 that suggest a strong connection.
And they have been executing 10,000 pangolins a day.
As is correct.
This feels like the beginning of The Hot Zone.
Did you ever read that book?
I did not, no.
Oh!
Jakey read a book.
Literally sounds like you picked it up at the airport and it had like a half nude woman with a gun on the cover.
It definitely was like an airport book for sure.
But I believe, you know, Michael Crichton maybe?
You figure it out, listener.
I'm going to get owned for this on Twitter.
However, in the absence of certainty, there is an alternative view that the virus escaped or was even engineered by a laboratory.
The main suspect is the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As the name suggests, the lab is based in Wuhan, China, which also happens to be where the virus first spread.
This is a research facility founded in the 1950s that was the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety clearance, meaning that it is equipped to study the world's highest risk infectious agents and toxins, ones that require the strictest biocontainment measures.
So we're talking about like, you know, the Andromeda strain suits, these, you know, the contagion suits.
And by the way, the French helped them build this.
Um, and then they eventually just like kicked the French out.
They were like, eh, we got the facilities down.
Thank you very much.
Goodbye!
And just, they've been running it since.
Good for them.
Which is how you should treat the French, I totally agree.
Now to make matters more interesting, for five years prior to the pandemic, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have engaged in so-called gain-of-function research, which is designed to enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of anticipating future pandemics.
This kind of research is so controversial that back in 2014, the U.S.
government paused funding for it.
This pause was intended to provide time to address concerns about the risks and benefits of these studies.
A statement from the White House about the pause said this.
Specifically, the funding pause will apply to gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to
influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses, such as the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or
transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route."
So, just to reiterate, there's no definite evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was produced via
gain-of-function research or anything like that, but it is something that people pointed
out and it's caused a lot of concern and it's mentioned on Tucker Carlson a lot.
In the early days of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was dismissed as poorly evidenced
at best and a wild conspiracy theory at worst.
And it didn't help that the main proponents of this theory were people like President Trump, Republican Senator Tom Cotton, and Jake.
That really was a strike to its credibility, that third.
The first two, look, there's a little bit of leeway, but once you get to that third guy, if he's pushing it, you know, you grew it in a cup of water, you know?
One thing that really didn't help in terms of its credibility was Just how often the kind of lab leak theory was kind of also pushed alongside this like bio-weapon kind of idea, right?
That it's deliberately been unleashed?
Because leaking from the lab doesn't mean shit.
It doesn't mean it's designed.
It doesn't mean it's on purpose that they're leaking it.
There's various like assumptions there.
Yeah.
Yeah, quite often people would say like a deliberate engineered virus.
And like we discussed in the coronavirus conspiracy theory episode, there's really no evidence of that whatsoever.
But I mean, the fact that was that was kind of like inflated with, I guess, the more reasonable sort of lab leak hypothesis meant that people tend to reject both those theories out of hand.
Well, of course, and there's the line from Dustin Hoffman in the 1990s film Outbreak, where he says, you know, I don't want this thing walking out on the bottom of somebody's shoe.
It makes you think of that line.
However, as time went on, scientists became more willing to voice support for at least the possibility of the lab leak theory.
This is perhaps best embodied in the recent letter published in the journal Science, which is titled, Investigate the Origins of COVID-19.
In that letter, a group of 17 scientists say, theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.
On May 26, President Joe Biden issued a statement saying that when he first entered office, he tasked the intelligence community with determining whether the virus, quote, emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.
When that analysis proved inconclusive, he asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts and report back in 90 days.
That report apparently is forthcoming.
Apparently, these are the kinds of calls you make when you're president.
You ask people to do something, and when they don't or they can't, you just tell them to do it again, but you try harder this time.
The lab leak theory is also less taboo in the media.
In a recent appearance on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, comedian Jon Stewart joked about the lab leak theory.
There's a chance that this was created in a lab.
There's an investigation.
A chance?
If there's evidence, I'd love to hear it.
I just don't know.
There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China.
What do we do?
Oh, you know who we could ask?
The Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.
The disease is the same name as the lab.
That's just a little too weird, don't you think?
And then they ask those scientists, they're like, so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab.
How did this happen?
And they're like, a pangolin kissed a turtle.
And you're like, no.
You're the name of your lab.
If you look at the name, look at the name.
Let me see your business card.
Show me your business card.
Oh, I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan.
Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan.
How did that happen?
Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and Then it sneezed into my chili, and now we all have coronavirus.
Okay, okay!
What about this?
What about this?
Listen to this.
Wait a second.
This is InfoWars.
This is fucking InfoWars.
Jon Stewart has been shit for a while, but man, this is a dumb as rocks argument.
Yeah I mean like that is how so many diseases have started and it's like actually there's even a theory that when there was contact with the new world and the old world that the reason that so many diseases seemed to go one way basically from Europe and Asia and all these other countries to the new world and we didn't really seem to get many back was because of animal husbandry, was because Europeans lived among animals and like bred them and stuff like that whereas not many civilizations in the Americas did that.
Um, so we had like way more diseases to give them essentially than they had to give us.
So it's not like, it's not, it's not crazy.
You know, he's like making it, making it sound sort of like, you know, someone's just, just like, yeah, kind of like randomly picking up different animals that could, but that is how lots and lots of human diseases begin.
And he's just basically being like, oh, there's a lab that studies this stuff in Wuhan and the first outbreak was in Wuhan.
Same name.
It's the same name.
It's the same name.
That's not how science or research or investigation works at all.
It's Jake logic at best.
Yeah, like I explained earlier, the whole bat-pangolin theory is based on genomic analysis.
They weren't, like, picking animals at random.
Now, I was really intrigued by these shifting attitudes on the origin of the coronavirus, so I thought I'd, like, dive into the evidence as best I could to see why the lab leak theory has gained more interest.
As always, I wanted to include the disclaimer that I'm not a scientist.
None of us are.
Annie's the closest, because she's a doctor.
She has a great podcast about viruses.
Inoculations and whatnot.
But I will include links to my sources in the show notes of this episode.
But before I proceed, I want to address the real question on everyone's mind.
Will I be thoroughly owned if the lab leak theory turns out to be true?
And I would submit that I will not be owned, necessarily.
So early in 2020, I relied on scientific papers published at the time to deny that the virus was engineered in the lab.
But I did allow for the possibility of the lab leak hypothesis.
In April of 2020, I tweeted this in response to criticism from longtime friend of the show, Neon Revolt.
I said, quote, Oh, so this episode is just a defense episode.
I thought this was going to be a little different, Travis.
No, no, no.
I was like... It always delves back down into the mud.
That's right.
People misinterpreted your words, did they?
Over a year ago, I tweeted, "Neon seems to be confusing two distinct questions.
One, was SARS-CoV-2 constructed in the laboratory?
And two, did SARS-CoV-2 escape from the laboratory?"
As the retweeted article explains, the genomic evidence shows that the answer to question number
one is no. But the fact that the virus is natural doesn't eliminate the possibility
that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The article I retweeted doesn't address that question.
The lab escape theory is possible, but lacks evidence at the moment.
First of all, calling it escape makes it sound like the virus built, like, a series of pillows and sheets tied together and scaled the wall.
That's why he put escaped in quotes.
A daring escape!
So, as always, my secret to never being wrong is never believing in anything.
Now, one of the big reasons that the lab leak theory is getting more play is that the investigations so far haven't been conclusive.
And this is in contrast to investigations into previous coronaviruses.
For example, the intermediary host species of SARS-1 was identified within four months of the epidemic's outbreak.
This was all the way back in the early 2000s.
The host species of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, was identified within nine months.
Now it's been over a year and a half since the pandemic began and researchers have failed to find either the original bat population or the intermediate species to which SARS-2 might have jumped to humans.
The first official report from the World Health Organization on the origins of the virus came from an international team of scientists who traveled to Wuhan at the beginning of the year.
During their 28-day trip, the scientists tried to reconstruct the early moments of the outbreak and the possible pathways for the emergence of the virus.
The final report, titled who convened global study of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was issued on March 30th and failed to offer any definite conclusions.
The authors concluded that it was most likely that the virus was introduced to humans by an animal which acted as an intermediate host.
That study dubbed the possibility that the virus came from a lab as extremely unlikely.
However, there was widespread concern about how the study was conducted.
Specifically, there are concerns that China wasn't being as transparent as they could be.
The World Health Organization's Director General even called out China for not being more transparent and raised concerns that scientists were unable to get unfettered access to biological samples and raw data that was relevant to the investigation.
The first report was intended to be the starting point for the joint WHO-China probe, with a second phase of more in-depth studies to follow.
But since the Phase 1 uncovered so little, it's unclear, apparently, what Phase 2 is going to look like at the moment.
Now, with all that being said, I do want to mention that there have been scientists who took the lab leak theory seriously in 2020.
One of the earliest scientists to posit the lab leak theory was Bo Tao Xiao from the South China University of Technology.
In February of 2020, he published a brief article in ResearchGate titled, The Possible Origins of 2019 NCoV Coronavirus.
It concludes, In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Safety level may need to be reinforced in high-risk, biohazardous laboratories.
Now the evidence cited in the paper, which was very brief, included lab locations in Wuhan, reference to past incidents of mishandled pathogens elsewhere in China, and the fact that a Wuhan researcher connected to the institute was famous for collecting thousands of bats and sometimes getting bitten.
Which I know reasons.
What?
Don't do that!
He's a scientist, he gets bitten by bats.
You know?
What are you gonna do?
Just don't do that!
Just choose not to do that if you're a guy doing the viruses in the lab!
Don't become Batman!
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