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I Visited a Chinese Lab at the Center of a Biosafety Debate. What I Learned
Helps Explain the Clash Over Covid-19s Origins.
We should let science and evidence prevail while recognizing that science,
like other disciplines, is shaped by competing interests.
Mara Hvistendahl
Mara Hvistendahl The Intercept
June 19 2021, 12:03 p.m.
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39
This photo taken on April 16, 2013 shows Ms. Shi (R), a doctor at the
Beijing Center of Disease Control, gesturing to a colleague in their
laboratory in Beijing. A seven-year-old girl who contracted the deadly H7N9
strain of bird flu was to leave a Beijing hospital on April 17, staff said,
as the death toll from the virus in China remained at 16. CHINA OUT AFP
PHOTO (Photo credit should read STR/AFP via Getty Images)A doctor at the
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention gestures to a colleague in
their laboratory in Beijing on April 16, 2013. Photo: STR/AFP via Getty
Images
I WAS LIVING in Shanghai when a new avian flu virus emerged there in 2013.
The outbreak started in February, shortly after the Lunar New Year, when an
87-year-old man and his two sons showed up at a local hospital with a fever
and other symptoms. By early March, the elderly man was dead, leading an
anonymous Chinese social media user to speculate about the strange
circumstances surrounding his demise. Censors swiftly deleted the post.
Shanghai officials initially said that the man had died from routine
complications, but by the end of the month, the governments claims had
given way to a troubling admission: The Chinese health ministry notified the
World Health Organization of the emergence of a new avian flu virus called
H7N9. The death toll rose to seven, and cases spread to provinces
surrounding Shanghai. Public health experts lost sleep worrying that the
world was on the brink of a pandemic.
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H7N9 would turn out to be a minor threat compared to SARS-CoV-2, the
coronavirus that causes Covid-19, but the path it took will sound familiar
to anyone who has tracked the news over the last year. Initial cases in
China were followed by censorship and secrecy, which gave way to lingering
suspicion of both the government and Chinese scientists.
I remember that trajectory vividly because I was the lead China
correspondent for the journal Science during the H7N9 outbreak. Many times
over the past year, amid seesawing and often misleading media coverage of
the search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2, I have thought back on one
particular story I wrote in 2013.
I profiled a flu researcher who was helping authorities contain the spread
of H7N9. Even as she became the point person for the outbreak, she was at
the center of a scientific controversy for an experiment she had done on
another avian flu virus. That work involved tweaking pathogens in order to
study how they might become more contagious, a type of study that is often
lumped under the shorthand gain of function. Proponents of such
experiments argued that a better understanding of how viruses are
transmitted from one species to the next could help public health experts
ward off natural outbreaks. Critics worried that instead of aiding in global
health, her research could spark a pandemic.
Republicans believed a few vocal politicians who claimed, wrongly, that the
pandemic was definitely caused by a lab leak, and Democrats believed a few
vocal scientists who assured them, also wrongly, that it was definitely
impossible.
That was before gain-of-function work got stirred into the toxic stew that
is American politics, before it was mixed up with feelings about former
President Donald Trump and ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, racism and
anti-racism, and faith in science. Before Republicans believed a few vocal
politicians who claimed, wrongly, that the pandemic was definitely caused by
a lab leak, and Democrats believed a few vocal scientists who assured them,
also wrongly, that such a thing was definitely impossible.
To be sure, gain-of-function research was political even back in 2013, but
only within the scientific community. (The broad label gain of function
can apply to less risky research, but critics are concerned mainly with
research that involves making pathogens more transmissible in a way that
might pose a risk to humans.) Understanding that debate is key to grasping
how and why the mainstream media has charted such an abrupt shift, from
branding speculation about a lab leak a conspiracy theory to
enthusiastically, and prematurely, embracing it.
WHEN THE FIRST rumors about a new virus trickled out on Chinese social media
back in 2013, I was at home with a newborn. I came back from maternity leave
early to cover the new strain and soon flew to Harbin, a city in
northeastern China, to interview the countrys leading avian flu expert,
Chen Hualan. Because my baby was so little, I brought her and my partner
along.
As the head of Harbin Veterinary Research Institutes National Avian
Influenza Reference Laboratory, Chen oversaw animal testing efforts for
H7N9. Like many viruses before it, including Ebola, MERS, and the first
SARS, H7N9 jumped naturally from animals to people. So-called natural
spillovers often happen in densely populated areas where people live close
to animals. (That frequency is one reason many scientists suspect a natural
origin with SARS-CoV-2.) With H7N9, the likely culprit was poultry markets.
I wanted to talk with Chen about the early days of the outbreak, when her
lab had scrambled to sequence and analyze H7N9 strains isolated from
chickens and pigeons.
But I also wanted to ask about her other research. Shortly before my trip,
she and her colleagues had published a paper in Science detailing a massive
gain-of-function experiment with guinea pigs. It had involved swapping gene
segments from H5N1 with those from the H1N1 swine virus, then infecting
guinea pigs with the hybrid viruses. Her team found that they could get the
virus to leap from one animal to another by switching out a single gene. The
guinea pigs stood in for humans.
Even as China was in the midst of an outbreak with a clearly natural origin,
critics worried that risky research on pathogens could give rise to a worse
one. But that was eight years ago, before the discourse on such research had
geopolitical implications.
Arriving in Harbin, we checked into a neoclassical-style hotel overlooking
Stalin Park. My partner and baby stayed there while I taxied over to the
avian flu lab, which at the time was housed in a sprawling complex built
before the 1949 Chinese Communist Revolution.
A northerly outpost that lags behind Chinas more developed cities, Harbin
is not a logical place for a lab where scientists work on highly dangerous
pathogens, but in China, as elsewhere in the world, decisions about where to
locate such labs are not always driven by biosafety concerns. In this case,
Harbin had become a research hub through a mixture of chance and mission
creep. Northeast China is a traditional agricultural region with a lot of
livestock. Decades earlier, farmers needs had turned Harbin into a center
of veterinary research. In time, veterinary science gave way to a lab
focused on animals that was classified as biosafety level P3, or BSL-3. In
2018, the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute moved to a new campus with a
BSL-4 laboratory, the highest biosafety level. (The other BSL-4 lab in China
is at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the institute at the center of the
SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis.)
P1010964-1Chen Hualan at the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory
in Harbin, China, on June 15, 2013. Photo: Mara Hvistendahl
Chen was soft-spoken and likable. She showed me around the parts of the
building that didnt require a gown and other protective equipment and asked
about my baby. She told me that when she had started her research in the
1990s, virologists in China had trouble even obtaining strains to work on.
After solving that problem, they faced other challenges. When they got a
virus, they just put it in the freezer, she said of scientists in China in
the early aughts. People didnt know how to do research with viruses. They
may not be happy to hear me say it, but its true.
Chen left for the United States to do postdoctoral work at the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, under renowned flu scientist
Kanta Subbarao. Three years later, she was offered a position back in China
heading up the lab in Harbin. Chen sensed that research conditions were
changing and the country would become an exciting place for flu research.
Over the decades that followed, her hunch was borne out. China became a site
of cutting-edge experiments and large grant budgets. Researchers worked
closely with scientists elsewhere in the world and published their findings
in top journals. For infectious disease surveillance, which requires a
global network tracking emerging outbreaks, that collaboration was critical.
But as the international profile of Chinese science rose, it was beset by
the controversies that plagued science elsewhere in the world.
As the international profile of Chinese science rose, it was beset by the
controversies that plagued science elsewhere in the world.
Chens paper on H5N1 and guinea pigs was published in May 2013, when H7N9
was still spreading through southern China. More than a dozen researchers
had worked on the study, which involved 250 guinea pigs, 1,000 mice, and
27,000 infected chicken eggs. Their goal was to determine what changes would
enable the H5N1 virus to spread more effectively. After swapping out the
single gene, they found that an infected animal could pass the virus to a
healthy one in an adjoining cage through respiratory droplets.
A firestorm ensued. In comments that were splashed across the pages of the
Daily Mail, former U.K. Royal Society President Lord Robert May called the
study appallingly irresponsible.
Criticism came from within China, too. When the paper was published,
scientists in China were pretty shocked, Liu Wenjun, deputy director of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology &
Immunology, told me at the time. This artificial virus could cause a big
problem in China. People are really concerned about biosecurity.
Chen said that all of her research had been above-board and that following
the outcry, Chinas Ministry of Agriculture had sent two people to the lab
to make sure that its viruses were properly stored. Her team had also
developed impressive vaccines against avian illnesses. She felt that the
criticism was off-base, she said, and added that May, a theoretical
ecologist, didnt understand her work.
Virologists who did similar research had a completely different take on
Chens work. I spoke with five of them. One quibbled with the design of the
experiment, but the others used words like exemplary and highly
respected. Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, told
me that he had dreamed of doing exactly the same experiment as Chen but
couldnt because of various constraints. I do not have a single grant for
which I could afford to work with 13 people for two years to yield a paper,
no matter how excellent that paper is, he wrote in an email. Yoshihiro
Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison also spoke highly of Chen and
told me that her lab was state of the art.
But Fouchier and Kawaoka were not entirely neutral on the topic. They had
come under fire for similar experiments. Studies they had done involving a
potentially airborne version of H5N1 had sparked a global outcry in 2011,
when news of the experiments leaked before they published their results. In
2014, studies including Chens, Fouchiers, and Kawaokas would prompt
critics to form the Cambridge Working Group, which called for halting
research on pathogens that could cause a pandemic pending a thorough review.
The Cambridge groups work spurred the U.S. National Institutes of Health to
impose a moratorium on certain types of gain-of-function research that same
year. Three years later, the NIH lifted the ban and replaced it with a more
lenient framework. Back then, there was a sense that virologists could not
police themselves, that their work needed to be regulated. But for portions
of the political left in the wake of the pandemic, that notion has become
heretical.
UNTIL RECENTLY, the suggestion that a virus could leak from a lab had no
correlation with ones political beliefs. The first SARS virus leaked from
labs several times including at least twice from the National Institute of
Virology in Beijing. A 1977 outbreak of H1N1 in the Soviet Union and China
is believed to have been caused by Soviet scientists experimenting with a
live virus in a lab. A number of leading American laboratories have had
significant safety breaches as well, including at the CDC.
Before the pandemic, the scientific press regularly covered such risks. In a
2017 article on the opening of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Nature
raised concerns about biosafety. The notion of a lab leak was also floated
by Science early in the Covid-19 pandemic in an article that also discussed
a natural spillover.
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Then influential infectious disease expert and zoologist Peter Daszak
entered the fray. Daszaks organization EcoHealth Alliance has distributed
U.S. government grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and he has
worked closely with researchers there. He organized a group of scientists to
write a statement, published in The Lancet in February 2020, decrying the
spread of rumors and misinformation around the origins of the pandemic.
We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that
COVID-19 does not have a natural origin, the group wrote. In apparently
dismissing the plausible prospect of a lab accident along with outlandish
propositions about bioweapons, the letter helped silence debate on the
matter.
The discourse grew even more fraught later that spring, when Trump blamed
the pandemic on the Wuhan lab without citing evidence.
Some journalists apparently saw it as their duty to uncritically report what
researchers said, as if scientists were a neutral foil to Trump.
In the coverage that followed, some journalists apparently saw it as their
duty to uncritically report what researchers said, as if scientists were a
neutral foil to Trump. Vox extensively quoted Daszak in an explainer
debunking the lab-leak hypothesis.
Daszak ended up on both the WHO and Lancet origins committees, which are
investigating the causes of the coronavirus pandemic. He chairs The Lancets
committee. Last fall Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council
who sits on the WHOs advisory committee on human genome editing, wrote to
Lancet editor Richard Horton to flag Daszaks conflict of interest. He added
that he respected Daszaks work, writing, I am not at all suggesting that
he did anything wrong, just that one of the possible origin stories includes
him.
Metzl says that the Lancet editor didnt write back. I was a bit naïve then
and couldnt imagine they would knowingly make such a bad decision, he told
me. As Metzl noted, a conflict of interest doesnt in any way suggest guilt.
But Daszaks ties fueled online suspicion and frustrated biosafety experts
who were hoping for real answers.
Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the
origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, arrive at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology in Wuhan, in China's central Hubei province on February 3, 2021.
(Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty
Images)Members of the World Health Organization team investigating the
origins of Covid-19 arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan,
China, on Feb. 3, 2021. Photo: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Following the WHO committees trip to China, Metzl helped lead a group of
scientists who wrote an open letter calling for a more extensive
investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2. They followed up with another
one after the committee concluded, following a circumscribed tour of Wuhan
and an analysis of selective data, that a lab leak was extremely unlikely.
A number of the signatories of both letters were French scientists. Jacques
van Helden, a professor of bioinformatics at Aix-Marseille Université, told
me that the discussion around the pandemics origins has been less polarized
in France, noting that Trump had tainted the issue in the United States. I
suspect that this might even have led a part of the American scientific
community to avoid addressing the question, he said, because expressing
the possibility that the virus would result from a lab leak would have been
perceived as support for Trump.
Another open letter calling for a transparent and objective investigation
followed, this time from a group of leading experts. Among those who signed
were evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center, Stanford University microbiologist David Relman, and
Harvard University epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Lipsitch, who
years earlier had founded the Cambridge group that pushed for restrictions
on gain-of-function research.
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said that the
lab-leak hypothesis requires further investigation. Vox added a note to
its explainer noting that scientific consensus has shifted.
BUT THE MOMENT of correction were now in is dangerous in its own way. There
is still no direct evidence to support a lab leak, and many scientists with
no stake in the outcome still say that a natural origin is more likely.
Scientific consensus has not, in fact, shifted toward a lab origin. But some
pundits with the risky combination of a lack of expertise and an agenda have
argued that a lab leak caused the pandemic, case closed. Bari Weiss, the
former New York Times columnist who spends most of her time railing against
cancel culture, recently published an interview with Mike Pompeo, who told
her that the evidence points in the single direction of this having been a
laboratory leak, though he added, I cant lay down the proof for you.
The most honest experts say simply that they dont know. Were not taking
an advocacy position on one scenario being more likely than another, Bloom,
the evolutionary biologist, said in a Q&A published by his institute. As a
scientist its important to clearly convey that there is scientific
uncertainty especially because this is a hot-button topic.
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coronavirus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx or use one of these secure methods to contact a
reporter.
There is vitriol on all sides. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the
Broad Institute who advocates for a fuller investigation of the lab-leak
hypothesis, has been accused of being a race traitor. (Chan is Canadian and
of Singaporean descent.) Virologist Angela Rasmussen, a vocal proponent of a
natural origin, has been viciously harassed on Twitter. The Daily Mail
recently sent paparazzi to Daszaks home, then ran photos of him calling the
police. Scientists in China have been hounded too. The Harbin Veterinary
Research Institute and the Wuhan Institute of Virology have removed some
staff information from their websites. A few weeks ago, I received hate mail
from someone who was upset that I had mentioned the lab-leak hypothesis in
an article about origins last spring, when it was all but untouchable for
progressive media, but didnt give Trump proper credit.
We should let science and evidence prevail while recognizing what my
reporting suggested back in 2013: that science, like any other discipline,
is shaped by competing interests. Lipsitch, the Harvard epidemiologist,
underlined that point in a Brookings Institution event with Chan earlier
this month.
Ive come to the view that we shouldnt trust scientists more or less than
we trust other people, Lipsitch said at the event. We should trust
science. And when scientists speak science, we should trust them, because we
should recognize that they are speaking in a way that is based on evidence.
When scientists express political views or policy preferences or even claims
about how the world is that are not citing evidence, we should not give
those scientists undue deference.
In those moments, he continued, scientists are not being scientific. They
are people. We are people.