Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
After more than a year of preparations, the Covid-19 Inquiry is now properly underway. But as was made clear on the first day of public hearings earlier this month, the most important Covid question will not be examined: how the pandemic started.
This is what the counsel to the inquiry, Hugo Keith KC, had to say on the matter:
“We will likely never know how [the virus] was first transmitted to the human race. Perhaps it came from farmed wild animals that were sold in Wuhan… infecting market customers and workers. Some have suggested it came from a leak of coronavirus specimens being transplanted to or stored at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
He went on to consider when the first human infection occurred (most likely between mid-October 2019 and mid-December 2019), but then he dismissed the issue: “For this inquiry’s purposes this knowledge does not matter.”
Doesn’t it? In Keith’s own words this a pandemic that “changed lives on a scale unseen in modern history.” So, that being the case, its origin is surely of great importance.
Imagine if the Grenfell Tower Inquiry had focused solely on the response to the disaster, while drawing a veil over its causes. There’d have been outrage. And yet in regard to the Covid pandemic, a catastrophe on an immensely greater scale, the British state has had almost nothing to say as to what might have caused it.
Wanting to put the pandemic behind us is no excuse. In regard to lockdown violations we found the energy to push a prime minister out of office (and now out of Parliament). But as to who might bear ultimate responsibility for the deaths of 200,000 Britons and 20 million worldwide, we shrug our shoulders.
Perhaps the question is unanswerable. As Keith said, “we will likely never know”.
However, this is only superficially true. The main reason why it’s so difficult to establish the facts is obstruction by the Chinese government.
That’s no reason to give up. We must continue asking questions, especially about the coincidence around which this whole mystery revolves: Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and Wuhan is the sole point origin for the pandemic.
Wuhan is also home to the Huanan Seafood Market, which is known to have sold live wild mammals – thus providing an alternative pathway for animal-to-human infection. Yet such markets are to be found all over China. Of the 160 Chinese cities with more than a million people, a deadly new respiratory disease just happened to break out in the city with a lab that studies deadly new respiratory diseases.
Of course, history is full of coincidences. Consider the case of the “Umbrella Man“, the strange figure who was seen holding up an open umbrella at the precise time and place that John F Kennedy was assassinated. If it had been a rainy day, the streets would have been full of people holding umbrellas.
But in Dallas on the 22 November 1963, the weather was fine. So what was the Umbrella Man up to? One theory is that he was sending a pre-arranged signal to Kennedy’s killer(s) .
Years later, someone called Louie Steven Witt came forward claiming to be the Umbrella Man. The open umbrella was just a symbol of protest, he said. And, as far as we know, that’s all the explanation required. Protests occur all the time, many of them pretty weird. The only thing that made this one special is that it just happened to coincide with the shooting of JFK.
The same might be said of the Wuhan coincidence. Except that the WIV isn’t just any research facility. For a start, it is one of just 59 maximum containment facilities in the world (only four of which are in China). It has more Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) lab space than anywhere else on the planet.
What’s more, the WIV includes the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, the director of which, Shi Zhengli, is a leading authority on novel SARS-like coronaviruses.
It’s also worth looking at Wuhan’s location, which is in the middle of China. This puts it hundreds of miles from the southern border region, which is where novel coronaviruses are most likely to naturally evolve.
Therefore, we not only need an explanation for why the virus popped up in Wuhan, but also for why it didn’t appear anywhere else (until, that is, it spread from Wuhan by human-to-human contact). The explanation that best fits the facts is that a live sample of the virus was collected by scientists and taken back to Wuhan for further research.
(Admittedly, the wildlife trade could have transported infected animals over the same distance – but with much less likelihood of leaving no trace of the virus along the way.)
All told, the co-location of the Wuhan outbreak and the Wuhan Institute of Virology cannot a simple coincidence. It could still be the product of multiple coincidences – but the more of those that pile up (and there are many more than I’ve got space to mention), the more reasonable our darkest suspicions.
Let’s consider the Umbrella Man again. If he’d been a Soviet spy, a mafioso, or an FBI officer, then it would have been much harder to dismiss his presence as mere happenstance. But in his case the coincidence was a simple one, while the Wuhan coincidences are irreducibly complex.
This is why the lab-leak theory is now taken seriously, with some parts of the US government regarding it at the most likely explanation.
What we still lack, however, is a smoking gun – a piece of hard evidence that would take us from balance-of-probability arguments to incontrovertible proof. If we had full access to the WIV’s research logs then we might just find what we’re looking for. But good luck with that.
One might ask why western governments, including our own, aren’t pressing the Chinese harder. Do they truly believe that we will never know the truth? Or is it more a case of not wanting to know?
After all, what would we do with the certain knowledge that China was responsible for the worst scientific accident in history? Even if the Chinese government accepted the evidence, would it offer compensation? The Soviet Union never compensated its neighbours for the literal fall-out from the Chernobyl disaster, which Beijing could take as a precedent.
From a diplomatic point of view, there’s a lot to lose and nothing much to gain from a showdown.
Then there’s the American angle. Through intermediaries, the US government funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology – including experiments on potentially dangerous coronaviruses.
Even if these didn’t directly contribute to a theorised Covid-19 lab leak, the senior figures who cooperated so closely with the WIV would come under intense pressure were a lab-leak to be proven, especially if the virus had been enhanced in some way.
Needless to say, the British Government wouldn’t be keen to embarrass its closest ally on this issue, so don’t expect much initiative from that quarter. As for the Opposition, it suits them to keep the Covid focus on the British response to the pandemic, and any ministerial blunders it can exploit ahead of the election..
The result is not so much a conspiracy of silence as a general lack of incentive to poke the hornets’ nest.
And yet we all have an interest in the truth. Knowing how this all started won’t bring anyone back, but it could prove vital to preventing the next pandemic. As bad as Covid was (and still is), there’s no guarantee that the next time won’t be worse.
Whatever we did to bring this plague upon our houses, we need to know what it is and stop doing it.