'Lab leaks' vs. 'wet markets' fails the search for COVID's origins

How is it possible that the prominent congressional subcommittee earnestly investigating COVID origins, and the scientists who testified last week and previously, are so at odds about where COVID-19 came from?

And why are our intelligence agencies so divided as well? The Department of Energy and the FBI think there is some likelihood it came from a lab, whereas others say no. 

The answer is twofold. First, there is clearly a political overlay in China that is obscuring pure investigation. Second and more importantly, we are talking about a powerful foreign country that has a history of obscuring public health truths from the world at large, including the first SARS outbreak two decades ago. Why should this time be any different?

Despite the fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci (whom I have interviewed multiple times and have great respect for) and others have spent many years working on establishing and building an international consortium of scientists, we must consider that scientists in these countries (including China) must report to their governments. It could well be significant that the Chinese military was involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology soon after the pandemic began. 

Under these circumstances, it was never a correct position for any American scientist to assume against, suppress, or marginalize the lab-origins hypothesis. Yet many did. At the same time, there is no reason to assume automatically that scientists are lying, doing things for money or out of fear of losing National Institutes of Health grants. 

I recently interviewed Kristian Anderson, a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research. He strikes me as a scientist of integrity, whom I believe when he says that the more he studied the virus the more he thought it came from nature. 

I believe him, but that doesn’t mean he is automatically correct.

During the congressional hearing earlier this month, Anderson said several times that this was clearly not a bioweapon, but he also couldn’t rule out that it leaked from a lab or wasn’t in some way genetically edited. 

Bioweaponry is highly improbable in this case because it would likely spawn a much more deadly weapon than COVID-19, but several scientists, including former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director and virologist Dr. Robert Redfeld, have expressed concern to me that the lab could have been working on a defensive strategy where the virus was made to help produce a vaccine vector to protect both military and civilian populations.

Anderson also acknowledged that genetic editing could well be conducted without leaving a trace, or what I call a “seam.”

The fact that Ralph Baric, a virologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina has worked together with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronavirus research and generating new viruses known as chimeras is also not proof that the virus came from a lab. But the fact that COVID-19 started in Wuhan and that the lab there was working on modifying bat coronaviruses (COVID-19 clearly has a bat origin), plus the reports that lab workers were getting sick in the late summer and early fall of 2019 and that the labs had been cited for multiple safety violations, are all eyebrow-raising, to say the least. 

But it is also significant that there were at least two cohorts of humans sick with COVID-19 coming from the wet market. Though there were no bat coronaviruses there, it is clear that this market was a node of significant spread. If the virus didn’t come from here, it certainly spent time here. 

Michael Worobey, a respected evolutionary biologist and the head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, pointed out a potential connection to me on Doctor Radio on SiriusXM. He said that raccoon dogs that were found in the wet markets (and that showed the genetic signature of the virus) can live in close proximity to bats and could be the intermediate creature between bats and humans that scientists have been looking for since early 2020. But most bats infected with these viruses live a long way from Wuhan.

The truth of COVID-19's origins is important in preparing for the next pandemic. If it came from nature, we must be more wary than ever of zoonotic spillover. If it came from a lab, we must be even more vigilant in policing gain-of-function experiments as best we can. 

But most of all, the lesson to be learned from the ferocious debate over COVID-19 origins is that we must work together to find answers, not suppress ideas or alternate explanations. That’s actually supposed to be the main difference between our society and societies like China.

Marc Siegel, MD, is a professor of medicine and medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Health. He is a Fox News medical correspondent and author of the new book, “COVID; the Politics of Fear and the Power of Science.”