Wuhan Update: Firsthand Report From Australian Virologist Who Worked There

 

Virologist Danielle Anderson worked in Wuhan Lab

Timely & very important story from Bloomberg with this headline:

“The Last — and Only — Foreign Scientist in the Wuhan Lab Speaks Out”

Australian Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture working at the Wuhan Institute.

Background:

The Trump administration’s focus in 2020 on the idea the virus escaped from the Wuhan facility suggested that something went seriously wrong at the institute, the only one to specialize in virology, viral pathology, and virus technology of the some 20 biological and biomedical research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Virologists and infectious disease experts initially dismissed that theory, noting that viruses jump from animals to humans with regularity. There was no clear evidence from within the SARS-CoV-2 (AKA: CoVID-19) genome that it had been artificially manipulated, or that the lab harbored progenitor strains (Def: A person or thing from which a person, animal, or plant is descended or originates; an ancestor or parent) of the pandemic virus.

China’s actions raised questions; for example:

(1) The Chinese government refused to allow international scientists into Wuhan in early 2020 when the outbreak was mushrooming, including experts from the CDC, who were already in the region.

(2) Beijing then stonewalled allowing WHO experts into Wuhan for more than a year, but then provided only limited access.

(3) The WHO final report, written with and vetted by Chinese researchers, played down the possibility of a lab leak. Instead, it said the virus probably spread via a bat through another animal, and gave some credence to a favored Chinese theory that it could have been transferred via frozen food.

(4) Even the Director of WHO said the lab theory hadn’t been studied extensively enough. WHO experts again were provided limited access at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when they visited in February this year.

China’s obfuscation led outside researchers to reconsider their stance. Last month, 18 scientists writing in the journal Science called for an investigation into CoVID-19’s origins that would give balanced consideration to the possibility of a lab accident.

Biden’s consideration of the idea — previously dismissed by many as a Trumpist conspiracy theory — that has given it newfound legitimacy.

Biden then called on America’s intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts in rooting out the genesis of CoVID-19 after an earlier report, disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, claimed three researchers from the lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019.

Anderson said no one she knew at the Wuhan institute was ill toward the end of 2019, adding: “Moreover, there is a procedure for reporting symptoms that correspond with the pathogens handled in high-risk containment labs. If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick — and I wasn’t. I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated, and had never had it.”

Anderson also said many of her collaborators came to Singapore at the end of December for a gathering on the Nipah virus, and she said there was no word of any illness sweeping the laboratory and added: “There was no chatter. Scientists are gossipy and excited. There was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point that would make you think something is going on here.”

The names of the scientists reported to have been hospitalized in November 2019 haven’t been disclosed. The Chinese government and Shi Zhengli, the lab’s now-famous bat-virus researcher, have repeatedly denied that anyone from the facility contracted CoVID-19. Anderson’s work at the facility, and her funding, ended after the pandemic emerged and she focused on the novel coronavirus. 

It’s not that it’s impossible the virus spilled from there. Anderson, better than most people, understands how a pathogen can escape from a laboratory saying that SARS, an earlier coronavirus that emerged in Asia in 2002 and killed more than 700 people, subsequently made its way out of secure facilities a handful of times. 

Anderson also said: “If presented with evidence that such an accident spawned CoVID-19, I could foresee how things could maybe happen. I’m not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off.” Yet, she says she still believes it most likely came from a natural source.

It took researchers almost a decade to pin down where in nature the SARS pathogen emerged, and she said she is not surprised they haven’t found the “smoking gun” bat responsible for the latest outbreak yet. 

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is large enough that Anderson said she didn’t know what everyone was working on at the end of 2019.

She is aware of published research from the lab that involved testing viral components for their propensity to infect human cells. Anderson is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released — which is one of the more disturbing theories to have emerged about the pandemic’s origins.

She does concede that it would be theoretically possible for a scientist in the lab to be working on a gain of function technique to unknowingly infect themselves and to then unintentionally infect others in the community. But there’s no evidence that occurred and Anderson rated its likelihood as exceedingly slim. Also, getting authorization to create a virus in this way typically requires many layers of approval, and there are scientific best practices that put strict limits on this kind of work.

For example, a moratorium was placed on research that could be done on the 1918 Spanish Flu virus after scientists isolated it decades later.

Anderson said: “That even if such a gain of function effort got clearance, it’s hard to achieve. The technique is called reverse genetics, and it’s exceedingly difficult to actually make it work when you want it to work.”

Anderson’s lab in Singapore was one of the first to isolate SARS-CoV-2 from a CoVID-19 patient outside China and then to grow the virus.

That too was complicated and challenging, even for a team used to working with coronaviruses that knew its biological characteristics, including which protein receptor it targets. These key facets wouldn’t be known by anyone trying to craft a new virus. Even then, the material that researchers study — the virus’s basic building blocks and genetic fingerprint — aren’t initially infectious, so they would need to culture significant amounts to infect people.

Despite all that, Anderson does think an investigation is needed to nail down the virus’s origin once and for all. She’s dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued.

One of a dozen experts on an international taskforce in November to study the origins of the virus, Anderson hasn’t sought public attention, especially since being targeted by U.S. extremists in early 2020 after she exposed false information about the pandemic posted online. The vitriol that ensued prompted her to file a police report. The threats of violence many coronavirus scientists have experienced over the past 18 months have made them hesitant to speak out because of the risk that their words will be misconstrued. Elements that trigger infectious outbreaks, the mixing of humans and animals, and especially wildlife  were present in Wuhan, creating an environment conducive for the spillover of a new zoonotic disease. The emergence of Covid-19 would follow that pattern. 

What’s shocking to Anderson is the way it unfurled into a global contagion she says and concluded: “The pandemic is something no one could have imagined on this scale. Researchers must study CoVID's calamitous path to determine what went wrong and how to stop the spread of future pathogens with pandemic potential. The virus was in the right place at the right time and everything lined up to cause this disaster.”

My 2 cents: A stunning and critically important report from Ms. Anderson. She gives no reason to doubt what she says, except those linked to and in tune with Trump would never and in fact do not accept anything except that “China did it – they released on the world from their lab in Wuhan.” 

Every expert with firsthand account like from Ms. Anderson is compelling and should be convincing – but in these times of wild-conspiracies flying so freely all over the airwaves, well, it’s not apt to go away anytime soon.

It sees to me that medical science and logical reasoning and solutions and such no longer matter in most anything these days.

What seems to matter only are personal opinions and individual views on the issue at hand and that can spread just as quickly as this deadly virus did and do long-term serious harm to future just about anything events – and that’s a sad dangerous hill to climb.

My conclusion: Yes, the virus’s origin was in fact from the Wuhan lab. 

But, but was it released on purpose for some nefarious reason? 

Or, did it escape by accident, even unknowingly carried out by those who may have been infected, and at the time didn’t even know it?

Those are still the lingering questions. We may never know for sure for a very long time to come.

Thanks for stopping by.