Over the past few decades, scientists have developed ingenious methods of evolutionary acceleration and recombination, and they’ve learned how to trick viruses, coronaviruses in particular, those spiky hairballs of protein we now know so well, into moving quickly from one species of animal to another or from one type of cell culture to another. And we need to stop hunting for new exotic diseases in the wild, shipping them back to laboratories, and hot-wiring their genomes to prove how dangerous to human life they might become. We need to hear from the people who for years have contended that certain types of virus experimentation might lead to a disastrous pandemic like this one. Nevertheless, I think it’s worth offering some historical context for our yearlong medical nightmare. We still know very little about the origins of this disease.
It has been a full year, 80 million people have been infected, and, surprisingly, no public investigation has taken place. Certainty craves detail, and detail requires an investigation. There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap - no written confession, no incriminating notebook, no official accident report. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly - in a rural setting, perhaps - and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe.