Alina Chan, Matt Ridley’s VIRAL is the story of greatest open-source pursuit seeking COVID origin
One of the first things that Alina Chan noticed about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, was that it appeared to be pre-adapted to infect humans, which was a notable difference from the virus behind the 2003 SARS outbreak.
Alina, a Scientific Advisor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, uploaded a study on a pre-print repository in May 2020 — co-authored with her director Ben Deverman and bioinformatics specialist Shing Zhan — that noted the importance of tracing the route taken by the virus to adapt for human infection.
They raised the following questions in the study –
Did SARS-CoV-2 transmit across species into humans and circulate undetected for months prior to late 2019 while accumulating adaptive mutations?
Or was SARS-CoV-2 already well adapted for humans while in bats or an intermediate species?
More importantly, does this pool of human-adapted progenitor viruses still exist in animal populations?
“Even the possibility that a non-genetically-engineered precursor could have adapted to humans while being studied in a laboratory should be considered, regardless of how likely or unlikely,” the three scientists added to the questions raised above.
The study and the point about a laboratory being a possible place for the adaptation in discussion was picked up by news organisations that brought Alina to mainstream attention. One of those who realised the significance of Alina et al’s study was veteran science writer Matt Ridley.
Matt had written an article for The Wall Street Journal barely two weeks back on the genetics of the virus causing COVID-19. He followed it with another article which he pitched to the editor with the following words — “A team of scientists finds that unlike SARS, this virus showed very little rapid adaptation/evolution in the early weeks of the epidemic, implying it was already settled into its final form. This implies that the source was almost certainly not via pangolins and probably not the wet market. It was more likely brought to the market by a person not an animal. So we don’t know where it came from and that implies the source is still out there. Bad news.”
After the editor commissioned the article, Matt had conversations with Alina and that was the beginning of a scientific association that led to Matt eventually propose the idea of writing a book on the subject. Since Alina had already become a leading voice advocating a thorough investigation of the origin of the pandemic, including the possibility of the virus emerging from a laboratory, I believe it was natural for her to team up with Matt.
Unlike right-wing commentators in the West who call for a laboratory-focussed investigation because of ideological or political reasons, Alina is a scientist who brings forward scientific arguments. Her Twitter account is now a beacon of international open-source investigation into the coronavirus pandemic where she shares and explains discoveries about Chinese research in the past as well as ongoing developments.
While several people mistake Alina for being a proponent of a lab-leak theory, hers is a pursuit for a proper investigation into the origin that takes the idea of a lab-origin as seriously as that of a natural spillover. Her research on the internet, the dissemination of the information in Twitter threads, and explaining it to the world through “Tweetorials” took the discourse on COVID from journals and online databases to people all over the world.
VIRAL is the story of how internet sleuths showed Chinese deceit to world
Alina and Matt’s book, aptly titled VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, reads like a Sherlock Holmes novel in a sense that it documents the layer-by-layer investigation of the origin of the pandemic by scientists like Alina and internet sleuths like The Seeker from the group DRASTIC. While it reads like a whodunit, it’s not a work of fiction. It’s a real account of how amateur sleuths outdid investigators from the World Health Organization and the American intelligence community in discovering the extent of opacity and cover-ups by the Chinese.
A Twitter user named The Seeker unearthed a thesis by a Chinese medicine student detailing that six miners had fallen sick from a SARS-like virus at a mine in 2012 in Mojiang county in Yunnan province while cleaning bat faeces in a cave. The Seeker, a former Indian science teacher from India’s Odisha, shared the thesis on Twitter that led Alina to analyse it.
Another thesis from 2016 was discovered that further detailed the episode. But why is this significant?
This is significant because the discovery of SARS-like anti-bodies in the miners triggered waves of virologists to mines in Yunnan where they sampled bats for years, collected chest-fulls of virus samples, and worked on them for years.
One of these viruses would be later found to be 96.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2 — the closest ancestor! But the Chinese never informed the world about such significant information. Instead, they gave two names to the virus in their documents — BtCoV/4991 and BatCoV/RaTG13 — that led to many people miss the connection.
But VIRAL co-author Matt noticed something was amiss. The book notes: “A day was wasted fruitlessly searching for the original report of the discovery of RaTG13. Where in Yunnan was it previously detected and how? The internet and scientific literature had no mention of that name RaTG13.”
While Chinese researchers told the world they found a 79% similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and the 2003 SARS virus, they said nothing about RaTG-13 (or Bt-CoV/4991) that had 96.2% similarity! One wonders why. It’s like highlighting a person’s facial similarity with their cousin but ignoring it with his brother!
Had it not been for The Seeker —who discovered the thesis, Dr Rossana Segreto — who first seemed to indicate the two names were for the same virus, and of course Alina and Matt who shared and explained the significance of these findings, the world would have never known that the Chinese had lied through their teeth. They were hunting viruses, working on them, publishing research on them, and one of those viruses — RaTG13 — was actually 96.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2 that had pushed the world into worst crisis in living memory.
Alina and Matt write as investigators, not prosecutors or judges
Despite such deceit by the Chinese, Alina and Matt continue their story as investigators rather than as prosecutors or judges. They bring forth evidence, put it in context, explain it, and drive home its significance.
They write: “Our preference throughout was for a balanced debate that led to the truth, not for a victory for one side or the other. The world now faces the strong possibility that scientific research, intended to avert a pandemic, instead started one; that all that collecting of viruses and sampling of bats in remote caves — and then hiding the specimens in secret databases — had put humanity in harm’s way.”
It was not just the Chinese that hindered conversations on the origin of the pandemic. Scientists in the Western world, prestigious journals like Science and Nature, and internet platforms like Facebook and Reddit all censored conversations that even discussed the possibility of a lab-accident as the reason of the viral outbreak.
Alina and Matt wrote: “Only on Twitter did a lively debate continue. The Drastic group not only explored every angle, but their numbers grew, and a handful of senior scientists joined their conversations — especially in France, where the ‘Paris group’ crystallised thanks to the dedicated efforts of Dr Virginie Courtier Orgogozo of the Institut Jacques Monod in Paris.”
Notably, it was only on Twitter that Alina and internet sleuths forming DRASTIC could come together to take on the might of the world. They were censored everywhere else, including much of the mainstream press that dubbed any sentence with “pandemic” and “laboratory” as conspiracy theory for much of 2020.
Book structure — Investigative, explanatory approach makes VIRAL an essential pandemic primer
A great plus-point of the book is that it breaks down science and an unprecedented public investigation into origin of a pandemic into language that a non-scientist reader may understand.
Almost like a Jack the Ripper investigation, the book chronicles everything that’s there about the pandemic and gives reader an idea of truth by the end. Just like the identity of Jack the Ripper is not known but there are strong hints, the source of the virus is not known by the end of the book but the reader gets a very good idea where to look.
Authors have taken a balanced evidence-driven approach. In two chapters towards the end, they build cases for both natural- and lab-origin of the pandemic. These are among the best chapters of the book and it’s perhaps the best way to understand what could have happened as the two scenarios are juxtaposed.
The authors highlight two aspects that make the case for a natural origin. One, a precedent — 2003 SARS outbreak. Two, the discovery of SARS-like anti-bodies in people in villages around bat-caves in Yunnan province (where Mojiang county is located) in 2012. These people — in the vicinity of of SARS-CoV-2’s closest ancestor RaTG13 — could have taken a very close ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 virus with them out of Yunnan where it could have mutated over the years to finally surface in Wuhan in 2019 to trigger the pandemic.
The case for a laboratory accident causing the outbreak begins from where the case for natural origin leaves. Alina and Matt highlight that no animal source — like civets in 2003 SARS outbreak — has been found from whom SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans. Moreover, the question with which this piece this piece as well as Alina’s quest into understanding the origin of the pandemic began remains unanswered — how did the virus became so adapt at infecting humans from the beginning? How did the virus skip the stepwise adaptive mutations seen in the 2003 outbreak?
Alina and Matt conclude the lab-accident case thus —
“There is a stark absence of evidence for a zoonotic spillover at the start of this pandemic. In contrast, the proximity of the outbreak to the WIV — the largest collector of SARS-related coronaviruses in the world, where scientists were creating chimeric viruses and experimenting with close relatives of SARS-CoV-2 — makes a compelling case for a laboratory-based origin of the virus.”
Nothing less than public trust in science is at stake
Both the authors of VIRAL are persons of science and they are well aware of the implications of inquiries into laboratories they are advocating. Nothing less than the foundation of faith in science is at stake here.
Alina and Matt write —
“If it is proven one day that SARS-CoV-2 somehow escaped from a laboratory, science’s reputation could suffer a huge blow. Research that was previously thought to be life-saving and pandemic-preventing could suddenly stand exposed as a source of pandemics.
“The almost two decades of research that followed the SARS epidemic failed to keep its promises of preventing the next pandemic and yielding broad-spectrum SARS vaccines or therapeutics in time for the Covid-19 outbreak…At best it left humanity with the agonising dilemma of Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, who prophesied doom but went unheeded. At worst it was a Faustian bargain.”
VIRAL is the story of the ‘10th person’
When nine out of ten persons say the same thing, it is the duty of the tenth person to take an opposite point of view and work towards contradicting the other nine. Alina and Matt are the tenth persons who have taken on the might of the rest of the nine — the Chinese state, influential scientists and journals — and have brought laboratory-origin thesis from the realm of conspiracy theories to the mainstream, not with the intention of proving it but with an intention of getting it examined seriously.
Alina and Matt highlighted in their book the lopsided nature of the discussion on the origin of the pandemic. They noted: “Much of the debate about the origin of the virus assumes that the laboratory-leak theory must prove itself. Natural spillover, by contrast, is the default assumption, which does not have to prove anything.”
They further highlighted why the burden of proof — or lack of it — should be likewise for both lab- and natural-origin theories. They write —
“Given the powerful circumstantial evidence that Wuhan was not a particularly likely place for a natural epidemic of a SARS-like virus to begin, but an obvious one for a laboratory-leaked one to start, it is surely reasonable to expect both hypotheses to be put to a similarly rigorous test.”
No definitive answer but all roads leads in one direction
The final word has not been said on the origin of the coronavirus pandemic and is unlikely to be said soon. VIRAL’s authors acknowledge the same.
Alina and Matt write: “The reader may want to know what the authors of this book think happened. Of course, we do not know for sure. There is still too much uncertainty and too much that is concealed. In this book we have tried to lay out the evidence and follow it wherever it leads, but it has not led us to a definitive conclusion.”
While there is no definitive conclusion in the book, there is a definitive direction in which the book and all the evidence leads us — the direction of places and people that hot-wired viruses for years and then hid all their traces from the world, only to be discovered by internet sleuths like members of DRASTIC.
Months after the publication of the book, Alina is willing to lean in one direction.
“My stance since early 2020: Both natural and lab origin of COVID [are] plausible and should be investigated.
However, in late 2021, when more info emerged about research in Wuhan, my judgment is that the evidence now points more strongly towards a lab origin.”
Earlier in this article, I said while the book does not provide a clear answer for the question of the origin of the pandemic, it does give you a very good sense where you’d find that answer. My sense is that all roads lead to labs in Wuhan.
The burden of proof has now shifted. As Alina has highlighted, the circumstantial case for a lab-origin is now much better for a lab-origin.
Madhur Sharma is a Meerut-based journalist. He tweets @madhur_mrt.
This is the third blogpost on COVID-origin on The Dispatch. Please see previous posts —
2. FBI probed EcoHealth Alliance, then told Biden it believes in COVID lab-origin
