Foreign Affairs

The harms of promoting the lab leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 origins without evidence

Authors: James Alwine, Felicia Goodrum, Bruce Banfield, David Bloom, William J. Britt, Andrew J. Broadbent, Samuel K. Campos , Arturo Casadevall, Gary C. Chan, Anna R. Cliffe, Terence Dermody, Paul Duprex, Lynn W. Enquist, Klaus Frueh, Adam P. Geballe , Marta Gaglia, Stephen Goldstein, Alexander L. Greninger, Gigi Kwick Gronvall, Jae U. Jung, Jeremy P. Kamil, Seema Lakdawala, Shan-Lu Liu, Micah Luftig, John P. Moore, Anne Moscona, Benjamin W. Neuman, Janko Ž. Nikolich, Christine O'Connor, Andrew Pekosz, Sallie Permar, Julie Pfeiffer, John Purdy, Angela Rasmussen, Bert Semler, Gregory A. Smith, David A. Stein, Koenraad Van Doorslaer, Sandra K. Weller, Sean P. J. Whelan, Andrew Yurochko

https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.01240-24

JVI
Volume 98, Number 9
17 September 2024

ABSTRACT
Science is humanity’s best insurance against threats from nature, but it is a fragile enterprise that must be nourished and protected. The preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2. Yet, the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence. We discuss how the resulting anti-science movement puts the research community, scientific research, and pandemic preparedness at risk.

COMMENTARY

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There are two broad competing hypotheses for the origins of SARS-CoV-2: (i) the lab leak hypothesis, the most discussed version of which posits that the virus was modified, or even created, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and, by some mechanism, escaped the laboratory; and (ii) the zoonosis hypothesis, wherein the virus emerged into the human population through a naturally occurring animal-to-human transmission. Viruses often spill over into humans, but these are typically dead-end events that rarely lead to sustained human-to-human transmission and rarely spark a pandemic. Wildlife coronaviruses have long been poised for emergence into humans (1). It is estimated that there are ~66,280 people infected with SARS-CoVs each year due to human-to-bat contact, most of which result in asymptomatic infections with limited or no human-to-human transmission (2). However, in the past 25 years, there have been at least 12 instances of zoonotic transfer of viruses into humans, including three coronaviruses, which resulted in epidemics or pandemics (3).

Dr. Fauci testified that, after examining the scientific data, most scientists have concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged in humans as a zoonosis. The evidence supports the scenario that two distinct ancestral lineages of SARS-CoV-2 jumped from animals into humans, and that the Huanan Seafood Market in Hubei Provence, China, where wild animals were routinely present and slaughtered, was the epicenter of the pandemic (4–9). Importantly, Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he remains open to evidence supporting a lab leak if it were to become available. Indeed, all scientists must be open to this possibility. Factoring in new data that are sound and validated, even if a prevailing hypothesis were contradicted, is an essential aspect of scientific training. A critical guiding principle of science is that knowledge is continually revised and updated based on quality new evidence.

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There is currently no verified scientific evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. Moreover, the assertions in the Chan article have been challenged by a growing body of scientific data supporting the zoonosis hypothesis (4, 5, 8, 10–12). Dr. Chan’s five key points are well refuted by the data, as discussed in publicly accessible platforms by Dr. Paul Offit, in the science-based podcast This Week in Virology (TWiV), and in the scientific literature (13, 14). Further, based on the scientific evidence and investigations described in a declassified report, the majority of the US Intelligence community concur with the zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 being more likely. These reports do not identify high confidence evidence for a research-related incident, find no evidence that WIV possessed SARS-CoV-2 or a closely related virus before the end of December 2019, and conclude that it is unlikely that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered (6, 14, 15).

Many questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 remain unanswered and may never be fully resolved. We cannot currently disprove the lab leak hypothesis. Nevertheless, the lines of evidence needed to validate one hypothesis over another are not epistemically comparable (16). Validating the zoonotic origin is a scientific question that relies on history, epidemiology, and genomic analysis, that when taken together, support a natural spillover as the probable origin. This evidence is driven by scientific data that must be gathered and interpreted by experts. Much of the evidence that could have been obtained from animals at the Huanan Market was forever lost due to the clearance and cleansing of the market before any animals could be tested. Nonetheless, the available scientific evidence supports a zoonotic origin. Validating the lab leak hypothesis requires intelligence evidence that the WIV possessed or carried out work on a SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus prior to the pandemic. Neither the scientific community nor multiple western intelligence agencies have found such evidence.

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https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.01240-24