Jackson Jambalaya

 Independent-minded scientists continue to study whether the Covid-19 virus originated in a Wuhan lab.  The MIT Technology Review published an article covering the debate over the origin of the virus:

 Petrovksy is a professor at Flinders University, near Adelaide, and he is also founder and chairman of a company called Vaxine that develops immunizations for infectious diseases, among other projects....

After Chinese scientists posted a draft genome of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the disease culprit in Wuhan, Petrovksy—who by this time had put skiing on the back burner to work from his Colorado home office—directed his colleagues down under to run computer modeling studies of the viral sequence, a first step toward designing a vaccine.

This generated a startling result: the spike proteins studding SARS-CoV-2 bound more tightly to their human cell receptor, a protein called ACE2, than target receptors on any other species evaluated. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 was surprisingly well adapted to its human prey, which is unusual for a newly emerging pathogen. “Holy shit, that’s really weird,’” Petrovsky recalls thinking....

As Petrovsky considered whether SARS-CoV-2 might have emerged in lab cultures with human cells, or cells engineered to express the human ACE2 protein, a letter penned by 27 scientists appeared suddenly on February 19 in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet. The authors insisted that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin, and they condemned any alternate hypotheses as conspiracy theories that create only “fear, rumors, and prejudice.” Article

Petrovksy says he found the letter infuriating....

 A lab-escaped virus, meanwhile, would have been introduced to the world by a researcher or technician who became infected with it. These sorts of lab leaks have happened before, and were implicated in several cases of community transmission during SARS outbreaks in the early 2000s. In 2017, the Wuhan Institute of Virology became the first lab in mainland China to receive a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) designation, the highest security status for a research space. But the institute also has a history of questionable safety practices. The lab’s scientists reported a lack of appropriately trained technicians and investigators at the facility, prompting US diplomatic scientists who visited in 2017 and 2018 to alert the State Department. At the same time, many scientists have pointed out, particularly in the aftermath of a recent, and for some, contentious, examination of the lab-leak hypothesis in New York magazine, that coronaviruses have typically been handled at BSL-2 or BSL-3—lower security levels....

 Petrovsky leans towards another potential scenario, namely that SARS-CoV-2 might be evolved from coronaviruses that snuck into lab cultures. Related viruses in the same culture, he explains, such as one optimized for human ACE2 binding and another not, can swap genetic material to create new strains. “We’ve had this sort of thing happen in our own lab,” he says. “One day, you’re culturing flu, and then one day you sequence it, and you go, ‘Holy shit, where did this other virus come from in our culture?’ Viruses are evolving the whole time, and it’s easy for a virus to get into your culture without you knowing it.”...

Then there is Dr. Peter Dascack, the Defender of the Faith and would-be Minister of Covid-19 Science.  He is the leading advocate of gain-of-function research in the scientific community.  He had just a little bit more than a conflict of interest: 

 Perhaps no one played a greater role in galvanizing scientific opinions in support of natural origins than Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York–based environmental health nonprofit. A longtime Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator, Daszak—who, in what many sources described as a conflict of interest, was a member of the WHO-led team that visited China earlier this year—received grant funding from the National Institutes of Health to collaborate on research at the Chinese lab. (The Trump administration abruptly cut off this funding in April 2020, but it was later reinstated with new restrictions.) Daszak is purported to have written a first draft of the Lancet statement condemning hypotheses other than natural origins as conspiracy theories. 

He led the charge in shutting down all discussion about a lab leak hypothesis last year.  His attacks on such lab-leak proponents were so vicious that it is reasonable to wonder if he was following the old adage that the best defense was a good offense.  In other words, did he have something to hide?

 When asked why he thought Daszak and others pushed so strongly against the possibility of a lab leak, Relman says they may have wanted to deflect perceptions of their work as endangering humankind. With so-called “gain of function” experiments, for instance, scientists genetically manipulate viruses to probe their evolution—sometimes in ways that boost virulence or transmissibility. This sort of research can reveal targets for drugs and vaccines for viral diseases, including covid-19, and was used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in studies showing that certain bat coronaviruses were just a few mutations away from being able to bind to human ACE2. A 2015 paper in Nature Medicine notes that the “potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens.”... 

Relman proposes that among those trying to suppress the lab-release hypothesis, there might have been “far too much protection of one’s self and one’s peers before allowing a really important question to receive a hearing.” And scientists collaborating with researchers in China “might worry about their working relationship if they say anything other than ‘This threat comes from nature.’”

Other scientists say opposition to the lab-leak hypothesis was grounded more in a general disbelief that SARS-CoV-2 could have been deliberately engineered. “

It is perfectly reasonable to ask if the virus came from a lab or was created through gain of function research.  Unfortunately, the polarization of society extends to science today.  Asking such questions immediately draws racism attacks and accusations of support for you know who.  The origin of the virus will probably never be known as it is simply too much to expect the Chinese to be honest about such a matter.  They didn't throw those scientists and journalists in prison for nothing, after all. However, that does not mean all possibilities should be explored.