Behind the Lab Leak Theory
Professor Nikolai Petrovsky is the Director of endocrinology at the Flinders Medical Centre is one of those medico who believes we still don’t know the source of COVID 19 and therefore should not be ruling out the possibility that it started with a lab leak in Wuhan.
What do you believe are the main reasons for WHO Director-General changed his attitude towards China and the possibility of a lab leak?
It’s much more complex than that, it’s probably better to go right back to square one to how this outbreak started and to where the first suggestion that it might not be a natural virus and maybe a lab leak came from and then the US political environment with Trump saying that he had intelligence reports that this may be a lab leak and then the WHO getting involved but remembering that it wasn’t a WHO actual investigation , firstly the WHO have said the people on the panel were not WHO employees, I think bar one. It really was just facilitating that it wasn’t, even though its badged as WHO, the WHO are saying it’s not WHO.
So, going back to the first published report that this is not a natural virus came from Chinese scientists in China which a lot of people have missed in this whole debate so it was actually a paper very early on in January of a group of Chinese scientists in China, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology obviously but who pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and said that we believe that this was a lab released virus. Now the Chinese Government subsequently went in and deleted that paper and sort of but that’s where it all started from within China, not from outside, not from the US.
Let’s be clear, the WHO Director General began by backing a report which concluded that any suggestion of a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and then changed his position to say it remained a possibility, why?
There was a lot of politics, you have to remember that just prior to the pandemic the US government under Trump had announced that it was pulling out of the WHO completely and that it was removing all US Government funding from WHO and the Chinese came in and filled that void and said to WHO look don’t worry we’ll more than make up for it and this was unfortunate because it happened just prior to the pandemic so at the time the pandemic started WHO were very China-centric and very antagonistic towards the US so that didn’t help when you are looking at early perspectives on whose message should they convey, the US message or the Chinese message, the answer is they were very beholden to the Chinese message because is this vacuum created by the US, the Chinese had a lot more influence within the WHO than they should have had and that’s not talked about but that was the reality that WHO were very much beholden to China at the very point when this pandemic started needless to say whatever messages China relayed very early were for the most part repeated verbatim by WHO.
At present, what are the mainstream views and differences of WHO on the source of the epidemic?
WHO is a representative organisation of a whole collective of countries and so needless to say WHO has a lot of internal politics just like the United Nations which it sits under, you know similarly you can’t say the United Nations is a singular institution with a common goal, it’s all the member countries all playing politics within the umbrella and so WHO is no different and so there were people within WHO, who clearly had very divergent views on what was their role in the pandemic, what should be their messaging and also obviously views on this so called investigation which wasn’t it was actually a study tour put together as more like a goodwill mission where WHO were basically under their umbrella because it wasn’t actually WHO it was under their umbrella they agreed that a group of scientists from around the world would be selected by the Chinese Government not by WHO so China had veto power on everyone who was part of that delegation and they used it, so the US put forward I think 3 people and they were all actually blocked by the Chinese and none of them were invited and instead Peter Daszak who arguably had the biggest conflict of all was selected by China to ostensibly represent the US so of course this wasn’t based on country representation but obviously with these panels they do try to have you know, a group from Europe, a group from the US, Australia, Japan but it’s not obligatory if that makes sense. So, from its very origins and how it was put together it was never an independent WHO led investigation, it was actually what they call now a study group who went to China not to investigate and again, the WHO have clarified this, they went to hear what studies have been done by the Chinese scientists who were presenting to them and effectively critiquing the evidence presented to them by the Chinese. This is nothing to do with an investigation and its commonly done where say Australia wanted our science reviewed, we would pick what science we presented to an international panel and then they would critique that science we presented and say have you thought about this and you know there’s something missing here you know but you couldn’t ever call that an investigation of Australian science it’s what China chose to present in terms of the different research they’d done into the epidemiology to the animal studies and again all that’s in the back of the report is the actual data and studies the Chinese presented.
I’m still confused as to why the Director General had this change of attitude?
Well it think it came down to the, you know, the political environment changing dramatically through that period, I think WHO found itself in a difficult position where it had got too close to China and they were on the spot because they had repeated what the Chinese said, which now turn out to be totally, frankly lies about in January there was no person to person transmission, now we know that’s a complete lie because Chinese doctors have said we told the authorities in December this was clearly transmitting human to human but the problem is not only that the Chinese Government lied but then the WHO repeated that as if it was a fact. So you know there were a number of issues like that were essentially the WHO just repeated what China said verbatim without investigating it so from that position onwards they were implicated that they got too close to China and I think what the Director General realised was that they had been set up with this whole so called investigation where the Chinese Government even had a right to veto the report and had deleted a lot of stuff from the report because I think some of the individual members had dissenting views but that was all removed. So, I think WHO realised and the director realised he’d been totally stitched up by China and so suddenly that’s where he just did a backflip because he obviously thought up to then that the Chinese will do the right thing by us and obviously the realisation dawned on him that he’d been completely set up. So the Chinese were now claiming that the WHO had done an investigation which was not actually the mandate and were using WHO’s name to clear themselves and he’s said wait a minute we never lent you the WHO brand to say that you did everything right and this couldn’t possibly have been a lab leak because at that point I think he realised he was going to get attacked by the rest of the world and lynched because other governments were by then asking serious questions, you know the European Parliament was asking serious questions, then the US Government and increasingly I think WHO realised hey you know, we’re just as dependent on the Western World as much as we might be on China, China is one country and we’ve probably upset 80 per cent of our constituency.
So what are the different views of the WHO group as to the source of virus?
If you take any group of scientists you’ll find different views on the origins and again WHO is a massive collective of scientists and public health clinicians who would all have their own personal views.
There are various theories so far made public like (1. Wuhan Laboratory Leak 2. Wuhan Nature Leak 3. Fort Detrick Leak 4. Other possibilities) Who are the key personnel representatives who believe these things?
It’s normal in science to have divergent views, that’s healthy, until you actually have firm evidence, which we don’t, there’s no categorical evidence to prove one possibility or the other and that’s the truth to this day so all possibilities are on the table and then each scientist is allowed to take a position on that as long as they are honest that they are just taking a position but it’s not a fact. So if you look at any area of science, cancer or anything, scientists will always have varying ideas about what causes things, of course they can’t all be right but until someone proves what absolutely causes it they’re all entitled to their perspective and hopefully they’ll all keep chasing after the right answer and one person will eventually be proved right and the others will say, ok.
Can you tell me which WHO representatives hold what views?
No, I’m not a member of any WHO panel, you would have to ask someone much closer to the WHO itself.
And of course they are not making their views public?
Well the WHO shouldn’t really have an official position and I think that’s where the Director General backed away when he realised they were getting sucked into a position because they only time the WHO should have a position is when its backed by science and its absolute, like its proved beyond doubt but even then, they are answerable to their member countries so if a member country had a different opinion it’s hard for the WHO to have an opinion that’s contrary to that if its sucked into a position and that’s why the Director General rightly, backed way away because the only time WHO should have a position is if it’s backed by science and it’s absolute, like it’s proven beyond doubt but even then they are answerable to their member countries and so if a member country had a different opinion you know, it’s hard for WHO to have an opinion that’s contrary to that of its constituencies so it would have to manage that carefully and I think WHO and the DG realised they had gone way beyond their remit and had been tricked into going way beyond their remit and were being used. I think in private the DG might even admit that the WHO were tricked.
So the WHO and the DG now have doubts about the investigation in China?
Yes, and I think everyone has expressed concern and now that we are allowed to have this discussion because, you know, last year if you even expressed doubt or raised questions about the origins, you were called a conspiracy theorist and a Trump supporter and no-one wanted to be called either of those things and often it could not have been further from the truth. Every scientist I’ve spoken to who was questioning the origins, not a single one of them was a Trump supporter. Now we now in retrospect that this whole thing was driven by China, they distorted the debate and turned it into a monologue and then most people though that monologue was reflecting of Western scientists and it never was but they were all tricked into thinking I don’t want to speak out because I’ll be shot down because every other scientist in the world thinks the opposite. So, everyone just got silenced and I think scientists are now realising actually this is a legitimate question and it’s probably 50/50 if you look at the real numbers and now there are lots of people coming out and saying actually I’ve always had my suspicions.
So what do you understand the WHO position to be now?
The WHO position is the right one, we don’t know where the virus came from and we can’t exclude a lab leak.
What tracing measures to you think the WHO will seek to take next?
I don’t know that WHO is the right body going forward to realise some of these questions which are more forensic questions, it’s more a job for the CIA or Interpol because if we are talking of a lab leak, particularly if it’s been covered up then that’s a forensic investigation it’s not a scientific investigation.
Do you seriously think the Chinese Government are likely to cooperate with that?
Of course, not and they’ve already said that. Even when the WHO asked questions which were not forensic questions but just innocent questions like can we talk to some of these people? Can we see the lab books? Or can we see any of your virus databases? China was very vehement in saying, no way in hell and obviously people drew all sorts of conclusions from that.
So realistically how do you think the WHO investigation will go forward?
Well I think there is a lot that can be done outside of China, don’t dismiss the power of modern intelligence and external forensic investigation and a lot of interesting data is being found on the web and in the cloud that the Chinese haven’t been able to delete, they’ve certainly attempted to delete a lot of that information but signatures get left just in the nature of the web and the way it echoes itself and it’s very hard to delete stuff once it’s out there on the web and there’s been some recent reconstructions but people like Jessie Bloom which were certainly interesting. The deep sequencing that was related to what Jessie Bloom was pulling up was deleted deep sequencing data and the thing about deep sequencing data which most people didn’t realise is it could be used for forensic purposes because there are sequences within the material that tell you what the atmosphere was like in the machine and also in the laboratory. So, they’ve pulled up all the viruses that the Wuhan Institute of Virology were working on just from what sequences were available in other sequence data.
Who is Jessie Bloom?
So, he is a scientist in the US who was featured in the Wall Street Journal, he managed to reconstruct some data off the cloud, of sequence data that the Chinese Government had ordered destroyed which related to an early paper on this.
So was there sustained pressure on the WHO from the United States to step up the investigation in China?
I think the two US administrations have been disappointed, as have many people, in that initial report because it didn’t go to the heart of the matter and arguably the mandate was never there to go to the heart of the matter but it still tried to exonerate a lab leak based on now evidence and that’s probably the most damning thing of the whole report was the dismissal of the lab leak or the attempt to belittle it when it was an equally credible possibility which you couldn’t exclude and that’s the way it should have been written. But it wasn’t it was deliberately written in a very polarised way. So rightly, I think most Western Governments when they looked at it were extremely disappointed that it appeared the report was an exoneration of China which was the intention of how the Chinese got the report written.
So again, what sort of pressure did the WHO get from the US to step up this investigation?
Well its carrot and stick, the US have declared that they have been engaging with WHO and they are not going to pull their funding out so I think it’s been a combination. I don’t think they are punishing the WHO but I think they realise the WHO is an important global institution and the US desperately needs to remain engaged and support WHO.
But clearly the US would have told them unequivocally that they thought the report was not good enough?
I guess that’s a reasonable assessment of where it stands. I think that report of whatever you want to call it, I mean WHO have now distanced themselves from it, I think everyone has distanced themselves from it and they are now saying well how do we do things right going forward rather than reflecting on WHO’s role in that report and how they could have done better, I don’t think that’s what’s happening, I think most people are interested in how do we do this better going forward.
Do Australia and the US agree in relation to the WHO and traceability?
Well definitely our Prime Minister was one of the people to speak out early and call for an investigation in relation to the pandemic although he wasn’t specific into what he thought that investigation should or shouldn’t encompass because there were a lot of issues in that. It could be investigating where we told at the right time that there was person to person transmission, it could have been about all of the signals that came out of the pandemic in the early handling of the pandemic. I think he was also alluding to a proper investigation of the origins but I’m not sure he’s ever actually specifically referred to the origins as what he was calling for an investigation into.
Are there differences between the Australian position and the US position?
There are nuances as always between the Australian and US positions but those differences are only really understood by people inside those administrations.
Is it fair to suggest that Biden has called for a 3-month intelligence report and that Australia will simply take its lead from the US?
Well maybe, but from what I’ve been able to find out the majority view inside our government is that this is probably a natural origin so to this point Australia hasn’t come out as a country as much as the US and say we need a direct investigation because we are suspicious of the origins, I think Australia is more neutral on that point than the US.
How do other Western countries view the issue of tracing the source of the epidemic to China?
Europe has certainly expressed considerable concern about this. Russia has obviously come out in support of China and said it’s all a Western conspiracy and at this point I’m not aware if places like Japan, Africa and South America have a view either way.
Is the political factor behind the appeal far greater than the medical factor?
Look when you have events like this politicians are always going to see it from a political perspective, including the science and that was no different during the cold war even the space race was seen through political eyes rather than scientific eyes. Science hopefully can stay separate to the politics but that’s not to say politicians won’t fit science to their own agendas.
What will the US and Australian governments do next to pressure WHO to step up tracing investigation into China?
Well I don’t think WHO can be pressured to do anything and is this really the WHO’s role, they’re a health organisation not a detective investigation organisation so I think if those countries collectively think that there is a need for more thorough investigation, particularly an investigation that has a more forensic quality to it, then they would need to decide what an appropriate organisational structure should be for such an investigation which may or may not involve the WHO so again I don’t think we should make the WHO more political, we should try and make it less political and if this really is about getting China to cooperate and allow a forensic inquiry, I don’t think that should be forced through the WHO, that would be completely inappropriate. WHO have a role to play in public health and we shouldn’t be putting them up against one of their member countries, I think that’s an untenable position to put them in.
Biden asked the relevant departments to submit a report within 90 days on whether there was a leak from the Wuhan lab. What substantive evidence does the US government have?
Intelligence services I presume have data other than scientific data, they may have a little bit of scientific data we don’t but it’s unlikely because science generally is in the public domain and then intelligence service gets it like we do from reading papers and from talking to scientists so on that side I don’t expect any amazing scientific insights from the intelligence services. They may be able to synthesise it in a way that the president is able to better understand the science but I don’t think their job is to do novel science. I think where they do have the edge in something like this is they have people on the ground and access to informants that may be able to give them information about what was and wasn’t happening that may contradict official positions, I guess that’s what secret services do, is collect information on the ground that may be different to the public narrative and so if they had information like that from whistle-blowers or from informants, even people working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who knows what they have access to. That, of course would give enormous insights into the matter that science by itself can’t give us. I mean I can’t tell you other than indirect methods like looking at deep sequence data that we can make inferences about what viruses they were working on and what was happening whereas an intelligence service may be able to get you direct information from an insider.
What evidence or measures are available to refute the doubts raised by the US about the source of the epidemic?
On the natural transmission side, you find the virus in nature. Viruses have to transmit through hosts, they don’t exist by themselves so they can only exist in animals or humans so if this virus is out there it has to be able to be found. It can’t really hide so to speak. So, if they find the immediate ancestor or even a really close relative then that would be the end of the debate and it would be accepted. But any evidence of that has not been found despite the most intense manhunt in history actually mounted by the Chinese Government and reported in the WHO report. I don’t think ever in history have so many animals and human populations been screened to actually try and find the source of the virus and its turned up zero. Now when you put that in context the looking was done at the very time the virus started in humans and the fact that that has turned up nothing is an overwhelming case for the opposition if you want to put it that way. Never has such a manhunt been commissioned you know, with SARS it was found in a matter of months, with MERS it was found in a matter of months with a hundredth of the effort that went into this. So, if the virus is found in nature in precursor form, even in an intermediate host, that would be conclusive and end the debate. On the other side, say we never find it in animals because it was in fact created in a lab, it gets harder because to get that absolute evidence you need access to the records that would prove this virus was lab created and that means access to the lab records. Or you need someone to come up, perhaps on their deathbed, and say I apologise but I actually did this 10 years or 20 years ago by accident and I’m now apologising to the world in my memoirs, which we’ve had happen with other terrible events were people felt compelled ultimately to spill the beans.
Last week a high-level group of renowned virologists, led by Professor Edward Holmes and Nobel Lauriat, Professor Peter Doherty, published a paper here in Australia and concluded that the “lab-leak” theory was “extremely unlikely”, is that not evidence enough for you, the view of an international group of distinguished scientists that’s this lab leak theory is essentially nonsense.
I’m involved in writing a number of rebuttals to that and I don’t take that paper at all seriously. It talks about not speculating and the whole paper is a speculation, there’s actually no hard scientific evidence advance and a lot of the arguments are quite flawed to be frank and obviously I will be detailing that in our rebuttals which are now being written by a number of different groups of scientists who dispute the way that paper is constructed. No insult to the authors but it’s no different to a previous paper they wrote last year which made the same speculation.
So who are these other experts along with you who are planning to criticize China in media and hold that the origin of the epidemic is unclear?
Well, look we still don’t know the origins of the virus and in that paper there is zero evidence that would support directly a natural transmission so, it’s all speculation because there is no direct evidence and we would argue that’s true both ways, so, in other words the lab leak theory and natural transmission are both equal probabilities from a scientific perspective.
What other groups are you involved with and what response has your campaign drawn from China?
Look I know the Chinese have made disparaging remarks about some of the informal scientific groups I’ve been party with and who have put some open letters to WHO, four open letters so far, stating the scientific position in this and the Chinese press has been quite derogatory.
Who is we?
There is the Paris group which wrote the 4 open letters to the WHO, I signed two or three of them, I didn’t sign the most recent and they were just stating a scientific position to the WHO and supporting the WHO in their attempts to investigate this. The Paris group is an informal grouping, it’s a collective maybe you would call it and it got the name Paris group because it was started by a group of French academics. There are a number of people in the US but again, the don’t even have a name, they are again just collectives of scientists who have struggled with this view last year which is just a singular view that was driven by Eddie Homes and Peter Dazsark, the two biggest drivers of it, that this could only be a natural origin whereas these were scientists who felt that we couldn’t be conclusive on that and that we couldn’t exclude a lab leak based on science. We are people trying to protect what we consider to be the integrity of science which is that the question is open until it is closed. I guess we are also trying to keep politics out of science. I don’t know if you could really call them groups, they are people who are connected through social media with just informal exchanges of information, we are just individuals who share information. It’s like a scientific collaborative where you have scientific collaboration, it’s not formal, there’s nothing written. Again, there’s no agenda here and the other side there’s a very formal agenda and you can obviously you can be suspicious as to who drives that agenda but on our side from my experience it’s just a whole lot of well-meaning scientists who are quite disturbed by what they see has happened and the politicisation of the science. You have to realise that China as a growing world power has been playing in the rest of the world and through devious means and that’s on the public record. Our government, the CIA and ASIO have been very concerned about China’s infiltration of Western science for its own agenda.
What do you think China makes of your activities and positions?
I think there would be an enormous number of Chinese scientists who would be supportive of us even if they don’t say that out loud. When we talk about China we’ve got to be careful because the first whistle-blower that even implicated this as a lab leak came out of China, you know Chinese doctors and scientists are good people and they don’t want to see this happen again. Now obviously the Chinese administration and government have to protect the integrity of China and deal with it but at the end of the day if it was a lab leak then they know it so although they might run smoke-screens I still think they are intelligent people and they will want to solve some of these issues and sort them out and remedy them and sometimes us putting the science forward can help them even while they are potentially belittling the science. They may benefit from an investigation if they themselves are concerned because if this was a lab leak it’s not to say everyone knows even in China that it’s a lab leak.
How does Australia view the intention of internal traceability? Will Australia continue to demand responsibility and compensation from the Chinese side? What concrete steps will be taken next
It’s almost incompensatable, so I just don’t see that happening but possibly, in some way or other, that’s possible, I mean reparations are being paid for world wars, I’m not sure it’s an effective way to correct such things and also, even if it was a lab leak, if it was an accidental lab leak, it’s not that you could prosecute for causing the lab leak, it would only be for covering it up. You know, once it leaked it leaked but again it shouldn’t be about finger pointing and I think compensation implies a deliberate act. It’s again politics and I don’t speak for the politics. As scientists all we can do is search for the truth and then someone else can deal with the consequences.
What are the views, opinions and judgments of Australian experts and medical authorities on the origin of the epidemic? It’s clear our scientific community is split on this issue?
Science is all about taking potentially opposite views and trying to prove them and finding sometimes it’s in the middle and neither of you are right so that’s just normal science.
How would you break down this opinion in the scientific community here though?
In Australia, a lot of people feel it’s an open question and you have the group we spoke of earlier (paper above) who say no it’s a closed question. I think if you talk with virologists, there is probably a lot of support for that group because the implications if it is a lab leak is that there will be a lot more regulation on virology research so I think the society of virology spoke out in favour of that paper but I think one you go outside of the virology community I think you’ll find most people have an open mind on it.
Ok at a personal level, what is your best guess as to how this started?
All I can say is I can’t see a natural cause, I see a lot of unusual features that could be explained by a lab cause but am I prepared to say it’s a lab cause? Absolutely not, because I don’t have evidence for that at a sufficient level of proof so its not helpful for me to speculate on what I might believe because I think it should be based on what are the facts
Will you ever get an answer that satisfies you?
I think in science if we pursue things long enough we get to the truth of most things so yes I’m an optimist, it may not be immediately but I think we will get closer but we have to have an open mind and keep it open and that’s where we would disagree with the other group who just want to shut it down. We need to keep it open until we have the answers.
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