Are there any early clues of Covid-19’s origins?

The story of how the Covid-19 virus emerged in Wuhan, China, has produced a nasty propaganda battle between the United States and China.
The two sides have traded some of the sharpest charges made since the Soviet Union in 1985 falsely accused the CIA of manufacturing AIDS.
US intelligence officials don’t believe the pandemic was caused by deliberate wrongdoing. The outbreak that has now swept the world instead began with a simpler story, albeit one with tragic consequences: The prime suspect is “natural” transmission from bats to humans, perhaps through unsanitary markets. But scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.
“Good science, bad safety,” is how Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., put this theory in a February 16 tweet. He ranked such a breach (or natural transmission) as more likely than two extreme possibilities: an accidental leak of
an “engineered bioweapon” and a “deliberate release.” Cotton’s earlier loose talk about bioweapons set off a furor, back when he first raised it in late January and called the outbreak “worse than Chernobyl.”
President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo added to the bile last month by describing Covid -19 as the “China virus” and the “Wuhan virus,” respectively.
China dished wild, irresponsible allegations of its own. On March 12, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao charged in a tweet: “It might be the US army who brought the
epidemic to Wuhan.” He retweeted an article that claimed, without evidence, that American troops might have spread the virus when they attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
China retreated on March 22, when Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai told “Axios on HBO” that such rumors were “crazy” on both sides. Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping pledged in a March 27 phone call to “focus on cooperative behavior,” a senior administration official told me.
To be clear: US intelligence officials believe there’s no evidence whatsoever that the novel coronavirus was created in a laboratory as a potential bioweapon. Solid scientific research demonstrates that the virus wasn’t engineered by humans and that it originated in bats.
But how did the Wuhan outbreak occur? Solving this medical mystery is important to prevent future pandemics. What’s increasingly clear is that the initial “origin story” — that the virus was spread by people who ate contaminated animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan — is shaky.
Scientists have identified the culprit as a bat coronavirus, through genetic sequencing; bats weren’t sold at the seafood market, although that market or others could have sold animals that had contact with bats.
There’s a competing theory — of an accidental lab release of bat coronavirus — that scientists have been puzzling about for weeks. Less than 300 yards from the seafood market is the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control. Researchers from that facility and the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology have posted articles about collecting bat coronaviruses from around China, for study to prevent future illness. Did one of those samples leak, or was hazardous waste deposited in a place where it could spread?
Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that “the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,” with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through
another animal.
But Ebright cautioned that it “also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.” He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, “which provides only minimal protection,” compared to the top BSL-4.
Ebright described a December 2019 video from the Wuhan CDC that shows staffers “collecting bat coronaviruses with inadequate [personal protective equipment] and unsafe operational practices.”
And then there’s the Chinese study that was curiously withdrawn.
In February, a site called ResearchGate published a brief article by Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao from Guangzhou’s South China University of Technology. “In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. Safety level may need to be reinforced in high risk biohazardous laboratories,” the article concluded. Botao Xiao told the Wall Street Journal in February that he had withdrawn the paper because it “was not supported by direct proofs.”
Accidents happen, human or laboratory. Solving the mystery of how Covid-19 began isn’t a blame game, but a chance for China and the United States to cooperate in a crisis, and prevent a future one.
—The Washington Post

David Ignatius is an American
journalist and novelist. He is an
associate editor and columnist for
The Washington Post. He has
written eleven novels, including Body of Lies, which director Ridley Scott adapted into a film