It’s a compelling argument, especially given the lack of transparency around WIV’s experiments. Even if it’s circumstantial, the case is growing stronger
Matt is pussyfooting around the real issues. I suspect it is largely a well-intentioned attempt to appear moderate and gain the support of centrists, but this is unhelpful. It is important that this pandemic be properly attributed. Right now, US biodefense is being dismantled due to the false belief that "risky research" caused the outbreak.
There is a fifth unstated possibility - that SARS-CoV-2 was designed to be a biological weapon most likely by the PLA. Whether accidentally or deliberately released is a less important question than the intent behind its design. Destroying American science doesn't fix this.
I was seeing leaked video of panic in Wuhan in October 2019! The local govt was freaking out. It was crystal clear to anyone with half a brain this leaked from the lab there.
A very interesting article. Thank you. There were reports during the pandemic of Covid antibodies (or antigens) being found in sera taken from people in Italy and, I think, Spain much earlier than the outbreak in late 2019. Were these findings confirmed, and how would they fit the theory of the lab leak?
IIRC the Barcelona finding was likely a false positive, and the Italian ones seemed legit, but people investigating do not think so for some reason.
If you look at the epidemic curve, the original infection could have taken place at any time since the end of the last flu season, as it would have simmered at a low level until the next flu season started (as did the second wave of Covid).
Note too that science is of little help in answering the question of whether the SARS CoV-2 virus was created in a lab and then leaked. Just like science is of little help in finding out who committed a murder. Some evidence can be obtained in those cases using scientific tools, but the scientific method cannot be applied to a particular past event. That is well-explained here: https://www.heartlandforensic.com/writing/forensic-science-and-the-scientific-method/
The best investigative agency in the world -- the FBI -- looked into this question and decided that a lab leak was likely with a medium degree of confidence. Some other investigative agencies also came to the same conclusion, though with less confidence. That's telling, a lot more so than the reports by Michael Worobey et al. and others that seemed to be grounded in science, but speciously so, and lacked any investigative analysis.
Interesting issue, we published this back in March 2021, discussing what could and what could not be done. We worked with the FBI WMD directorate at the time:
PROPOSED FORENSIC INVESTIGATION OF WUHAN LABORATORIES
A question: do you consider fingerprints on a gun as "science?" If not, then I might agree with you. But I do consider fingerprints and DNA to be science speaking about the past. And the RNA sequence of the c@v!d virus contains fingerprints of genetic alteration that are found in known lab-created viruses and not found in natural viruses (so far sequenced). So it's easy to conclude with high certainty that c@v!d is a lab creation.
It’s a historical epidemiological investigation, but due to the fact that all data were edited by politicians prior to publication, it’s indeed more akin to a crime investigation, where witness credibility and the motivation for what politicians published and did not publish are of more bearing than detailed analysis of the edited data that were signed off for publication. I don’t know a single lawyer who thinks the pandemic emerged naturally.
First, you argue that, "the well adapted, highly infectious nature of the virus ... is compatible with SARS-CoV-2 possibly having been grown in human cells, monkey cells and/or humanised mice in a laboratory" -- i.e. that SARS-CoV-2 was suspiciously well adapted.
Second, you argue that, "[The D614G mutation arising only a couple months into the pandemic] suggests that the FCS was introduced into the virus just before the pandemic" -- i.e. that SARS-CoV-2 was suspiciously poorly adapted.
Can you elaborate more on your novel Goldilocks Principle of viral evolution? What's the range of apparent adaptation that raises suspicion?
There are other early adaptive pandemic mutations e.g. Nsp6 L37F (B.4 lineage) and RdRp P323L (in B.1 lineage along with D614G) that aren't relevant to the S1/S2 sequence. And lineages without D614G lasted for a long time.
Even without the furin cleavage site, SARS-CoV-2 was well adapted to infect human cells (e.g. Vero E6 or Calu-3). The FCS insertion is essential for in vivo transmission, not in vitro infectivity, making it entirely consistent with a lab scenario.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine what sort of natural conditions led SARS-CoV-2 to acquire a 12-nucleotide furin cleavage site, bearing in mind that the same conditions didn't promote the D614G mutation (a simple A->G transition) that multiplies virus fitness in every animal that's been tested.
Even before the DEFUSE project, which explicitly says "we will introduce appropriate human specific cleavage sites", parsimony already strongly suggested a lab scenario. After the DEFUSE drafts were uncovered, it's beyond reasonable doubt.
It's hard to imagine exactly which evolutionary pathway led to that insert because the number of plausible pathways are countless. Here's a 12-nucleotide insert during the pandemic with three tandem CGG codons -- ins22204TGGCGGCGGCGG -- detected in multiple countries and clearly not an artifact.
Can you explain how it occurred naturally? Unlike the SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 insert, you can be confident about what the starting sequence was before the insert happened. It's unlikely the SARS-CoV-2 insert had the same sequence when it was first wholly or partially acquired. It should be easy to explain! What's the source? If you fail to have an answer, does that mean it was a lab leak?
The rest of what you write is just handwaving nonsense. Lineages without D614G persisted for quite a long time in humans. Other mutations (e.g. Nsp6 L37F) were more frequent. The DEFUSE drafts? They say that they will look for cleavage sites in natural viruses and near-cleavage-sites with mismatches from the motif "R-X-[R/K]-R" -- that's it. This would not find SARS2, since "A" does not match the "[R/K]" motif specified.
Yes, it can easily be explained: some insertions like the one you mention have indeeed been detected, but at infinitesimal proportions, often associated with persistent infections, and in the context of a 3-year pandemic, with hundreds of millions of cases, that yielded gazillions of sequences.
Most of those insertions are also duplicates of other short sections of the viral genome, and none that I know of popped up at the precise region of interest for spike cleavage.
To try and turn those one-off anomalies into a template for how a crucial feature (one that hasn't been found in any other SARS virus, but one that made a very hot research topic before the pandemic) evolved out of the blue, in an uncertain time and place, in unspecified animals that were never detected, comes across as desperate wishful thinking.
I guess just making stuff up works well with a lab leak audience for you?
Ignoring all the factual errors here, the logical error is not realizing that people study S1/S2 precisely because its a sequence with high diversity subject to strong selection.
I wouldn't say it was the hottest research topic in the world by any stretch and it's hardly a focus of the DEFUSE proposal. WIV is linked to one pre-pandemic study on the FCS, right? Not for a SARS-like virus? And the work in that case took place in North Carolina?
It’s easier to get a beneficial insert when a virus is replicating in billions of humans than in 1 raccoon dog.
Timely reminder that only 1 recon dog per day was sold in Wuhan, hardly a hotbed of evolutionary pressure. Of course, there were millions of raccoon dogs farmed in China, but if the virus arose on a farm, there would have been spillovers in many locations, not just one. Also remember that raccoon dogs are barely infected by sars2…
Only 12 nucleotides is such an embarrassingly small God of the gaps that Intelligent Design folks wouldn't even dare.
Ridley and Chan know this. This is why they wrote: "So finding a natural origin of the furin cleavage site will not clear up the question of whether the virus first jumped into people in the wild or in the course of research activities."
But now those 12 nucleotides are the only thing they've got left, so they pretend it's damning evidence. Even though they said it wasn't informative of origins at all in 2021.
All the discussions about the 'lab leak' origin of Covid-19 ignores the distinct possibility that the virus was intentionally released into the population.
The CCP was responsible for the deaths of up to 50-100 million people in its founding and consolidation of power. What's the difference to them of another 7 million?
In response to criticisms of the non-specific nature of PCR testing (and other problems with its rollout), many cite - as proof that a novel virus swept the world - “whole genome sequencing”, particularly that using Oxford Nanopore technology.
Is your understanding that the output of Oxford Nanopore technology is not reliant on prior assumptions about the sequence, and would have been able to determine the viral sequence in a “covid patient”, even if the “Wuhan sequence” had never been identified and / or published?
The stonewalling by journal editors against publishing anything suggestive of a lab leak is unsurprising that all journals depend heavily on revenue from Chinese universities. Such universities are subject to arbitrary direction by politicians, and China has been swift to punish anyone who dared to suggest a lab leak was possible, for example, imposing sanctions on Australia when its government raised the possibility.
Quite an effort has gone into this. Wouldn't it be easier to just provide a single quantified sample of a truly isolated virus which can be examined for authenticity?
That would end the debate on the existence of viruses forever.
After all, you can't leak something which doesn't exist.
Good compelling argument, but a much shorter proof is the simple realisation that virulent pandemics are self limiting: if they are too deadly, then they kill their victims before they have chance to infect anyone else, and if they are milder, then people just take to their beds when they feel ill, and don't infect others. Mild enough that 99,8% of people can get on with their daily lives, and, well, so what?
Therefore the world's government s would never have panicked in unison and shut down the global economy for a naturally occurring 'novel pathogen', but when they got he memo that an engineered virus, with an IFR of up top 4% had leaked from a lab, well, the rest is history.
This is the main reason I knew in 2020 that covid came from a lab, the frantic denials from all sides served only to reinforce my belief.
It’s a compelling argument, especially given the lack of transparency around WIV’s experiments. Even if it’s circumstantial, the case is growing stronger
Great to see this published finally!
Digging into the experiments involved, if you can wade through 40,000 words:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390743356_The_Pangolin_Coronavirus_Papers
Matt is pussyfooting around the real issues. I suspect it is largely a well-intentioned attempt to appear moderate and gain the support of centrists, but this is unhelpful. It is important that this pandemic be properly attributed. Right now, US biodefense is being dismantled due to the false belief that "risky research" caused the outbreak.
There is a fifth unstated possibility - that SARS-CoV-2 was designed to be a biological weapon most likely by the PLA. Whether accidentally or deliberately released is a less important question than the intent behind its design. Destroying American science doesn't fix this.
It’s not “pussyfooting” to not mention a hypothesis for which there is literally no evidence. This is science, not politics.
I'm sorry. You literally don't know what you're talking about.
Literally
Great work, Matt. Congratulations!
I was seeing leaked video of panic in Wuhan in October 2019! The local govt was freaking out. It was crystal clear to anyone with half a brain this leaked from the lab there.
Perhaps those videos were from the same team that gave you these absurd propaganda pieces.
https://sanityunleashed.substack.com/p/remember-the-absurd-videos-of-people
I never saw those. Pretty funny
I doubt we will ever know the whole truth of the matter. But perhaps I'm wrong.
That was years ago on Reddit I believe. Don't think they could be found now.
Care to share these videos? I’ve never heard of such videos…
A very interesting article. Thank you. There were reports during the pandemic of Covid antibodies (or antigens) being found in sera taken from people in Italy and, I think, Spain much earlier than the outbreak in late 2019. Were these findings confirmed, and how would they fit the theory of the lab leak?
IIRC the Barcelona finding was likely a false positive, and the Italian ones seemed legit, but people investigating do not think so for some reason.
If you look at the epidemic curve, the original infection could have taken place at any time since the end of the last flu season, as it would have simmered at a low level until the next flu season started (as did the second wave of Covid).
Excellent report.
Note too that science is of little help in answering the question of whether the SARS CoV-2 virus was created in a lab and then leaked. Just like science is of little help in finding out who committed a murder. Some evidence can be obtained in those cases using scientific tools, but the scientific method cannot be applied to a particular past event. That is well-explained here: https://www.heartlandforensic.com/writing/forensic-science-and-the-scientific-method/
The best investigative agency in the world -- the FBI -- looked into this question and decided that a lab leak was likely with a medium degree of confidence. Some other investigative agencies also came to the same conclusion, though with less confidence. That's telling, a lot more so than the reports by Michael Worobey et al. and others that seemed to be grounded in science, but speciously so, and lacked any investigative analysis.
Interesting issue, we published this back in March 2021, discussing what could and what could not be done. We worked with the FBI WMD directorate at the time:
PROPOSED FORENSIC INVESTIGATION OF WUHAN LABORATORIES
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350409839_1_PROPOSED_FORENSIC_INVESTIGATION_OF_WUHAN_LABORATORIES
A question: do you consider fingerprints on a gun as "science?" If not, then I might agree with you. But I do consider fingerprints and DNA to be science speaking about the past. And the RNA sequence of the c@v!d virus contains fingerprints of genetic alteration that are found in known lab-created viruses and not found in natural viruses (so far sequenced). So it's easy to conclude with high certainty that c@v!d is a lab creation.
It’s a historical epidemiological investigation, but due to the fact that all data were edited by politicians prior to publication, it’s indeed more akin to a crime investigation, where witness credibility and the motivation for what politicians published and did not publish are of more bearing than detailed analysis of the edited data that were signed off for publication. I don’t know a single lawyer who thinks the pandemic emerged naturally.
A " lab made bioweapon" so deadly that when they put it up people's noses on purpose they were absolutely fine 🙄.
https://open.substack.com/pub/controlstudies/p/scientists-tried-to-give-people-covidand?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=27c5yh
These people are ridiculous 😂
First, you argue that, "the well adapted, highly infectious nature of the virus ... is compatible with SARS-CoV-2 possibly having been grown in human cells, monkey cells and/or humanised mice in a laboratory" -- i.e. that SARS-CoV-2 was suspiciously well adapted.
Second, you argue that, "[The D614G mutation arising only a couple months into the pandemic] suggests that the FCS was introduced into the virus just before the pandemic" -- i.e. that SARS-CoV-2 was suspiciously poorly adapted.
Can you elaborate more on your novel Goldilocks Principle of viral evolution? What's the range of apparent adaptation that raises suspicion?
There are other early adaptive pandemic mutations e.g. Nsp6 L37F (B.4 lineage) and RdRp P323L (in B.1 lineage along with D614G) that aren't relevant to the S1/S2 sequence. And lineages without D614G lasted for a long time.
Even without the furin cleavage site, SARS-CoV-2 was well adapted to infect human cells (e.g. Vero E6 or Calu-3). The FCS insertion is essential for in vivo transmission, not in vitro infectivity, making it entirely consistent with a lab scenario.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine what sort of natural conditions led SARS-CoV-2 to acquire a 12-nucleotide furin cleavage site, bearing in mind that the same conditions didn't promote the D614G mutation (a simple A->G transition) that multiplies virus fitness in every animal that's been tested.
Even before the DEFUSE project, which explicitly says "we will introduce appropriate human specific cleavage sites", parsimony already strongly suggested a lab scenario. After the DEFUSE drafts were uncovered, it's beyond reasonable doubt.
It's hard to imagine exactly which evolutionary pathway led to that insert because the number of plausible pathways are countless. Here's a 12-nucleotide insert during the pandemic with three tandem CGG codons -- ins22204TGGCGGCGGCGG -- detected in multiple countries and clearly not an artifact.
Can you explain how it occurred naturally? Unlike the SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 insert, you can be confident about what the starting sequence was before the insert happened. It's unlikely the SARS-CoV-2 insert had the same sequence when it was first wholly or partially acquired. It should be easy to explain! What's the source? If you fail to have an answer, does that mean it was a lab leak?
The rest of what you write is just handwaving nonsense. Lineages without D614G persisted for quite a long time in humans. Other mutations (e.g. Nsp6 L37F) were more frequent. The DEFUSE drafts? They say that they will look for cleavage sites in natural viruses and near-cleavage-sites with mismatches from the motif "R-X-[R/K]-R" -- that's it. This would not find SARS2, since "A" does not match the "[R/K]" motif specified.
Yes, it can easily be explained: some insertions like the one you mention have indeeed been detected, but at infinitesimal proportions, often associated with persistent infections, and in the context of a 3-year pandemic, with hundreds of millions of cases, that yielded gazillions of sequences.
Most of those insertions are also duplicates of other short sections of the viral genome, and none that I know of popped up at the precise region of interest for spike cleavage.
To try and turn those one-off anomalies into a template for how a crucial feature (one that hasn't been found in any other SARS virus, but one that made a very hot research topic before the pandemic) evolved out of the blue, in an uncertain time and place, in unspecified animals that were never detected, comes across as desperate wishful thinking.
I guess just making stuff up works well with a lab leak audience for you?
Ignoring all the factual errors here, the logical error is not realizing that people study S1/S2 precisely because its a sequence with high diversity subject to strong selection.
I wouldn't say it was the hottest research topic in the world by any stretch and it's hardly a focus of the DEFUSE proposal. WIV is linked to one pre-pandemic study on the FCS, right? Not for a SARS-like virus? And the work in that case took place in North Carolina?
It’s easier to get a beneficial insert when a virus is replicating in billions of humans than in 1 raccoon dog.
Timely reminder that only 1 recon dog per day was sold in Wuhan, hardly a hotbed of evolutionary pressure. Of course, there were millions of raccoon dogs farmed in China, but if the virus arose on a farm, there would have been spillovers in many locations, not just one. Also remember that raccoon dogs are barely infected by sars2…
Horizontal gene transmission is pretty easy to imagine since it happens frequently in viruses
Only 12 nucleotides is such an embarrassingly small God of the gaps that Intelligent Design folks wouldn't even dare.
Ridley and Chan know this. This is why they wrote: "So finding a natural origin of the furin cleavage site will not clear up the question of whether the virus first jumped into people in the wild or in the course of research activities."
But now those 12 nucleotides are the only thing they've got left, so they pretend it's damning evidence. Even though they said it wasn't informative of origins at all in 2021.
Note that DEFUSE specifically proposed inserting Novel FCS, not just canonical ones. The FCS in SAR2 is a novel one. Probably just a coincidence…
Why does the ancestral strain, WA1, transmit in Egyptian fruit bats?
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/21/is-this-the-experiment-that-started-the-pandemic/
All the discussions about the 'lab leak' origin of Covid-19 ignores the distinct possibility that the virus was intentionally released into the population.
The CCP was responsible for the deaths of up to 50-100 million people in its founding and consolidation of power. What's the difference to them of another 7 million?
State of the art science lab in Wuhan produced the virus: Racist
It was those filthy Chinese eating bats in their disgusting third-world wet markets: Not racist
The evidence indicates COVID-19 came from Huanan Seafood Market
I have a question for Matt Ridley please.
In response to criticisms of the non-specific nature of PCR testing (and other problems with its rollout), many cite - as proof that a novel virus swept the world - “whole genome sequencing”, particularly that using Oxford Nanopore technology.
Is your understanding that the output of Oxford Nanopore technology is not reliant on prior assumptions about the sequence, and would have been able to determine the viral sequence in a “covid patient”, even if the “Wuhan sequence” had never been identified and / or published?
The stonewalling by journal editors against publishing anything suggestive of a lab leak is unsurprising that all journals depend heavily on revenue from Chinese universities. Such universities are subject to arbitrary direction by politicians, and China has been swift to punish anyone who dared to suggest a lab leak was possible, for example, imposing sanctions on Australia when its government raised the possibility.
Quite an effort has gone into this. Wouldn't it be easier to just provide a single quantified sample of a truly isolated virus which can be examined for authenticity?
That would end the debate on the existence of viruses forever.
After all, you can't leak something which doesn't exist.
I'll wait.
Good compelling argument, but a much shorter proof is the simple realisation that virulent pandemics are self limiting: if they are too deadly, then they kill their victims before they have chance to infect anyone else, and if they are milder, then people just take to their beds when they feel ill, and don't infect others. Mild enough that 99,8% of people can get on with their daily lives, and, well, so what?
Therefore the world's government s would never have panicked in unison and shut down the global economy for a naturally occurring 'novel pathogen', but when they got he memo that an engineered virus, with an IFR of up top 4% had leaked from a lab, well, the rest is history.
This is the main reason I knew in 2020 that covid came from a lab, the frantic denials from all sides served only to reinforce my belief.