This post, authored by Matt Ridley, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
Was it the sorcerer or the apprentice?
There’s a new theory in the Covid origin debate being pushed by some people, namely that the virus was probably created in America by Ralph Baric’s research group at the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina – and sent to China from there.
It’s not plausible for many reasons. But it plays into the hands of the Chinese Government, who may be surreptitiously pushing it through their friends in the West to confuse the issue and distract from the evidence.
That evidence strongly suggests that there was indeed a lab leak but it was in Wuhan and it was of a virus assembled in Wuhan.
Ralph Baric did collaborate closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), it is true, and he pioneered the synthesis of chimeric sarbecoviruses and testing these on humanised mice – which his Wuhan counterpart, Shi Zhengli, later began doing in her own laboratory but at low biosafety level. That much is on the record.
Baric has steadfastly refused to share his email correspondence and his university has gone to court to prevent its release. He has also refused to testify in open session before Congress so far.
This is a mistake on his part because it is now fuelling speculation that he created virus. He should reveal what he knows to clear the air.
Here are three reasons that it is highly unlikely that Baric made SARS-CoV-2 in a North Carolina lab.
First, sarbecoviruses do not exist in the wild in the Americas. The horseshoe bats that host them are only found in the old world. In order to work on SARS-related viruses at all, Baric has to import them or their digital sequences from China – in his case from Wuhan.
Where would he have got the backbone virus from to do the experiment? After all, the WIV and Baric were competitors as well as collaborators. Baric has admitted that the WIV would not have shared their most interesting strains with him, much less the novel lineage four viruses which they obscured in their 2019 paper.
Second, even if they did send him the information from which to assemble SARS-CoV-2, rather than doing it themselves, why on earth would he then ship the completed chimeric sarbecovirus back to Wuhan for testing? Or send the digital recipe for them to copy?
That would have been pointless as well as highly irresponsible. Baric may be guilty of encouraging foolish experiments and concealing his own role in collaborating with Wuhan, but there is no evidence for any of this.
Third, the notorious DEFUSE proposal for inserting a furin cleavage site into a sarbecovirus for the first time in 2018 stated clearly that the work would mostly be done in Wuhan, because it could be done at a lower biosafety level there to save costs. (A shocking revelation in itself.)
An early draft of the proposal even includes an exchange in which Baric is told he won’t get to do most of the work, and he protests at the low biosafety level used in Wuhan, saying it will “freak out” US scientists.
In our analysis of the origin of Covid, Alina Chan and I are often urged to speculate about exactly what happened but we resist going too far beyond the known facts. Expertise and funds went from America to Wuhan a lot: that much is a fact. Sequence information was sometimes shared. It is possible that synthesised viruses and sequences were whizzing back and forth too but we have no evidence of this for SARS-CoV-2. For several years before the pandemic, the Wuhan team had been successfully genetically engineering sarbecoviruses and experimenting with these in the lab. They had surpassed Baric in the quantity of these experiments and, most importantly, had access to a still-secret trove of bat sarbecoviruses from the regions where SARS-CoV-2’s closest relatives have been found. Baric was the sorcerer, certainly, but it is far more likely that the accident happened to the apprentice.
First published on X. Matt Ridley is the author, with Alina Chan, of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Subscribe to his blog.
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