Analysis: Why We’ll Likely Never Know Whether a Covid Lab Leak Happened in China

Early in this century, post-SARS, and in a period when China started allowing more students and scientists to study abroad, collaboration and exchange between American and Chinese scientists blossomed.

Many of China’s top scientists today were educated in the West. These include George Gao, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who trained and taught at Oxford and Harvard, and Shi Zhengli, who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and received her Ph.D. in France.

Many, like Gao, spent more than a decade abroad before returning to China for top jobs and, often, prestigious positions and big salaries. They were great at their bench work, their science was well respected, and top American scientists got to know them well. They became friends with their American counterparts, as is clear from Anthony Fauci’s email correspondence with Gao as the pandemic emerged, recently released through a Freedom of Information Act request.

But early on in what became a global crisis, when limited and reassuring information was coming out of China about the transmissibility of the novel coronavirus and the extent of its domestic outbreak, misplaced trust among America’s top scientists led some to think the spread of virus probably wouldn’t be so bad.

Here’s the problem: Chinese scientists are great scientists, but they work for an authoritarian government where politics, not facts, always come first. If information they know or discover makes China look bad, it is dangerous to say it — especially to foreign colleagues, especially publicly, and, often, even to their friends or family.

That may sound familiar after the presidency of Donald Trump, during which he often mocked and sidelined experts like Fauci. But the risk for scientists in China is far worse: loss of your job and your kids’ career prospects, visits by the police, false accusations, even prison.

As the country’s leader, Xi Jinping reminded his scientists in a speech last year: “Science has no borders, but scientists have a motherland.”

Every Chinese citizen knows how to interpret that statement, and I learned, too: When I was a reporter in Beijing, I got to know Dr. Gao Yaojie, who exposed an epidemic of HIV/AIDS in rural China that had resulted from unsanitary blood collection practices, some state-run.

She was a valued source for a series of articles I wrote on the unfolding tragedy, in which nearly the entire adult population of poor farming villages was dying, without any treatment and leaving AIDS orphans behind. Dr. Gao (no relation to George Gao) was feted by Bill and Hillary Clinton and won international human rights awards for saving perhaps tens of thousands of lives and ending dangerous practices. But in China, that very same work meant Gao spent her retirement under house arrest, often followed and threatened by local officials for embarrassing China. She fled China in 2009 and obtained political asylum in the U.S. And that was at a time when China was less autocratic and more open than it is today.

President Joe Biden had instructed security agencies to investigate the lab leak theory — to figure out whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, emerged from the Wuhan lab or from nature. But if international scientific sleuths are hoping to see a lab log or find a whistleblower, that very likely won’t happen. That kind of information won’t be revealed, even to Chinese scientists’ many American friends and scientific partners, which include the U.S. The Wuhan lab has received more than half a million dollars of funding that originated from the National Institutes of Health and has worked with many American scientists.

Mistakes happen in science. Pathogens leak out of good containment labs, and not because people are evil. It’s because, for example, the technician performing the bench work forgets an important step or, in a rush to go home, gets sloppy — it takes only a second. Or, for example, if scientists gathering bat samples in remote caves get a bit too comfortable in a dangerous environment — because they’ve been there dozens of times before with no problem and the biohazard suits and masks are suffocating. So, they pull off the face mask a bit too early as they exit.

When that happens, you have to acknowledge the error right away to contain the damage. But Chinese scientists can’t do that, at least publicly. When, in late December 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist working at one of Wuhan’s major hospitals, raised his concerns to colleagues about patients dying from a strange new virus, he was punished and told by police to “stop making false comments” and investigated for “spreading rumours.” He died of covid just a few weeks later.

In China today, it is dangerous to say what you know if it challenges the official government narrative. People who participated in the protests on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square, which were violently put down by the Chinese army, don’t even tell their children about that bloody day when many hundreds, and possibly thousands, were killed.

Kai Strittmatter, a longtime China correspondent for one of Germany’s largest newspapers, told NPR’s Terry Gross: “Of course, this generation, they all know, but they were afraid to tell their children. Because, you know, what do you do when your child in school suddenly tells the teacher and asks the teacher about Tiananmen massacre?”

We may never know if the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab or from animal-to-human transmission from a wild animal at one of Wuhan’s live animal markets, as the Chinese first suggested. And that’s exactly the knowledge we desperately need to prevent the next pandemic, because the solutions are so different.

If the former hypothesis proved true, U.S. scientists would need to ensure that collaborations with their Chinese partners involve full transparency — access to log books, internal reports, and all. If the latter, China must fully enforce its ban on the sale of exotic animals (the “intermediate hosts” that carry the virus) at its wet markets, a ban it promised after the original SARS virus emerged there from a civet cat nearly two decades ago. But the Chinese government’s control over its scientists makes it unlikely we will learn the truth now — or ever.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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