Settling Suspions Once And For All

"It's not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab. What people are saying is just not how it is."

"If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick -- and I wasn't."

"There was no chatter. Scientists are gossipy and excited. There was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point that would make you think something is going on here."

"[I] could foresee how things could maybe happen. I'm not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off."

Danielle Anderson, Australian scientist, expert in bat-borne viruses

Anderson in Wuhan in 2019.   Source: Danielle Anderson

The 42-yar-old Australian scientist has had ample experience working out of laboratories all over the world. Her reputation as an expert virologist made her, as a scientist, welcome to work at any international laboratory as an adjunct to any work in her field being studied. And she just happens to be the sole foreign scientist to ever have been privileged to undertake research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at their BSL-4 Lab, a highly secure laboratory, the first in China to come equipped to handle the deadliest pathogens in the world.

She was there until November 2019, when the strange new pneumonia-like virus was just beginning to emerge in the city of 15-million people. By the most peculiar of circumstances the coronavirus emerged in the very same city where scientists in highly protective gear, were studying the very family of viruses that caused a century-pandemic that has killed millions of people around the world. A fierce controversy has arisen, at first unsupported by scientists studying the virus but gaining adherents the more Beijing denies any such possibility.

The speculation persists, however, that the virus could have escaped from the lab, with scenarios as simple as an infected staffer or a contaminated object leaving the lab for the outside world. That Beijing chose to obscure the situation while denying that any suspicion could fall on it and at the same time refusing to permit investigators access to critical documents and the laboratory itself, suspicion simply grew.

 

Thomas Peter/Reuters

When Dr.Anderson received the invitation to work out of the Wuhan Virology Laboratory she was enormously pleased that she would be working alongside a friend and colleague, Shi Zhengli,, the lab's director. The scientific probe and anxiety to find the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 has a purpose; to inform and enable scientists to fully understand how best to be prepared for future such outbreaks of new and perhaps even deadlier pathogens. China's lack of transparency on the matter does itself no favours and certainly does no favour for science and the scientific community.

The laboratory's work remains shrouded in controversy and mystery with the U.S. administration questioning the lab's safety record, alleging its scientists may have been involved in 'gain of function' research, manipulating viruses in such a manner that could produce more dangerous outcomes. Dr.Anderson began her collaboration in 2015 with the Wuhan researchers as scientific director of the biosafety lab at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.

 

Shi Zhengli in the BSL-4 lab at the Wuhan Institute in 2017. Source: Feature China/Barcroft Media/Getty Images

Dr.Anderson describes strict protocols to contain the studied pathogens in the maximum biocontainment lab, a concrete, bunker-type building holding the highest biosafety designation requiring air, water and waste be filtered and sterilized prior to leaving the facility. To be certified to work independently in the lab, researchers must undergo 45 hours of specialized training. Scientists must demonstrate their knowledge of containment procedures and competency in the use of air-pressured suits: "It's very, very extensive", Anderson said of the induction process.

Now, a growing number of virologists and other related scientists have adopted the belief that something had gone seriously amiss at the institute specializing in virology, viral pathology and virus technology of twenty biological and biomedical research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Despite that from within the SARS-CoV2 genome, no clear evidence exists it had been artificially manipulated, suspicion of the origins of the virus grows.

Beijing prevaricated for a year over permitting investigators from the World Health Organization to gain access to critical sites such as the Wuhan live market where the virus was first presumed to have emerged, and the laboratory itself, and its personnel. Finally, when the WHO investigation report was issued -- a report vetted by Chinese researchers, and written in collaboration with those researchers, guided by Chinese authorities -- it made little of the possibility of a lab leak but stated the virus had likely spread with a bat vector contaminating another animal that passed it to humans.

It was when the Wall Street Journal made the claim that three researchers from the lab had been hospitalized in November 2019 with flu-like symptoms, that attention was drawn back to the lab-escape theory. No one she knew, said Dr.Anderson, was ill toward the end of 2019 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. An earlier coronavirus that had emerged from a lab in 2002 in Asia, killed over 700 people as it made its way out of secure facilities on a handful of occasions, she acknowledged. But the names of such employees as were claimed to have been hospitalized have not been released, nor proof of the contention.

As for knowing everything that was taking place in the great sprawling complex, that just didn't happen. There was published research from the lab involving the testing of viral components for their ability to infect human cells, but Dr.Anderson is convinced that no virus was intentionally created to infect people and then deliberately released; yet another disturbing theory about the origins of the pandemic. She does agree, in the face of the controversy, that a full investigation  is required to finally discover the origin of the virus even as she is appalled by charges against China by some media along with uninformed attacks on the scientists working there.

The BSL-4 lab, center, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in May 2020.

Photographer: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images