Soon after a deadly plague came with dark winds out of the East.[i]
In the Saturday Paper of 23-29 November 2024 James Bradley reviewed the collection, The Best Australian Science Writing 2024. I am not as enthusiastic as Bradley about the publication as a whole, but his comments on one article I found particularly interesting. The article was by Elizabeth Finkel who, in Bradley’s words, ‘systematically demolishes the notion Covid was the result of a lab leak’.[ii] I was curious to read Finkel’s piece and to compare it with other Australian commentary which pursued the line that the Wuhan laboratory was where it all began. And that is how this piece came to be.[iii]
Here, I shall examine some of the claims and counter-claims Australian commentators have advanced concerning the laboratory thesis. I have selected Sky News Australia journalist, Sharri Markson, as the chief proponent of the lab leak argument. In 2021 Markson published What Really Happened in Wuhan, a book which was heavily promoted by her employers, NewsCorp.[iv] Finkel’s article first appeared in The Monthly in November 2023 and then in the collection cited in the previous paragraph. I am neither a virologist, nor a biochemist. The only science I know is history, in as much as it is a science. But after assessing the quality of each side’s argument, and the evidence used to buttress their claims, my conclusion is that the supporters of the lab leak theory have not established their case. Nor have their international counterparts. What I am not investigating is the rich, and very tempting, group of completely outré ‘explanations’ for COVID-19’s rise such as evildoers like Bill Gates or George Soros. Poor George, he cops it every time.
I shall consider Sharri Markson first. We don’t have to go far before issues arise as the subtitle of her work, A Virus Like No Other, is problematic. There are at least two senses in which COVID-19 is much like many other epidemic viral diseases. Whatever its origins, COVID-19 is closely related to other coronaviruses such as Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and the common cold. Further, the majority of human viruses are zoonotic; they have jumped from their original animal host across the species barrier to us. This process has been in full flow since the rise of agricultural society and the domestication of animals. COVID-19’s mutability and spread are similar to previous scourges, viral or bacterial. Influenza is an excellent example of the adaptability of such diseases – endemic, epidemic and occasionally pandemic as in the misnamed but lethal horror of Spanish Flu between 1918-1920. Viruses have been responsible for some of the most devastating illnesses in human history, wasting colonised populations, brutalising social structures, changing the course of history. These infections have not required human design to hop aboard; they do it all on their own.[v]
Markson’s book emerged from a welter of conjecture about COVID-19’s origins. During 2020 health authorities throughout the world were concerned with what they saw as unfounded claims that a human generated virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology via an infected worker and set off the pandemic.[vi] Once COVID had spread beyond China’s borders it did not take long for the lab theory to emerge, especially in the United States, and with an appreciative audience in Australia including NewsCorp journalists. [vii]
Basically, the human origin argument, as stated by Markson, rests on four premises: the proximity of the Wuhan laboratory to the initial outbreak, that lab’s research in genetic amendment of bat-derived viruses, slow communication of the outbreak of COVID-19 to the rest of the world, and the thorough chemical cleansing of the affected area The key steps of her case are summarized in the last chapter of the book. Health authorities, including the ubiquitous Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the United States, contended that COVID-19, like other pandemics, was a ‘natural event’ which Markson admits is ‘a reasonable case, given previous breakouts were linked to animals in the wild’, that is, zoonotic transmission as described above. Enter the Wuhan laboratory and its secretive research plus Chinese cover-ups. For Markson, this means that the ‘secrecy shrouding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s radical research and their tightly held virus databases might very well point to a cover-up of a laboratory leak’.[viii]
Might. I don’t need to italicize that word to draw a reader’s attention to it. Markson needs a clincher here and that clincher is the purported nature of COVID-19:
This incredibly devastating virus is like no other, despite sharing properties with its SARS cousins. In character and behaviour it gives the impression it is purpose built to infect humans . . . it acts as if it’s tailor made for human carnage, almost unstoppable in its capacity to ravage the human respiratory system.[ix]
The style is gaudy, the science patchy and even vaguely suggesting viruses have intentionality is ludicrous. And ‘tailor made for carnage’ points the finger at the white coats in the Chinese lab. In 2023 Markson attempted to strengthen her argument by introducing further ‘evidence’ about somebody on the inside of the American health structure who ‘knew’ that Fauci was fibbing about the cause of COVID-19.[x] This apparent revelation appears to have fallen flat.
As noted above, NewsCorp’s various publications trumpeted the book’s virtues. They were proud that the ‘Wuhan doco’ of September 2021, shown on Foxtel, was the highest rating program for Sky News Australia that year.[xi] Four days later, according to the Australian, the COVID cover-up was ‘as shameful as the Tiananmen massacre’.[xii] HarperCollins, Markson’s publisher, devised a blurb for the back cover of the book that is a masterpiece of colorful overstatement, leaving few clichés untouched:
The origins of Covid-19 are shrouded in mystery. Scientists and government officials insisted, for a year and a half, that the virus had a natural origin, ridiculing anyone who dared contradict this view. Tech giants swept the internet, censoring and silencing anyone who dared contradict this view . . [Brave] individuals persisted through bruising battles and played a crucial role in investigating the origins of Covid-19 to finally, in this book, bring us closer to the truth of what really happened in Wuhan.
Distributors such as Amazon advertised the book without bothering to amend material supplied by the publisher. Similarly, the Kirkus Review in the United States stated that Markson’s work had revealed ‘a detailed coverup accepted uncritically by Western media, scientists, and global governments, with few exceptions’..[xiii] Again, no reference to alternative viewpoints. But Cian Hussey’s piece in the IPA Review of January 2022 is a stand-out. After praising Markson it veers off the road into the comforting territory of ideological extremity. COVID-19 exposes weaknesses in western civilisation and ‘has accelerated the crisis of confidence in experts because eventually it turns out many scientific answers are provisional’. After that unremarkable conclusion, Hussey claims that the ‘result, for the scientists and politicians who promote an absolute and unwavering view of . . . where a new virus came from, is that trust is undermined’. I think very few politicians wondered where the virus came from. They just wanted to keep their local death toll down.[xiv]
The zoonotic argument was accepted by the World Health Organisation, which has long been a convenient punching bag for the nuttier elements of the American right, and within the United States itself by Anthony Fauci, who was also Chief Medical Advisor to President Trump, who has been forever damned by the above-mentioned right for basing his opinions on science. Outside NewsCorp’s cloistered world, What Really Happened in Wuhan was not received enthusiastically. Examples of this approach are two reviews from 2021 – one in the Guardian Australia, the other in the Saturday Paper.[xv] Hamish McDonald in the Guardian points out that the overwhelming majority of virologists back the natural origins theory and he cites Professor Dominic Dwyer of the University of Sydney who states that Markson’s ‘science interpretation . . . is so bad it is risible’. As significantly, O’Dwyer added that this year ‘there has been continuing emerging evidence for animal links and none for biowarfare’. Hold that thought.
Now to a proponent of the opposite view. Elizabeth Finkel, a biochemist, now journalist, wrote that at the outset of COVID-19 her instinctive reaction was to plump for natural origins as had occurred with SARS, MERS, Ebola, Bird Flu etc. But she added that she did ‘not blindly trust scientists’ as her ‘lodestone’ was ‘the scientific method itself’. Her chief argument was that there was overwhelming evidence that the natural origins thesis was correct and ‘the lab leak side a lightweight proposition’. Why? Firstly, ‘the hunt for SARS-2 ancestors has . . . delivered several family members’, many of them bats. Possible intermediate hosts abound – civets, for example. Markson had tried to throw doubt on the natural origins proposition by saying COVID-19 was neither a purely bat or a purely pangolin virus, so therefore unlikely, even impossible. This is bad science. The influenza I get shots for annually is to treat a mixture of animal and human strains. Further, we now know that the Wuhan market contained two varieties of the virus, which is ‘far more consistent with what is known to happen with animal viruses, which make hopeful leaps to humans all the time’. As time goes by, we get more evidence.
I had never understood why the World Health Organisation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Easter Bunny, whoever, would betray their scientific credentials and hide the truth. I must lack sufficient imagination. But returning to Markson, she supplies what she thinks as a motive for abusing the lab leak theory. It’s a pile on on the Trump presidency, first version. Because ‘the US intelligence community, perhaps fearful of antagonising China . . . or unwilling to be seen as supporting Trump, was complicit in failing to properly explore the origins when it should have’.[xvi]
Our final comment comes from a recent obiter dictum from former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. After telling readers about his continuing friendship with Donald Trump, Morrison offers his current view on COVID-19’s birth:
I think the lab theory is the most credible, unquestionably the most credible, and frankly a little less disconcerting [than] that it was coming out of the wildlife wet market, well, they happen every other week in most parts of South-East Asia . . . I’m not saying they did it deliberately . . . but they didn’t tell the world, and millions and millions of people died, economies were shut down.[xvii]
I think Morrison might have wanted to take account of the following.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong. This pithy statement – it has several versions – has often been attributed to Mark Twain, but it is actually from the great American cynic himself, H.L. Mencken, and dates from 1920. There should be more like him who can pick the smell of bullshit at a kilometre’s distance. Mencken would have said ‘mile’.
NewsCorp journalists aren’t comets, nor are they asteroids. They are space junk drawn into right-wing America’s gravitational pull.
As per usual, I leave out many references not to bloat the article. If readers want more information, please contact me at richard_trembath@hotmail.com.
Richard Trembath,
Ballarat.
References
[i] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, HarperCollins, London, 2005, p. 1048. First published in 1955.
[ii] James Bradley, review of The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 in the Saturday Paper, 23 November 2024.
[iii] Elizabeth Finkel, ‘This little theory went to market: Using the scientific method to debunk the persistent claim that Covid-19 originated in Wuhan as a lab leak’, The Monthly, 1 November 2023, https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/november/elizabeth-finkel/little-theory-went-market#mtr
It was republished in Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith (eds), The Best Australian Science Writing 2024, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2024. Quotes are from The Monthly.
[iv] Sharri Markson,’ What Really Happened in Wuhan’: A Virus Like No Other, Countless Infections, Millions of Deaths, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2021.
[v] William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Anchor Books, New York, 1998. Originally published in 1977. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, Vintage Books, London, 2005. Originally published in 1997. And for an example of a bacterial killer, William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire, Penguin, New York, 2008.
[vi] ‘Australian Concern Over US Spreading Unfounded Claims About Wuhan Lab’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 May 2020; ‘NewsCorps Exclusive on Chinese “Bioweapons” Based on Discredited 2015 Book of Conspiracy Theories’, Guardian Australia, 13 May 2021; ‘Covid Origins: Australia’s Role in the Feedback Loop Promoting the Wuhan Lab Leak Theory.’, Guardian Australia, 13 July 2021.
[vii] For example, see ‘ “What Really Happened in Wuhan”: US Authorities Ignored Virus Warning’, Sky News Australia, 14 September 2021; Australian, 6 October 2021.
[viii] Markson, pp. 389-390.
[ix] Markson, p. 390.
[x] Sky News, 26 November 2023.
[xi] Australian, 21 September 2021.
[xii] Australian, 25 September 2021.
[xiii] Kirkus Review, 27 October 2021. Author not named.
[xiv] Cian Hussey, ‘Don’t Pass This on’, IPA Review, Summer 2021.
[xv] Hamish McDonald, ‘Sharri Markson’s book on Covid’s Wuhan lab leak theory raises more questions than it answers’, Guardian Australia, 9 October, 2021; Linda Jaivin, review of What Really Happened in Wuhan in the Saturday Paper, 16 October 2021.
[xvi] Markson, p.391.
[xvii] Age, 15 February 2025.
