Virologists are still bringing dangerous, novel pathogens in from the wild

They seem to have learned nothing from the COVID pandemic

So here’s what’s going on. A team of scientists in Wuhan, China collected viruses from bats in remote caves, brought the viruses back to Wuhan, and started doing experiments. They discovered that one of the viruses, which they called HKU5-CoV-2, seems to be really good at infecting human cells. How exciting, they thought! After more experimentation to confirm how dangerous this virus was, they published their results in a prestigious scientific journal, Cell, just a couple of weeks ago.

What the heck??? Did they learn nothing at all from the COVID pandemic? This is incredibly risky work, and I was astonished to see that it’s still going on – and not only is it going on, but it’s happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, widely considered to be the possible source of the pandemic, although that remains controversial. (More on that note below.)

I first heard about this last week, when two US-based virologists, Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about these experiments. Lipkin and Baric are concerned that the Chinese virologists used “insufficient safety precautions” when doing their experiments. Most of their article focuses on the use of BioSafety Level 2 (BSL-2) instead of BSL-3 or BSL-4, which they point out would be much safer.

They’re right about the inadequacy of BSL-2 labs, but they entirely missed the far, far greater problem with this study. Scientists should not be going out into remote caves and collecting exotic viruses to bring back into the middle of a large city! Hello? Didn’t we make this point enough already? Focusing on the biosafety level is like telling someone who is driving at 200 kph straight towards a 1000-meter cliff that they ought to buckle their seatbelts.

The viruses in this study would never have come anywhere near humans if the scientists didn’t go out and collect them. The threat isn’t only from gain-of-function research on deadly viruses (although I’ve warned about that too), but from the entire “virus hunting” enterprise. Somehow, virologists got it into their collective consciousness that this is a great idea–that somehow this work will help prevent the next pandemic.

And if you think I’m making that up, the authors of the new Cell paper claim confidently that their work

“will be helpful for preventing the pandemic of the next ‘disease X’ caused by CoVs [coronaviruses]”.

US-based virologists, I should note, also like to go out and collect viruses from remote locales. As I wrote in 2022, the US Agency for International Development proposed to invest $125 million in an effort to collect thousands of exotic viruses, specifically looking for those with pandemic potential. Fortunately, that project was shut down, but not before those scientists too claimed that “this improved understanding will lead to prevention of future pandemics.”

Right. How did that turn out for us in 2019, when Covid-19 hit? All of the previous work on exotic viruses, including gain-of-function experiments, had exactly zero effect on our efforts to halt (or treat) Covid-19. On the contrary, it is quite possible that virologists actually caused the pandemic.

Let’s consider what we know about Covid-19. Most scientists agree that the pandemic started when a bat virus infected a human. We also agree that the pandemic started in Wuhan, China, and that humans are almost certainly responsible for bringing the bat virus there.

On the other hand, experts don’t agree on whether the pandemic started when a virus sample “leaked” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or instead when someone brought an infected bat to a live animal market a few miles away in the city of Wuhan. Both possibilities have been fiercely debated, with many virologists insisting it started in the market, and others saying it was a lab leak. Those are the only two scenarios that have been seriously considered.

But the mere fact that this is a legitimate question–that it’s possible the pandemic started in a lab–ought to be enough to shut down all activities where scientists, no matter how well-meaning they are, venture into remote sites and bring dangerous viruses back to cities. We just don’t need to do that. Virtually all of those viruses will never make it anywhere near humans unless we help them along.

And then, of course, doing experiments where we grow those viruses in a lab and see whether they can infect human cells–well, BSL-3 or not, lab accidents happen. And as Harvard's Marc Lipsitch, one of the leaders of the Cambridge Working Group, has remarked:

"We don't need to do these dangerous experiments. Indeed there are many ways that can (and have) been used to answer the public health question with greater generality, little to no safety risk, and much lower cost."

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of the centers of gain-of-function (GoF) research on coronaviruses. This is work in which the viruses are mutated intentionally to see if they gain additional capabilities, such as (most worryingly) the ability to jump from animals to humans.

When challenged about the need for GoF research, virologists have doubled down and claimed that it’s incredibly important and widely beneficial. Indeed, in a lengthy commentary published in the Journal of Virology in 2023, 156 virologists argued that GoF research is not only essential to their field, but that it brings all kinds of wider benefits, including “faster computers” and “enhanced lithium batteries.” (Neither of those claims is even remotely true.)

At the risk of sounding repetitive, let's weigh the pluses and minuses of bringing deadly viruses from the wild back into scientific labs, shall we?
Pluses:

• Studying novel pathogens might lead to insights in the basic biology of viruses and bacteria.

• Creating hard-to-kill pathogens might help us develop better anti-virals and anti-bacterials, although this has never happened before and more effective strategies already exist.

Minuses:

• The viruses could accidentally escape, and millions of people could die.

• The viruses could get into the wrong hands, and millions of people could die.

That brings me to my (nearly) final point: journals like Cell deserve at least a portion of the blame for creating a serious risk to the health of society. They simply shouldn’t publish work like this. Cell is considered highly prestigious within the scientific community, and the Wuhan scientists are no doubt delighted that they got their work published there. Some of them might even get promotions, something that the Chinese government has been known to offer for publications in top journals.

What should we do? Well, while NIH is under broad attack in the U.S. for reasons that have nothing to do with its mission (see my previous column), there are some areas of science that could and should be restricted. Collecting exotic viruses and doing gain-of-function research probably represent well under 0.01% of the NIH budget. We should just stop these activities.