April 9, 2020

Was the Coronavirus Bio-Engineered in a Chinese Lab?

By Clarke Morledge

As it turns out, it is not just anti-vaccine Christians who buy into conspiracy theories.

UPDATE June 4, 2024: Please read all the way through to the end of this post for an important update.  I finally had an opportunity to revise what I wrote here four years ago, in the early stages of the pandemic, but I wanted to keep the original content preserved as much as possible, aside from some grammatical errors I spotted within a few weeks after originally posting this. PLEASE READ ON….

Conspiracy theories have long fascinated people, particularly when there are a large set of unknowns involved. Sadly, many Christians tend to get taken in by such conspiracy theories, and even some popular preachers use their pulpits to promote interest in such talk.

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic, caused by a tiny virus, COVID-19, provides fertile ground for growing conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory I hear the most these days is the idea that the virus was bioengineered in a Chinese lab, located at Wuhan, where the outbreak started, in late 2019.

As with all conspiracy theories, there is always a grain of truth. Yes, there is a biomedical lab in Wuhan. Yes, the Chinese authorities did not immediately address the crisis, when it first started, thus allowing COVID-19 infections to spread rapidly. But was the virus somehow leaked out of a biomedical lab, either accidentally, or even worse, intentionally?

Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and an outspoken follower of Jesus Christ, wrote a blog recently, outlining research that demonstrates that COVID-19 was not an intentional product of bioengineering. Rather, COVID-19 arose naturally. Here is a snippet from Collins’ blog, describing some of the results from the research:

“Existing computer models predicted that the new coronavirus would not bind to ACE2 as well as the SARS virus. However, to their surprise, the researchers found that the spike protein of the new coronavirus actually bound far better than computer predictions, likely because of natural selection on ACE2 that enabled the virus to take advantage of a previously unidentified alternate binding site. Researchers said this provides strong evidence that that new virus was not the product of purposeful manipulation in a lab. In fact, any bioengineer trying to design a coronavirus that threatened human health probably would never have chosen this particular conformation for a spike protein……
…..this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19. And that’s a good thing because it helps us keep focused on what really matters: observing good hygiene, practicing social distancing, and supporting the efforts of all the dedicated health-care professionals and researchers who are working so hard to address this major public health challenge.” 

Read the whole blog article for more details.

… and while you are at it, encourage your fellow Christians to show a little more skepticism when it comes to propagating conspiracy theories. In the meantime, wash your hands, continue your “social distancing,” and pray that a safe, reliable vaccine becomes available soon.

UPDATE June 4, 2024:

This is an important update from four years ago. We know a lot more about the origins of the COVID pandemic than we did in the early stages back in April, 2020. Back then, the reigning hypothesis of the COVID origins was that it had a natural origin, not coming from a lab in Wuhan. What has emerged since then is very disconcerting:

  • Unlike the original SARS virus back in the early 2000s, where a positive link to a natural source for SARS was found in relatively short time, we have yet to find a positive link for a natural source for the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years is long enough to go without some clearly identifiable source for COVID.
  • More scientists have come forward believing that the weight of the evidence has shifted to suggest that COVID had its origins in the Wuhan Lab.  If this lab leak hypothesis is correct, then it is most probably a result of an accident, not some on-purpose leak by the Chinese government intent on trying to kill their own people, which was the most common conspiracy theory being promoted back in early April, 2020.
  • Efforts by other scientists to call into question the natural-origins hypothesis in the early days of the pandemic apparently were rather forceful.  This should not have happened. Freedom of scientific inquiry demands that scientific analysis be done without fear of repercussions from others.
  • Since April, 2020, we have learned that the Wuhan lab received funding for research from the U.S government, but that the safeguards to keep that research from morphing into gain-of-function research were not well established.

When I originally wrote this blog post back in April, 2020, I was not aware of the above pieces of information.  Part of this was simply that we were too early in the growth of the pandemic to know much more than what we already knew.  Time needed to pass, with more eyes on the situation, in order to make an adequate judgment.

Unfortunately, we may never be able to determine if the lab leak hypothesis (by accident, NOT intentional) is correct. In order to determine this, we would need cooperation among all parties involved, including the United States and Chinese governments, and trust seems to be very low right now.

My main concern in writing this earlier version of this blog post was to cast doubt on the conspiracy theory about an INTENTIONAL lab leak, which still seems preposterous to me. It makes no sense for the Chinese government to try to purposely kill thousands and thousands of their own people, when they have a population crisis emerging, due to their one-child birth policies of the recent decades, which has severely limited their future growth as a nation.  This is the reason why I linked to the James White video within the body of the post, which suggests an INTENTIONAL lab leak.

But I should have been more direct in bringing this out, as in looking back over what I wrote it might have given the impression that I was somehow ideologically opposed to an ACCIDENTAL lab leak.  I simply was not sure about the accidental lab leak hypothesis, and I believed that what Francis Collins said at the time was a reasonable judgment at that stage of the pandemic, a judgment that could easily change over time. Looking back, it is reasonable to think that Dr. Collins might have been premature in his assessment.

What I will say is that I trusted our leading scientific authorities at the time, when I should have been more cautious myself.  Sometimes, conspiracy theories can indeed be true.  How all of this conspiracy thinking plays out with COVID-19 still remains to be seen.

 

About Clarke Morledge

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Clarke Morledge -- Computer Network Engineer, College of William and Mary... I hiked the Mount of the Holy Cross, one of the famous Colorado Fourteeners, with some friends in July, 2012. My buddy, Mike Scott, snapped this photo of me on the summit. View all posts by Clarke Morledge
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