![US COVID origins hearing renews debate over lab-leak hypothesis 2 Witnesses are sworn in before testifying to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus.](https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-023-00701-1/d41586-023-00701-1_24598618.jpg)
Witnesses (from left) Jamie Metzl of the Atlantic Council, former editor of the New York Times Nicholas Wade, Paul Auwaerter of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Robert Redfield are sworn in at the start of the hearing on 8 March.Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty
The US House of Representatives held the first in a series of public hearings on 8 March aimed at exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Members of the Select Subcomittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledged that the question of where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated has become highly politicized, but that both hypotheses describing its emergence — that it spread naturally from animals to people, or that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — must be explored. “This question is fundamental to helping us predict and prevent future pandemics, protecting our health and national security and preparing the United States for the future,” said committee chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) in his opening statement.
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The hearing itself, however, offered a heavy dose of political theatre, giving a preview of sessions to follow in the weeks and months to come. Republicans now control the House, so they led the hearing and invited three of the witnesses: Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank based in Washington DC; Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, Georgia; and Nicholas Wade, a former science editor for the New York Times. All three have supported the lab-leak hypothesis.The Democrats invited one witness, Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
One of the focal points for Republicans was the idea that Anthony Fauci, former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, had steered the scientific community to dismiss a lab leak early in the pandemic. Ahead of the hearing, they released a memorandum suggesting that Fauci “prompted” a group of virologists in March 2020 to publish a correspondence in Nature Medicine1 concluding that a lab-leak scenario was not plausible.
Fauci was not at the hearing to offer his perspective, but in a statement he responded to the memorandum, denying the accusations. He said his only goal was to encourage the virologists to evaluate the origins of SARS-CoV-2. “I have stated repeatedly that we must keep an open mind as to the origins of the virus.”
The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know
Democrats, meanwhile, focused much of their energy on Wade. They questioned whether he was a credible witness, given that he has authored a much-criticized book discussing the biological basis of race that has been hailed by white supremacists. Wenstrup defended Wade’s inclusion as a witness, saying that Wade had once worked at Nature, and that the hearing would be discussing a correspondence published in the journal (Although Nature and Nature Medicine have the same publisher, they are separate entities and operate as such; Nature’s news team, in which Wade worked during the late 1960s and early 1970s, is also independent from its journal team.)
Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, Tucson, who has studied genetic evidence from the early days of the pandemic, told Nature he found the proceedings “shockingly unscientific” and they do not bode well for the overall investigation. “Not one of those witnesses had any scientific record of investigating and publishing peer-reviewed research on the origins of this virus in quality journals,” he said.
Change of heart
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Republicans’ desire for answers was heightened last week after the Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy (DOE) had given a classified intelligence report to the White House in which it updated its stance on COVID-19’s origins. The DOE, undecided previously, now says with “low confidence” that the pandemic probably got its start from a lab leak in China — however, the evidence behind this change is unclear. Soon afterwards, FBI director Christopher Wray told Fox News that his agency has for some time thought that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped from a lab in China, without revealing any evidence informing the agency’s views.
![US COVID origins hearing renews debate over lab-leak hypothesis 5 Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, arrives for a news conference with members of the GOP Doctors Caucu.](https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-023-00701-1/d41586-023-00701-1_24598620.jpg)
Representative Brad Wenstrup is chairing the Select Subcomittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty
Meanwhile, the National Intelligence Council and four other agencies support the idea that the pandemic had a natural origin, also with “low confidence”, and two agencies are undecided. In August 2021, all of the agencies, including the DOE and FBI, concluded that SARS-CoV-2 is not a bioweapon — engineered and released from a lab purposefully.
For David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in California, these recent announcements by the intelligence community support the idea that both hypotheses for COVID-19’s origins should receive serious attention, and that there is no definitive evidence to support either at the moment. “In particular, the laboratory idea is a plausible idea that hasn’t been properly addressed,” he says.
Speaking at the hearing, Redfield said he thinks answers about COVID-19’s origins will not come from the scientific community: “I think that answer is going to come from the intelligence community.”
Asked about the DOE’s assessment, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said on 27 February: “Certain parties should stop rehashing the ‘lab leak’ narrative, stop smearing China and stop politicizing origins-tracing”. She also reiterated a message that has come from China during the pandemic: “China has always supported and participated in global science-based origins-tracing.”
A community divided
Scientists have for some time been divided over the provenance of SARS-CoV-2. Early in the pandemic, in February 2020, some researchers published a correspondence in The Lancet2 condemning “conspiracy theories” that suggested the coronavirus had leaked from a laboratory in China. Over a year later, however, others, including Relman, published a letter in Science3 arguing that the lab-leak theory should be given fair examination. This group, in particular, argued that an origins investigation organized in early 2021 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and that included Chinese researchers had hastily — and without all the necessary evidence — concluded that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely”.
Early last year, Worobey and other researchers, reported genetic and other evidence that a massive market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were sold was probably the source of the COVID-19 outbreak4,5. The scientists concluded that these animals might have harboured SARS-CoV-2 and passed it to humans working or visiting there.
Scientists struggle to probe COVID’s origins amid sparse data from China
At the same time, lab-leak proponents have questioned funding granted by NIAID to the small non-profit organization EcoHealth Alliance, in New York City. EcoHealth had partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to study coronaviruses, and some have claimed that researchers at the WIV used NIAID funding to conduct so-called gain-of-function studies on these viruses. Specifically, critics have suggested that WIV scientists manipulated coronaviruses to infect human cells, at a time when gain-of-function studies were barred in the United States.
This, committee members and witnesses implied at the 8 March meeting, is a reason why Fauci, who directed NIAID, wanted to suppress the lab-leak theory early in the pandemic. Fauci has denied that the research funded by NIAID could be categorized as gain of function.
Metzl criticized the focus on Fauci during the hearing. “China must be the primary focus,” he said. “If we make it primarily about Dr. Fauci, we will be inappropriately serving the Chinese government a propaganda coup on a silver platter.”
WHO report into COVID pandemic origins zeroes in on animal markets, not labs
Some researchers have complained that China has been slow to release data it has collected regarding the early days of the pandemic. In 2021, Zeng Yixin, vice-minister of China’s National Health Commission rejected a plan by the WHO to further investigate the possibility that “China’s breach of laboratory protocols caused the virus to leak”.
Despite the stalemate, the 8 March hearing has made it clear that the political debate isn’t going away. “I’m very much concerned that people are allowing themselves to be guided by their emotions, intuition and historical precedence,” says Relman. Despite the political tensions, one of the takeaways from the hearing, Worobey says, is that everyone seemed to agree that there are no definitive answers about the origins of COVID-19.
The committee has yet to schedule its next hearing.