The "Lab Leak" Origin of Covid Is A Conspiracy Theory & A Throwback to Medieval, Pre-scientific Revolution Thinking

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not voodoo.

If only someone in a position of power could have known.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” - Richard Feynmann

On March 3 2024, journalist Sam Cooper released an update with CSIS information about two Chinese researchers working at Canadian National Microbiological Laboratory - (NML) one of the only “Level 4” labs capable of dealing with extremely risky pathogens in the world.

There is lots of important information coming out. There is no denying that the breach happened, that it was unacceptable, or that it requires investigation.

There is a huge problem with Cooper’s piece - which is also the reason the story is even bigger: there is a conspiracy theory that Covid-19 was created by China, either deliberately or by accident, and that the global pandemic was a result of that.

There are very, very good reasons to believe that the Covid-19 pandemic, like every other pandemic and epidemic in human history, is the result of new diseases that arise in nature.

That is the scientific consensus, and given the entire history of infectious disease, blaming someone for creating a disease is a throwback to medieval thinking superstition, and black magic.

An entire book has been written that debunks the Covid “Lab Leak” conspiracy theory, while still recognizing the obvious: there were huge problems with oversight and security at the NML.

Elaine Dewar On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation was released in 2021,

“That particular conspiracy theory is nonsense, and there is absolutely no evidence to support it.”

Dewar found that Qiu worked closely with Wei Chen, a prominent Chinese virologist who holds the rank of major-general in the People's Liberation Army, and tested Chen's Ebola vaccine at the Winnipeg lab. 

Bad Practises and Management at the NML

Serious security violations at the NML were known and public for over a decade. It’s clear nothing was ever done to improve the situation.

After the two workers were escorted from the building in 2019, there were reports of a “toxic workplace” at the Winnipeg lab.

Management accountability was also a recurring concern in the report, including favouritism and uneven treatment of staff.

"There is a [redacted] view that staffing decisions are either made out of favouritism or out of desperation," Donais wrote.

Scientists are seen by administrative employees as having "different rules," especially when it comes to expense reporting requirements, the report says.

Some of the people on the lab side also have a reputation for being disrespectful, pushy and inconsiderate of the roles played by other employees. The report notes there is an increasingly fine line between disrespectful behaviour and harassment in workplace law.

In 2009 was also the year there was a well-publicized security breach at the NML.

A former researcher at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg accused of trying to smuggle genetic material from the Ebola virus across the Manitoba-North Dakota border pleaded guilty to a lesser charge… Konan Michel Yao, 42, pleaded guilty in a Grand Forks, N.D. courtroom to a charge of "failure to present merchandise for inspection."

Yao was caught at the Manitoba-North Dakota border on May 5 on his way to a new job with the National Institutes of Health at the Biodefense Research Laboratory in Bethesda, Md. He had 22 vials in the trunk of his car that were allegedly taken from the lab.

Any investigation into what happened at the NML should go back at least until 2009. It should also ask why it is that, despite the 2009 breach, nothing was ever done?

an organization dealing with budget cuts, a hiring freeze, poor morale, and an on-going RCMP investigation into two scientists who were evicted from the lab last summer for what PHAC described as a "possible policy breach."

Challenges With Leadership

Many of the activities under scrutiny at the lab happened between 2009 and 2015. At the time, the NML’s director was the late Dr. Frank Plummer. He was an unquestioned medical and scientific genius and was a global pioneer in HIV/AIDS research. Under his direction, the NML was doing globally important research into SARS, H1N1, HIV, Ebola and other diseases.

Plummer died at the age of 67 in Kenya in February of 2020 - as the pandemic was gathering steam. However, just the month before that it was international news that Plummer had received an extraordinary intervention for his severe alcoholism. In this BBC report from January 2020, Plummer talked about his severe, and previously undisclosed addiction to alcohol.

The report states that he went from drinking five or six drinks after work, to drinking 20 ounces of scotch. A serving of scotch is between one and one-and-a-half ounces of scotch - 20 ounces is the equivalent to 13 to 20 drinks a night.

"My liver packed it in," he says. "Before that I knew I drank a lot but I didn't think I had a problem."

The diagnosis of chronic liver failure was followed by a liver transplant. He had to watch his alcohol intake to preserve his new liver - but he found his alcohol had become a powerful thirst.

Dr Plummer tried treatment - rehab programmes, support groups, counselling, medications - but any relief was temporary. He would inevitably slip back into drinking.

"It was pretty hopeless cycle and it was very tough on my family and my wife, Jo, and on my children and my stepchildren," he says. "I was in the hospital a lot, I almost died several times."

Plummer’s addiction was so severe he required a liver transplant in 2012, and in 2018, he had an experimental brain implant to combat his addiction.

Plummer’s wife, Jo Kennelly, had close connections to the Conservative Party of Canada: she was the Ottawa-based policy director to Federal Health Minister Tony Clement, as this story about Plummer and Kennelly in Canada’s Macleans Magazine explains.

No one has talked about the impact this terrible addiction might have had on the lab. Plummer’s star status meant that he was difficult to challenge, and difficult to replace, despite known problems at the lab - like security breaches. Plummer stayed on as Director at the lab until 2015 all within a time frame that the Conservative Government of Stephen Harper was in power.

Anyone asking why the Harper Conservative Government weren’t running a tighter ship, please remember who was in charge of oversight of Canada’s Spy Services at this time. In 2008, Stephen Harper appointed Dr. Arthur Porter IV as Chair of Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee. (SIRC), despite being warned that Porter was untrustworthy. BQ Leader Gilles Duceppe wrote Harper, referring to a series of investigative journalism pieces on porter that had run in Quebec.

Porter had to step down in 2011 when it turned out that he had been doing multi-million dollar deals in Africa with Russia, with his family getting paid for it. He managed to add to that scandal by taking a $22.5-million dollar bribe to award a contract worth more than $1-billion for the McGill Health Centre in Montreal to SNC-Lavalin. That’s right - the actual person who took the bribe to award the corrupt contract at the centre of the SNC-Lavalin Scandal was Harper-appointed Conservative Chair of the oversight committee of Canada’s spy services. And, as I wrote in an earlier article, Arthur Porter also did business with Peter Nygard.

When Bad Practices Become Standard: Normalized Deviance in Health Care

I’m going to make a big-picture point here for a moment, as it relates to the management of the NML. This is a catastrophic failure of security. Most of it happened under the last Conservative government.

When people ask (or scream) “how could this happen?” it’s because there’s something rotten about the system. It does not have to be actively malicious.

There is an incredible research study of just his phenomenon, and it is important because it describes how all human systems become corrupted. It really paints a picture of how we become disconnected from the risk of what we’re doing.

The way it happens is clear -

• Socialization - pressure to conform as others reward or punish rule breaking

• Institutionalization - which means you do it too.

• Rationalization - justifying or explaining

Many serious medical errors result from violations of recognized standards of practice. Over time, even egregious violations of standards of practice may become “normalized” in healthcare delivery systems. This article describes what leads to this normalization and explains why flagrant practice deviations can persist for years, despite the importance of the standards at issue.

The cases they detail are shocking: patients getting the wrong limb amputated; a patient dying because the warning alarm on the artificial ventilator had been programmed off because it was annoying.

What’s more, these types of failures - catastrophic breaches - tend to follow a pattern, where the problem was known about for years, but nothing was done. The reason for this is the quite literally fatal reasoning that, if something really bad hasn’t happened by now, it never will. Rather, the risk has been building up.

Mega disasters such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, and the ill-fated Challenger and Columbia space missions all witnessed system flaws and protocol violations that antedated the disasters by years… What these disasters typically reveal is that the factors accounting for them usually had “long incubation periods, typified by rule violations, discrepant events that accumulated unnoticed, and cultural beliefs about hazards that together prevented interventions that might have staved off harmful outcomes” (Vaughan, 1999, p. 698). Furthermore, it is especially striking how multiple rule violations and lapses can coalesce so as to enable a disaster’s occurrence…

As one commentator put it: “There is no isolated ‘cause’ of an accident. There are multiple contributors to accidents. Each of these is…insufficient in itself to create an accident. Indeed, it is the linking of these causes together that creates the circumstances required for the accident”

They then describe several of those conditions, including

3.5. The rules don’t apply to me/You can trust me

While pathological narcissists who believe they are above rule-following can be found in any organization (Banja, 2005; Weber, 2004), a more subtle form of “the rules don’t apply to me” is when system operators believe they are not tempted to engage in the behavior that the rule or standard is supposed to deter. Thus, the rule is understood as superfluous. As in Example #5, the rule violator feels perfectly justified in performing the problematic behavior, because the deviant practice of drug diversion would never cross his or her mind.

Administrators should appreciate a psychological finding that has been replicated in various forms throughout the 20^th century: most human beings perceive themselves as good and decent people, such that they can understand many of their rule violations as entirely rational and ethically acceptable responses to problematic situations. They understand themselves to be doing nothing wrong, and will be outraged and often fiercely defend themselves when confronted with evidence to the contrary (Ashforth & Anand, 2003).

3.6. Workers are afraid to speak up

The likelihood that rule violations will become normalized obviously increases if persons who witness them refuse to intervene. Yet, a 2005 study of more than 1,700 healthcare professionals found that “it was between difficult and impossible to confront people” (Maxfield, Grenny, Patterson, McMillan, & Switzler, 2005b, p. 10) who manifested problematic work behaviors, especially rule-breaking, incompetence, and showing disrespect. Fear of retaliation, lack of ability to confront, belief that it is “not my job,” and low confidence that speaking up will do any good were the chief reasons given for not calling attention to deviant behaviors. … If personnel feel intimidated or frightened to call an operator’s or supervisor’s attention to the deviance, it is more likely to persist and—even more problematically—to interact with other system failures, inviting disaster…

3.7. Leadership withholding or diluting findings on system problems

Findings of system flaws and weaknesses are frequently revised and diluted as that information ascends the chain of command (Gerstein, 2008; Vaughan, 1999). There are a number of reasons for this. One is that a supervisor might be abundantly aware of standard or rule violations, but be fearful that if her superiors knew about them, she and her unit would look bad to administration. Marc Gerstein (2008, p. 245) termed this “politics triumphing over safety” as the objective, through concealment, is to save face among one’s superiors. Furthermore, remediative efforts to correct standards violations might be perceived as too time-consuming and as threatening to cause short-term productivity losses; consider when a hospital’s misbehaving, but only, neurosurgeon is left to his problematic behaviors because administrators fear he will leave if confronted with his unprofessionalism (Gerstein, 2008; Joint Commission, 2008). Admittedly, the neurosurgeon’s departure could represent a financial blow to the hospital, not only from the standpoint of lost revenues from neurosurgical procedures, but also from the lost opportunity for neurosurgical consultations, referrals, or admissions to or from other units (e.g., neurology, oncology, rehabilitation medicine). It is easy to understand how a hospital’s administration might shrink from initiating remedial, not to mention disciplinary, measures against him.

All these failures describe the issues at work with the NML: “Politics triumphing over safety”.

We should recognize this is a form of corruption - corruption in the sense of something good going bad, in ways that we can understand. Because it’s only by understanding it that we’re going to be able to do anything about it.

And that is what is so important about understanding how these broken practices create opportunities for others to exploit, that can lead to catastrophe.

In his book “Structures: or, Why things don’t fall down.” J.E. Gordon, who was a naval architect, innovator and professor of engineering, wrote of his time working as an expert witness and investigator in engineering disasters.

He wrote:

“Very few accidents just ‘happen’ in a morally neutral way… Nine out of ten accidents are caused, not by the more abstruse technical effects, but by old-fashioned human sin, often verging on wickedness.

Of course I do not mean the more gilded and juicy sins like deliberate murder, large-scale fraud or sex. It is squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won’t-learn-and-don’t-need-to-ask, you-can’t-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy, and greed that kill people.”

Those “squalid sins” defines more than just politics: it is the defining tone of much of the current culture and debate on the Internet.

Reality vs. Make-Believe

Now, everything I have talked about up to this point is not speculation. These are facts that have been publicly reported and confirmed through multiple sources, including, in some cases, evidence presented in court.

That is not the case with the “Lab leak” theory of coronavirus, where one of the major complaints is that the lab in Wuhan does not want to cooperate in an investigation.

That is not positive evidence. The idea that the pandemic strain was actually created by humans and unleashed on the world is a common conspiracy theory and is a regular feature of plagues dating back centuries. During the Black Death, as people died of bubonic plague - spread by bacteria from fleas on rats, it was Jews who were falsely accused of being responsible, by poisoning wells. Entire Jewish communities were murdered in their thousands.

That was centuries ago. There were conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS being a government creation, which were also false.

In fact, many historical examples of past pandemics show that there has been a pattern of disinformation and scapegoating. This article was published in March, 2020 - the month the pandemic was declared. It accurately predicted the very scapegoating and disinformation.

People didn’t push back on the misinformation that was being pushed online - some of which is clearly a deliberate foreign disinformation campaigns, with Russian bots spreading misinformation on twitter.

For any investigation into origins of covid to be credible, it has to consider and investigate both the lab as well as natural origin.

You can’t just look for evidence that confirms your theory. That’s confirmation bias.

You have to go into the field, and consider alternate explanations

Richard Feynmann, the Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicist, said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

One of the defining features of conspiracy theorists is that they have a fear of doubt. They want certainty, which in a changing world is understandable, but not rational or realistic.

There is a genuine clash here of cultures, where journalists, the public, politicians and certainly pundits want an answer that is clear and unambiguous and expresses total certainty.

However, scientists and anyone committed to critical thinking have to acknowledge the real and established limits to what human beings can know.

This is a conflict that can’t be reconciled.

You have people demanding an answer of either black, or white, when the only accurate response from scientists must be “A shade of grey.”

In 1748, the Scottish Philosopher David Hume published A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, in which he argued that “weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity” meant we were making assumptions that could not be backed up by reason or evidence.

Let’s take the simple example of one billiard ball striking another and causing it to move. We see it 100, or even 1000 times, and conclude that one ball is causing another ball to move.

Hume points out that we are gathering information from our own experience, and our own experience is very limited. Yes, we gathered real information, however it is limited. For us to state, unequivocally, that one thing caused another, and that it will always cause another, depends on the assumption that this connection will always hold.

That assumption is not based on observation or evidence: it can’t be, because in order to have total certainty - we would have to observe every single such interaction throughout time and throughout the universe. We cannot do that.

This is not just airy-fairy philosophizing. This is a fundamental obstacle at the heart of science and human knowledge that cannot be overcome.

The assumption that what you have observed will always be consistent in all situations is not based in reason or evidence. There is no getting around this. You cannot gather enough evidence to say with total certainty that something is universally true.

For many people this is profoundly uncomfortable, and it has real political and social consequences, especially in a modern crisis.

In order to accurately express what they know, scientists must express some doubt, and concede that they may be wrong or that another explanation may be possible.

In a crisis, that is not what people want to hear. They want someone who will put them on solid ground and reassure them, and reassuring falsehoods are much more comforting than uncomfortable truths, which may frankly be terrifying or unhappy.

As a consequence, in a crisis, a chartalan who will lie to people has a real rhetorical advantage, even if they are leading them to their deaths.

When the reality is that there is no easy solution, and that we have to choose between the best of a bad lot, confidence men, hucksters, false prophets and quacks all fill a role of providing comfort and reassurance - the illusion of safety - that authorities being honest can’t.

The fact that we don’t know everything does not mean we know nothing. We still have to act on the knowledge we have.

Scientists are supposed to have a professional obligation to express their findings with levels of uncertainty. Instead, scientists are supposed to express themselves in terms of possibilities, likelihoods, and probabilities.

Fortunately, some of those possibilities, likelihoods and probabilities are very high, which is why science actually functions.

Why the Lab Leak is a conspiracy theory

That brings us to the “lab leak” theory. If asked a hypothetical, “what-if?” question about whether Covid was the result of human research, a scientist cannot definitively rule it out, because there is not enough information right now. This is not a confirmation: it is an acknowledgement that we do not have enough information to rule it out, but neither can we confirm it.

However, the hypothetical possibility of the lab leak theory needs to be weighed against the evidence we do have - which is that throughout history, new infectious diseases and deadly pandemics arose naturally, and spread beyond human control. There was no real control over the spread of the diseases, because people didn’t even know that viruses or bacteria existed.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 - the “Spanish Flu” killed millions. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million - possibly as high as 100-million, far more than the deaths associated with the First World War. The “Black Death” from 1346 to 1353 killed an estimated 50-million people.

In the 1500s, there millions of deaths among Indigenous people of the Americas:

During the 16th century, Mexico suffered a demographic catastrophe with few parallels in world's history. In 1519, the year of the arrival of the Spaniards, the population in Mexico was estimated to be between 15 and 30 million inhabitants. Eighty-one years later, in 1600, only two million remained. (emphasis mine) Epidemics (smallpox, measles, mumps), together with war, and famine have been considered to be the main causes of this enormous population loss. However, re-evaluation of historical data suggests that approximately 60–70% of the death toll was caused by a series of epidemics of hemorrhagic fevers of unknown origin.

Today, about 40-million people have died of HIV/AIDS.

The point here is that incredibly deadly viruses, bacteria and infectious diseases can and do evolve naturally. None of these diseases were created artificially, and neither were smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella, or polio. New strains mutate and evolve without any input from human beings.

To emphasize how serious these diseases are: polio can lead to permanent nerve damage or paralysis; mumps can lead to infertility in men, rendering them sterile; rubella contracted during pregnancy can lead to serious birth defects in babies; smallpox could kill three out of ten people who caught it.

Some of these infections create lasting damage to the body and lead to further medical problems. Untreated syphillis can lead to mental illness and delusions; “Long HIV” becomes AIDS. It was recently discovered that Multiple Sclerosis is likely a form of “long” mononucleosis.

Measles is particularly dangerous after the initial infection. It is extremely contagious, and preventable by vaccine. According to the Mayo Clinic, 200,000 children a year still die from it. It can still cause pneumonia and encephalitis, which can cause brain damage.

What is even more dangerous about measles is that it can create “immunity amnesia”. Your immune system is a growing record of antibodies against infections, and a measles infection can erase that record. If you acquired immunity to a disease from previous exposure, or from antibodies from your mother’s milk, that immunity can be lost:

The immune memories that you have acquired are priceless, built over many years and from countless exposures to a menagerie of germs. Measles virus is especially dangerous because it has the ability to destroy what’s been earned: immune memory from previous infections.

Measles is also extremely contagious:

in a room full of exposed people, 90% who are unvaccinated will develop the disease. To complicate matters, this microbe can linger in the air for up to 2 hours.

Children who recover from measles will be strongly immune to measles - but only measles: they will have “increased vulnerability to all other pathogens.”

No one can credibly argue that any of these diseases were created artificially by human beings.

In our modern era, when a new and unknown infectious disease emerges, it presents an enormous challenge to researchers, because there is no body of existing knowledge to fall back on.

One of the ways in which these diseases develop is when human beings and animals are in close proximity to each other. Sometimes it is when humans encounter wild populations and are exposed to a disease for the first time. For example, HIV was a virus in monkeys and chimpanzee, that humans were exposed to when they were butchered for food. Close proximity to domestic animals - agriculture - is also a factor.

There are diseases that have “jumped” from birds (avian flu) pigs (swine flu) and cows (pox and tuberculosis).

In fact, the origin of the word “vaccination” comes from “vacca” - the latin word for “cow”. (The French word for cow is “vache”.) Edward Jenner (1749–1823), a British physician developed a method for inoculating people against smallpox - though the practice of inoculation was known for a thousand years at least. Inoculation was used in Asia as well as Africa and China. Jenner was following the practice of local farming communities where he worked:

“Milkmaids, who were renowned for their clear complexions, were often immune to smallpox and its scarring pock marks. Their work brought them into contact with cowpox, a mild disease of cattle that only left a single pustule on the hands of people who milked the cows. Locals who were aware of this phenomenon began to inoculate themselves with the cowpox pustule as a way to ward off the more deadly smallpox.” 

Vaccinations are not perfect, but when they work it is because enlist your body’s own immune response. This is an image of two people with infected with smallpox: the one on the top has been vaccinated, the one on the bottom was not.

All of this is important when it comes to understanding why the “Lab Leak” theory is a conspiracy theory: there is no evidence for it.

This 2022 paper by Robert F. Garry is one of many that make the point:

The faulty lab leak narrative leaves out some crucial details. Most lab leak proponents don’t mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. The Chinese government established these laboratories after multiple spillovers of the first SARS-CoV in 2002 through 2004, which caused approximately 8,000 cases of severe respiratory disease worldwide and at least 744 deaths. Those who suggest that the pandemic is the result of a lab leak often also note that the closest related bat coronaviruses to SARS-CoV-2 have been found only in southern China or in Laos, about 750 miles away from Wuhan (4) (Fig. 1). They argue that the virus could not have traversed such a distance without causing COVID-19 cases along the way. These comments, however, show an ignorance of some crucial points: the West African EBOV precedent, which showed that viruses can emerge or reemerge large distances from the site of their initial spillover, and the fact that SARS-CoV emerged multiple times in Chinese megacities similar distances from where its closest bat progenitors have been found.

This article details two more scientific studies that debunk the “Lab Leak” in favour of covid emerging from exposure to the disease from animals.

Here is an article from 2021 that makes it clear “There is no even indirect scientific evidence that the virus was created in a lab.”

One of the defining features of a conspiracy theory is that it is immune to challenge - no evidence at all and people offering contradictory evidence are both counted as proof, when - for all the reasons mentioned above - the claims don’t meet basic standards of evidence, reason, or critical thinking. The Wall Street Journal published Nicholas Wade, whose book on genetics was criticized by the people he cited as being junk.

Did Canada have a security problem at the NML? Absolutely, dating back until at least 2009. Despite that, no action was taken for a decade.

Is there any likelihood the lab in Wuhan caused the pandemic? Virtually zero.

There are enough real problems to address without having to make up real ones, or trafficking in conspiracy theories.

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• DFL